Meeting Corky - Colin Hall and a visit to Pretoria

Corky giving an inspirational talk at a girl's school

Colin wanted to see us and arranged to do so. It was dark and 8th avenue is split into two, with a little park in the middle and so he was stranded on the other side. I leaped off to get him and we drove back.

Colin is Dad's cousin and Dad always spoke very affectionately of him. Mike said that Colin was Head Boy at Pretoria boys' high and captain of different sports teams and quite tough when he was young. Colin admitted as much.

'Managing, he said, is getting other people to do what you want by ensuring that they listen to you and do what you say and you must back up any threats you make, implied or spoken, with real consequences. It's a game.' he said.

'When I was starting out in a company I used to take the elevator to the top floor so everyone would make the assumptions I wanted them to make of me and then walk back down the stairs again.'

In this way Corky got to be CEO of South African Breweries, which owns, in addition to the local South African brands, Miller's, Grolsch and Peroni. He was head of Woolworths for a while. Bullying works in management, Corky said.

'But one day I was playing a game of monopoly with my little son and I found myself cheating in order to win and I realised how far I was gone. At that moment I decided to leave my job and I did. I wanted to find a way whereby people could manage successfully without fear or bullying and I started a new company and we began to research what made people tick and how we could do this.'

We searched and we searched and we finally found the answer.

I wondered what made Corky tick. He is a large man, with presence and he reminded me somehow of my grandfather John. There is a family resemblance. He was the son of Philip Hall and not John Hall. I suppose I was named after his father, but I know that I was also named after a sophisticate called Philip who
Mom and Dad were impressed by in Cape Town when Mom was pregnant and Dad was taking his journalism course.

Philip followed in his father Arthur Lewis Hall's footsteps and went to Cambridge and he died when Corky was very young, only 8, of emphysema because he developed a process of turning coal into oil and the coal dust got him. He sacrificed his life to science, I suppose. Corky's brother Peter was a gifted mathematician and very easily distracted. His wife Mary was too. Dad and Mom told the story of how they went to visit Peter and Mary once and she was so engrossed in a book that she was cracking eggs one by one and dropping them into the cutlery drawer and not the bowl.

Mike said, 'Corky has softened with age. Some people grow older and they find themselves.'

'Where shall we eat?' asked Corky. '4th street, perhaps,' I suggested. 'Anything but sushi,' he said. Corky took us there and we cruised up and down and got out to look at two restaurants and he interviewed the waiters and asked us what we wanted and then decided. 'Look. It's too dark around here. Why don't we go to Greenside.' and so we went to Greenside and found an Italian restaurant that was buzzing soon the waiter was reciting the whole menu out loud to Corky trying to impress him.

It was a delicious meal. I ate a bloody steak while Corky expounded.

'The solution we found was energy. Human energy. If you can build a team and create energy from that team then it feeds back in and it grows and with enough energy almost all problems can be solved.

'We discovered that it's not that people leave parts of their brain unused it's that when people have more energy they use more parts of their brain. If you can propitiate energy then you enable people to use more of their minds and solve problems.

'So how do we create thjis energy? In the first place people respond to authenticity. If you are who you are and act accordingly then people will appreciate that and respond. Authenticity is important.

'Why don't you like sushi? Eve asked.

'Because once we went to Japan and we decided to go to a traditional hotel, it was wonderful, we were bathed and it was a wonderful experience but when we ordered we just ordered from the top of the menu and what we ordered was live fish. When we made the order the whole restaurant turned round to watch us eat it and so we had to force ourselves. You could feel it moving all the way down.' said Corky reflectively.

The next thing we ordered was also alive, from a tank. - he dismissed the memory of wriggling fish and took up the thread.

'And you can feel people's energy. I know instinctively about you or Teresa or Eve. I am sensitive to your energy. Do you think, he asked Eve, that if we had said Oh dear nothing's open. And someone else said. Why did you bring us here and I said. Well you needn't have come and I answered and so on. Do you think you would ever want to see Corky again? Of course not.' He said to Eve.

'Who do you advise?' I asked him.

'Companies, individuals, communities,' he said. 'Communities are the hardest to help because they don't have to turn up and they aren't paying. You can never tell how it's going to go and who is going to turn up.

Back at home I gave Corky a copy of Dickens 'A Christmas Carol', inscribed with his grandfather's name (my great grandfather) and dated 1885. Arthur Hall was 12 when he owned that book. It belonged to my father but I thought Corky would appreciate it. I also gave him a portrait photo of his grandmother which Dad had. I also gave him a picture of dad. 'He was the best looking of all of the cousins.' he said.

Corky told us about how marvellous Great Granny was and I'll write another blog on her.

We thanked Corky and the next day he called up.

'Phil, I am afraid Ian Pollock, one of auntie Connie's son, has just died and so I can't take you to the Lido hotel as promised. Instead, why don't you come to the memorial ceremony?' And so I did. Eve came with. But I had to find my own way because Corky had a 1pm meeting.

Eve navigated well and we arrived and this was the first time I was seeing many of the relatives for many years and many I had never seen and they were all in mourning. Subdued. The sons talking to the sons. So I drank a lot of Roibos. Eve chatted to a cousin.

I said hi to Barbara, a lovely woman and close to Dad, and Ken and gave my condolences to Jenny, Ian's wife and met Arthur Lewis's namesake. The son of Alan Hall.

He was an art historian, but doing more or less the same as I: getting people up to speed with their academic writing skills at Johannesburg University. He was very much into the question of the semiology of gendered space, but I detected a little nostalgia for the notion of separate development in his discourse.

'We are just realising how we are all so different in South Africa. Perhaps we should never have been in one nation anyway.'

This was heresy to me. So I said.

'Well my father coined a word: the inotic. It is the opposite of the word exotic and one of the things he taught me is that no matter how strange and different humans are, essentially we have to journey towards what is the same in  all of us.'

It turns out that Alan Hall is also thinking of writing a book about Arthur Lewis.

'But we have roots going way back in South Africa, unlike you,' said his wife.

And I said. 'Don't worry, the other side of my family is Jewish German and I want to explore that too and I am not just focusing on Arthur Hall.'

But I did wonder about the claims of someone who had not fought against Apartheid or struggled to overcome it as my parents had, over their claim to be good South Africans. I think ours is a little stronger in some ways, though we lived in exile. My claim is weaker, but I went to 13 different schools on three continents so I paid a price too. My education, for a start.

In any event we returned to Jozie. Those were your second and third cousins removed, I said to Eve. Very removed.