23 1963 – 1967: First years in Cape Town, and a change in direction.

23 <> 1963 – 1967: First years in Cape Town, and a change in direction.

A staff member from Woolworths Head Office was waiting to pick us up at Cape Town Airport. She took us to the Cecil Hotel in Newlands (it later became a Holiday Inn and now a Southern Sun Hotel) where we had been booked in, and at that point we realised we had been pulled into a new world in which the Company came first! I was given just enough time for us to sign in and get our bags up to the room when, leaving  DorothyAnne and the children to sort themselves out, I was whisked away to Head Office where the Merchandise Director was waiting to receive me! That was a bad start for both  DorothyAnne and me but I suppose it was important for the Company to get me into its culture of immediacy straight away. I had learnt a lot about that in the Durban branch with the strong emphasis on ‘tidy as you go’, which included merchandise, building and equipment: if it needs attention, do it now!

We spent a whole month in that hotel which became a very bad experience for  DorothyAnne when the manager turned her out of the dining room not wanting Andrew and Jenny there ‘disrupting the other guests’ (which was really not true because they were always well behaved in places like that). We were then forced to have all our meals in the room — which later caused much consternation in the Personnel Department at Head Office when they were confronted with the bill for a month’s worth of room service. That wasn’t the only inconvenience for  DorothyAnne — we arrived in the rainy season in Cape Town when, unlike in Durban where storms come and pass, it rained consistently for days on end which made it very difficult for her to ‘break the cabin fever’ by going out with Andrew and Jenny. To make things more difficult for  DorothyAnne, our Ford Popular was parked in the grounds of the hotel and when she came to start the car one morning there was no response to the starter button. She opened the bonnet and found that the battery had been stolen! (The Popular had been railed down to Cape Town by goods train much to the chagrin of the Personnel Manager who had to pass the bill for payment — he thought our Popular was not worth transporting to Cape Town and that we should have sold the car in Durban!)

While in the hotel, we had to find a house to live in, big enough to accommodate Dad when we brought him down to live with us. We found a house to rent on Main Road on the border of Claremont and Kenilworth to move into at the beginning of the next month, June 1964. I really can’t remember where our furniture was while we were in the hotel, but presumably it was stored by the Removers pending our instructions. Being a new Christian I also had been looking around for a church to attend — while in the hotel I had thought again about the Christian Scientists who had a reading room almost next-door to the hotel but I could ‘feel’ that that was not for me (much, I imagine, again to the relief of Anglican  DorothyAnne!)

But in May, and still in the hotel before we moved into the house ready to receive Dad, the worst was yet to come. I got a phone call at the office from Toni to say that she was in Pietermaritzburg where Dad was in hospital. He had collapsed on a seldom-used track while on his way to or from the Post Office in New Hanover. A farm worker had come across him and called the farmer, Mr Bentley, who took Dad through to Grey’s Hospital in Pietermaritzburg. He had then contacted Toni in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) who came down immediately to be with Dad. I borrowed the airfare from the Company, left  DorothyAnne, Andrew and Jenny at the hotel, and flew up to Natal. Frank Green, the Minister at the Musgrave Congregational Church arranged for me to stay with a family in Pietermaritzburg. The Kings were very kind to me and urged me to stay as long as I needed to but after a few days, Dad, in typical fashion, said to me, “Don’t worry about me, my boy. I’m finished. You get back to your family and your job”. It was a hard decision but I had to do that — there was no way of knowing how long he would hang on to life and I couldn’t leave  DorothyAnne, Andrew and Jenny on their own for too long, and I also didn’t know how long the Company would tolerate my absence. I said goodbye to Dad and returned to Cape Town on the Friday only to receive a telephone call on the Sunday to say Dad had died. It was the 17th of May, 1964. He died of cancer of the oesophagus. Toni, who had also returned to Rhodesia, came down to Natal to wind up Dad’s affairs at the house in New Hanover. She let the Bentley’s have what they wanted of the furniture and to dispose of the rest, and she railed to us in Cape Town a box containing tools and a mechanical device that Dad had been working on, his scrap book, and some papers. I couldn’t go back to Natal for a funeral but the Bentley’s attended as the only friends or acquaintances at the end of Dad’s 84 years. Dad was cremated and his ashes sent down to us in Cape Town where they were scattered in the newly prepared Garden of Remembrance at the Claremont Congregational Church. Dad’s name is the second or third entry in the Book of Remembrance there. I do have one regret about that — at some time long before his death Dad had said that he would love his ashes to be scattered on the hillside above Hout Bay, a place that he had seen when he first arrived by ship in South African waters and liked very much. I remembered, but when the time came it seemed such a lonely situation for his last resting place, a sentiment which, of course, was completely irrelevant to Dad and to anyone else but me. It was the end of an era stretching from 1880 in England where he was born.

