It was the first day of August 1929. Two Communists, Ralph Levy and Fanny Klenerman, were speaking outside the Johannesburg City Hall addressing a large crowd of whites. Police spies were taking notes. Sidney showed up, ‘at the head of a band of 150 natives who were carrying a red banner’. He was back in town and in fighting spirit. News of his Transkei journey and court battles had preceded him. ‘He spoke on the usual Communist lines’, reported one of the spies, ‘and said the workers should put a stop to war by refusing to fight’.

Five months in a caravan in the Transkei had left Sidney in poor shape, physically and financially. The Lidgetton estate was doing well, despite ‘a lower average price for bark, higher native wages, intermittent rains and longer haulage to the siding’, so Sidney could expect a healthy dividend that year. But that was still to come, and worried about money, he moved the family to Bertrams, a suburb to the east of New Doornfontein that had begun to decline from its earlier days of prosperity. Their new home was ‘a rather depressing semi-detached dwelling with more restricted facilities’ than their old house on Regent Street. Sidney had grown accustomed to eating mealie-pap during the campaign, and now he even tried to get the family to eat mealie meal porridge and sorghum gruel for breakfast – ostensibly to economize. Arthur rebelled at that point; there were limits to going native.