Glenys Harrison and John Patten - Memories of Eve and Tony Hall

 Those in the picture (from left) are your father Tony, your mother Eve, Tony Levy, (then two men students I can't identify), Glenys Harrison (as she was then), Paddy Roome, and myself (John Patten).

Hi Philip! 

I'm in California looking after the grandchildren for a few weeks. Not too effectively, I think, as my grandson fell out of an apple tree yesterday  and broke his arm!

I remember we all went on the big protest march against apartheid, starting at Wits and winding down into town. All the policemen turned their backs on us. We didn't have any idea at that stage how bad things would get. 

We  often went to parties together , or out on picnics. We just discussed everything going on in our lives, politics, courses we were taking. I don't remember any specific words, except once, when we were all in the car ready to go on a picnic and already late, when  Tony said he had forgotten the bottle opener, so got out of the car very slowly and ambled back to the house. Eve, watching him, said fondly 'My leaping young gazelle!'

I remember sitting above the swimming pool at Wits with Eve and Janet Suzman , just before final exams, talking about how ill-prepared we felt. However, we all did well.

Howard and I went to work in Carletonville, he as mine doctor, I as high school teacher, and we would stop on the drive out to see Eve and Tony. It was on one of those occasions that we took that nice picture of you as a baby.

I wish I could remember more!

Best wishes - Glenys.

Hi Philip

Glenys wrote to me following your letter to her, because I also knew your parents well at Wits. They were part of a group of us who used to meet on the Great Hall steps every break time, and we did many things together.

The picture attached was taken during the demonstration Glenys referred to in her reply to you. It shows the half-unfurled banner we carried to the Johannesburg City Hall following the student march from the Wits campus. The march was in protest against the University Apartheid Bill which the Nationalist government was pushing through Parliament, giving it the right to prevent black students from studying at Wits (unless there was no other university providing the course the black student wanted to take). 

The top line of the poster gives the Afrikaans title of the Bill. What you can see of the second line is part of the message "Wits behoort aan alle Suid-Afrikaners" (Wits belongs to all South Africans). The demonstration was held on 20 May 1957.

I have some memories of your parents that I can share with you.

The campus was abuzz with politics at that time, and your parents were tending to the more radical views being expressed by some students in opposing apartheid. There was a student named Mike Laschenger who was studying political science and was an activist canvassing for the banning of all South African sports teams from international competition because of the racial exclusion of of anyone not white from the teams. 

Soon there were other issues arising keeping students talking and your parents moved steadily left into the movement then known as the Congress of Democrats. My opposition to apartheid was less radical, because I didn't have any leanings towards socialism or communism, but I nevertheless remained very good friends with both of them.

I remember being invited to a party Tony was having at the Lido Hotel south of Johannesburg (was it for his 21st birthday perhaps?). I think the Lido Hotel was owned by his parents. The party was held in the dead of winter on an extremely cold night. I had bought Tony a pair of leather gloves for his birthday, and was very tempted to wear them against the cold that night, but I kept them wrapped for him.

While still at university, he managed to get work for himself as a part-time correspondent for The Star newspaper, writing news from the Wits campus, I think. We were very jealous of him at the time for having a paying job on such an important newspaper. He later worked as a full-time reporter on The Star until he and Eve had to leave the country because of their political views and the danger of getting locked up.

Your parents suddenly announced one day that they had got married over the weekend. This shocked many of their friends and was quite a talking point among friends who knew them. One girl I was taking out occasionally at the time, Val Mortimer, expressed the view that they had been disrespectful to their parents by marrying without even informing them that they intended to do so. In spite of the controversy, however, they had a marriage which lasted, unlike some others.

After leaving university at the end of 1957, I saw them only three times more. The first time was on the night of New Year's Eve, when they came to my parents home in Waverley, Johannesburg, had a light supper and then they and Glenys and I went out on the town to celebrate. By then your parents were married, and went back to their flat near the middle of town. Glenys and I stayed up the whole night, and eventually went back to my parents' house exhausted.

The next time I saw them after leaving university was at my 21st birthday party in February 1958. I had just got a job as a reporter on the Pretoria News (while Tony was working on The Star in Johannesburg) and continued my career on various newspapers of the Argus group, opposing apartheid and being myself very involved in reporting all aspects of the rise and fall of apartheid. I heard from other journalists that Tony and Eve went to live in Kenya after leaving South Africa, with Tony working on the Evening Standard in Nairobi, and later that Eve later got a very responsible job with the United Nations. I don't know if that information is correct.

A coincidence brought them back within my ken. My editor on the Pretoria News, Wilf Nussey, bought a house in the Lowveld and retired there. Wanda (my wife) and I visited them there quite often, a lovely place. They stayed there until Wilf's parents died and he inherited a wonderful property right on the shore of False Bay beyond Simonstown, where they have lived ever since.

In moving to Simonstown, they sold their house to (of all people, I was surprised to learn) your parents, who had retired back to South Africa after the fall of apartheid. Wilf let me know that they were coming to visit him in Cape Town and we planned to meet when they arrived. A meeting of sorts did take place, but not the evening together that we had hoped. 

I was walking in a street in central Cape Town one morning when I suddenly heard someone calling my name, and a large car (it could have been a four-by-four) pulled up. Tony had recognised me more than 40 years after we had last seen each other. They were about to leave CapeTown to go back to the Lowveld. I gave Eve a kiss through the open window, and we had a short chat. Your mother at that time, I gather, was already terminally ill with cancer, although I was not aware how seriously ill she was. We never got to see each other again. That same day, I went down to the harbour to meet Glenys and Howard, who had arrived by ship after a cruise. 

It would have been so wonderful if we could all have got together that day.

I heard with sorrow not very long afterwards from Tony that Eve had died, and then not very long after that that he himself had died. It is sad that they are gone, but our memories are still there.

These are my reminiscences of Tony and Eve. They were good friends. I was proud to know them.

I'm sure you could get further reminiscences from Wilf and Doreen Nussey, who sold their Lowveld house to Tony and Eve, and became quite good friends of theirs in the process. 

If you are ever in Cape Town, look us up.

Kind regards,

John Patten