At the office, I was placed in the Menswear Department under the Merchandise Manager who determinedly put me through the most thorough training — I had to spend the first few weeks in his office daily measuring production samples of vests and briefs to see that they came up exactly to specification! I eventually got responsibility, working under one of the two buyers in the Department, for men’s handkerchiefs and swimwear while still being exposed to other sections. Nothing was bought ‘off the rack’ as it were, but factories manufactured garments entirely to our specifications, something which required frequent visits to the factories — and visits from them — to view production on the line. Cloth also was ordered from Japan to our specification which meant contact with the Agents and representatives from factories in Japan. It was in the hands of one of these men from Japan that I saw the use of an abacus on which the man could do calculations as fast as anyone could do them today on the keys of a calculator! It was simply amazing to me. It was while in the Menswear Department that I had my first little triumph! We used to import from Marks & Spencer in England a line of Nylon (tricel, actually) cellular briefs which could not be made by the local industry. One day at the knitting mill in Cape Town where our cotton vests and briefs were made, I asked the ‘silly’ question — Why can’t we simply knit the same fabric on the same machines using tricel instead of cotton? There was a silence for a while and a sort of negative reaction — but a few days later the man from the factory arrived with a sample in his bag. It looked like the real thing but didn’t have quite the feel or handle we wanted, but with a little perseverance our locally-made cellular briefs hit our counters. Not a great achievement but it meant a lot to me because it vindicated my mode of lateral thinking !

There was a Congregational Church, between the house and Claremont, which I started to attend.  DorothyAnne tried St. Saviours, the Anglican High Church in Claremont, but she was persuaded by a new friend, Pam Casely, to go to the more evangelical Christ Church in Kenilworth. ( DorothyAnne eventually gave way to me and joined me at the Claremont Congregational Church.)

A couple of bad memories, among other more pleasant ones associated with the old house in Main Road, include the occasion when Jenny, who was only two at the time, developed an ear infection. The treatment in those days was to puncture the drum to drain the fluid and to force air into it to keep the hole open. It was excruciatingly painful for Jenny and terrible for  DorothyAnne to have to see her subjected to it. We were fortunate, though, in having Dr. Lane, an Intern at Groote Schuur and known to  DorothyAnne from Christ Church, to treat her at the hospital if  DorothyAnne asked for him. Another bad memory is the incident when Andrew tried to step from the draining board to the top of the washing machine. The machine moved, Andrew fell and broke his arm! And there was a feature of the house that we were very happy to leave behind. The bathroom and toilet were in an enclosed section of the verandah at the back of the house (added later as a common practice in old houses which were built originally with no bathroom: the toilet would have originally been a bucket housed in an outside structure, and bathing would have taken place in a galvanised-iron tub in the kitchen!) One day one of us encountered a large rat, a very large rat, in the bathroom! It escaped by jumping straight into the toilet bowl which was apparently it’s normal passage in and out of our house. Not surprisingly, we were very nervous about sitting on the loo after that discovery!

The house was sold while we were in it but the new owner didn’t impress us. In any case the house was large, old, and massively cold and uncomfortable for us so, as the twelve-month’s lease was coming to an end, we moved into a flat in Harfield Road. Ranleigh Park was convenient both to the Station for me to catch the train to work and for the Congregational Church which is not far from where Harfield Road joins Main Road, and it was also close to Christ Church for  DorothyAnne. When we eventually moved out of the flat, we left a legacy for the next and all subsequent tenants of the flat! The apartment was on the top floor. The first time it rained we discovered that there was a leak in the roof above Andrew’s bedroom. Our solution was for me to climb into the ceiling and place a plastic bucket under the spot where the rain water dripped onto the ceiling. We left it there when we departed and I presume it must still be there doing it’s good work! We applied the same solution many years later to a leak in the roof of a house we owned in Wynberg in Cape Town.

Our Ford Popular was getting old and needing more and more attention. It hit a low when I towed our two neighbours in their Peugeot 203 which had broken down somewhere between Cape Town and Kenilworth. The load was a bit too much for the Popular because after that it began to smoke furiously (I remember the disgusted looks I got from other motorists once as I drove with the car pouring smoke out of the exhaust — the car desperately needed a rebore; new rings would no longer do). We traded the Popular in on a second-hand Volkswagen Beetle which gave us a completely new motoring experience and in which we confidently undertook more than one trip between Cape Town and Durban, something we could never have attempted in the Popular.

After I had spent a year or so in the Menswear Department, Woolworths created a new category of staff for the Buying Departments, that of Merchandiser following the Marks & Spencer practice, and Simon Bernstein and I were each appointed to the position — he in the Women’s Outerwear Department and I in the Ladies’ Lingerie Department.

