Walter Hain obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/02/walter-hain-obituary

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Walter Hain “stumbled” into the anti-apartheid struggle, according to his son, the politician Peter Hain, who in 2014 wrote a memoir of his father and mother, Ad & Wal: Values, Duty, Sacrifice in Apartheid South Africa. Peter wrote of his parents: “At the time, in 1953, it just seemed the right thing to do, in keeping with their values of caring, decency, fairness and, perhaps equally important, their sense of duty.”

That was when Walter, who has died aged 91, and his wife, Adelaine, joined the newly formed Liberal party – the only non-race-based political grouping in South Africa. Then living in Ladysmith, the couple helped to organise the inaugural meeting of the party’s local branch and ended up holding it at their home. The author Alan Paton, the party’s national president, attended that first meeting.

The following year the family moved to Pretoria. Walter worked as an architect, while Adelaine became an unpaid political organiser. She made illegal trips into black townships to visit party members, and supported activists who had been arrested, helping them to find legal representation, and sending food to their families when they were imprisoned. When I met the couple in 2007, to write an article marking Adelaine’s 80th birthday, they gave me a nightmare description of the South Africa of the 1950s: prisoners taken to the jail in Pretoria could be sold to farmers as cheap labour, and a black servant not carrying his pass papers could be arrested merely for stepping outside his employer’s front garden.

As the repression worsened in the early 1960s, the Hains became even more active politically. Adelaine attended the trial of Nelson Mandela and his co-defendants in Pretoria, and was at times their sole supporter in the whites-only gallery. That in turn made the Hains the target of a paranoid regime.

In 1963 Adelaine was “banned” – a draconian measure forbidding all political activity and making her, in effect, a non-person. Walter faced the same treatment a year later. They were the first couple to be banned, and an unprecedented codicil had to be added to their banning order allowing them to communicate with each other.

Walter’s banning order followed the support he had given to the couple’s close friend John Harris, who in 1964 had planted a bomb at the railway station in Johannesburg, killing an elderly woman. In his book, Peter Hain alleges the authorities deliberately ignored Harris’s phoned warning in order to use the resulting carnage for political ends.

The Hains were opposed to violent action because they believed it was counter-productive, but they remained supportive of Harris, a fellow Liberal party member who had joined the African Resistance Movement and had come to believe that only violence could shake the apartheid system, although he always denied he had intended to kill. Harris was hanged for murder in April 1965, the only white person to be executed in apartheid South Africa for political activities. The Hains helped his wife, Ann, and their baby son during the months of his imprisonment and took them into their home after his death. Harris had wanted Walter to give the oration at his funeral, but because Walter was banned he was unable to do so. Peter, who was 15 at the time, read it instead.

Walter’s banning order meant he could no longer work as an architect in South Africa, so in 1966 he and his family left for the UK. They settled in London, where they became prominent opponents of the South African government. They supported the anti-apartheid movement, helping Peter with his Stop the 70 Tour campaign, which succeeded in blocking the all-white South African cricket team from coming to Britain in 1970. They also backed their son when he faced a trial for conspiracy in 1972 and trumped-up bank robbery charges in 1976.

The South African secret police continued to target activists in exile. The Hains’ phone was tapped and in 1972 they received a letter bomb, addressed to Peter but sent to their home. It was opened by their daughter Sally, but did not explode.

Walter was born in Durban. His father, also called Walter, and his mother, Mary, hailed from Glasgow, and in 1920 had emigrated to South Africa, where Walter Sr worked as an engineer. In 1935 they moved to Pretoria, and Walter attended Pretoria Boys high school, where he developed a lifelong love of sport.

He also learned to sketch at school – a skill he put to good use in the second world war, when he joined the Signal Corps at the age of 18 and took part in the allied assault on Italy. He kept a diary during the campaign, illustrated with pencil sketches. In 2015 he published them in a book called Apennine War Diary.

Walter was wounded in the advance, but recovered and was assigned to the Natal Mounted Rifles. He was still in Italy when Germany surrendered on 8 May. In his book about his parents, Peter says the war was a “profoundly formative experience” for his father, “both changing him and enlarging his perspective on life to one so much broader than that of a home-grown, young, white South African”.

After the war, Walter took up the place to study architecture at Witwatersrand University that he had gained before joining up in 1942. Though studying in Johannesburg, he still liked to pay regular visits to his parents in Pretoria, and on one of those visits, while out riding with a group of friends, he met Adelaine Stocks. The couple married in 1948, initially living in Nairobi, Kenay, where Walter had found a job in an architectural practice. Peter, their eldest son, was born there in 1950.

It was in Nairobi that the Hains exhibited the first flickerings of their political rebelliousness. “India had just got independence,” Walter recalled, “and a whole lot of [British] ex-Indian army people had come to Kenya, where black people were still kept in their place. One of the partners in the firm that I was working for said to me, ‘Oh, we must learn from you South Africans. You know how to treat the blacks.’ I had a hell of an argument with him.”

Walter described himself and Adelaine as political “late developers”. “It was very lucky because we both felt the same,” he said. “It would have been awkward if we’d developed differently.”

Exiled to the UK after their decade-long struggle in South Africa, they settled in Putney, south-west London, where Walter played cricket until he was 80. The couple were also passionate supporters of Chelsea football club – their sole accommodation with oligarchical power. In 2009 they moved to Neath, south Wales, to be close to Peter, who was the town’s MP until he stepped down in 2015.

Walter and Adelaine returned to South Africa on three occasions, the first visit immediately after the end of apartheid in 1994 to do “a whip-round of the whole country to see as many of our old friends as possible whom we didn’t think we’d see again”. On that trip, Walter had something of an epiphany – in a toilet. “We stopped at a garage on the road from Cape Town to Port Alfred to put petrol in. I went to the loo, and was standing at the urinal. Somebody came to the next urinal and I looked at him. He was black. I knew then that things really had changed.”

Walter is survived by Adelaine, their children, Peter, Tom, Jo-anne and Sally, 11 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and a great-great-grandchild.

• Walter Hain, architect and political activist, born 29 December 1924; died 14 October 2016