In the meantime my involvement with the Church intensified until the day came when I wanted to become a Minister. I approached Arthur Stops, the Minister at Claremont Congregational Church, about it before I had even mentioned it to  DorothyAnne, which was a serious mistake because such a move would affect her life even more than it would affect mine. Arthur took the not-uncommon step of testing my readiness for the ministry by trying to talk me out of it, but in view of my determination he placed my request before the appropriate people in the denomination and in due course it was approved at the Annual General Meeting. It was recommended that, because of my family status, I should take the three-year internal study course, rather than an external course, and without much delay my training commenced. It was ambitious of me because, as my history has shown, I was never a good student, but I persevered, barely passing with just a percentage point or so over the 50% required pass-mark. I was eventually ordained to the ministry of the United Congregational Church of South Africa later when we were back in Durban.

I was thrown in at the deep end of the ministry almost immediately when Arthur asked me to take the service at the church on an occasion when he was going to preach out of town. I remember sitting long hours in the largely unfurnished and unused dining room at the old house, researching and typing out my first sermon on my portable Olivetti typewriter, and reading it out allowed to myself and then to  DorothyAnne and later to a friend, Norman Casely, while he was at our place one evening when he and I worked on his car. The day came when I had to occupy the pulpit and face the Congregation! Except for once when I had a short sentence to say in a school play, that was the first time I ever had to speak in front of an audience of more than five or six people, and the first time that Dale Carnegie came to my assistance.

The signs were there from early on that I would not really fit in with the ethos in a Congregational Church, but it was too soon in my Christian career to make full sense of it. One sign was when “The Congregational Union Of South Africa” debated a motion to transform itself into “The United Congregational Church Of South Africa”. It probably doesn’t mean much to the casual reader, but to me it signified a backward step in the whole idea of ‘congregationalism’. Congregationalism was rooted in English Independency, a main principle of which is a local congregation’s total independence to order its own affairs, answerable only to Christ, without reference to any outside authority or hierarchy, unlike the situation in a centralised denomination such as the Church of England. I had picked this up in my discussions with Frank Green and now saw for myself that it is a principle most compatible with the New Testament documents I had been studying (which happily coincided with my own natural inclination!). I raised my objection with Arthur but, of course, I could not expect my new voice to carry any weight in the discussions. However, the denomination did have a strong reason for the change — it was in order to get past the official government policy of the time which precluded a local Black or Coloured church from owning property. The change of name and greater recognition as a denomination would enable the United Congregational Church to own properties on behalf of the local congregation. I couldn’t argue against that, but it was to be some years before I came to the conclusion that local congregations do not need to own property, certainly not when following the normative practice as appears in the New Testament.

After passing the exams in the second year of study, I received an invitation, communicated via Arthur, to become student Pastor of a new congregation in the suburb of New Forest in Durban where I would continue my studies under the guidance of the Minister of the neighbouring Sea View Church. After some heavy soul-searching — our monthly income would drop to less than half –  DorothyAnne agreed for my sake, and we accepted the offer. But there were still some developments which would profoundly affect the passage of our lives. In Harfield Road, on our way to the Congregational Church or the shops in Claremont, there was an Assembly Of God church. I really don’t know who and when, but someone who went to that Church lent  DorothyAnne a book entitled “They Speak With Other Tongues”. While I was studying urgently for an exam,  DorothyAnne would interrupt me with, “Listen to this!” and she would read me a passage. What I heard was completely in line with what I had just been studying in the New Testament. The baptism with the Holy Spirit was something not known in normal Congregational Church circles, or in most traditional denominations of the Church at that time. I read the book as soon as the exams were over and it aroused in me a hunger which would not leave me until I experienced it for myself in Durban later on.

Our daughter Suzanne was born while we were living in the flat in Ranleigh Park in Harfield Road. We were now a family of five.

The time came for us to depart on the next adventure for the Sutton family. I gave a month’s notice to Woolworths who received it most graciously. At the end of November 1967, the Lingerie Department gave me a send-off with a party where the Merchandise Director made a speech and handed me, as a parting gift from the company, a cheque for three-hundred Rand. Armed with that and the pay-out of my accumulated pension fund contributions, we were able to pay for our own removal expenses to Durban.

In preparation for the move we had sent our dog, Puddles, ahead of us into the care of friends we had met in Cape Town and who had subsequently moved to Durban. The day dawned for us to leave, we watched our furniture being loaded into the removal van, then bundled the five of us into the Beetle with our cases containing our personal effects on a roof-rack, and set off back to Durban and the church experience awaiting us at New Forest. We arrived there at the beginning of December 1967.