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Joel Joffe Interviewed by Louise Brodie

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Joel Joffe Interviewed by Louise Brodie Joel Joffe Page 1 C1155/10 Track 1 IMPORTANT Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators ([email protected]) Joel Joffe Page 2 C1155/10 Track 1 BRITISH LIBRARY SOUND ARCHIVE NATIONAL LIFE STORIES INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET Title Page Ref. No.: C1155/10 Wav files Refs.: C1155-0010-0001.WAV to 0006.WAV Collection title: Pioneers in Charity and Social Welfare Interviewee’s surname: Joffe Title: Lord Interviewee’s forenames: Joel Sex: Male Occupation: Date of birth: 12.09.1932 Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Date(s) of recording and tracks (from – to): 18/12/2006: (track 1-2); 03/04/07 (track 3-6); 05/06/07 (track 7). Location of interview: British Library and interviewee’s home Name of interviewer: Louise Brodie Type of recorder: Marantz PMD660 Total no. of tracks: 7 Reading Format: Wav 16bit 48kHz Mono or stereo: Stereo Burned to DVD: Duration: 9:41:57 Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: full clearance Interviewer’s comments: Occasional noises in first session Joel Joffe Page 3 C1155/10 Track 1 [Track 1] This is the eighteenth of December, 2006. Louise Brodie talking to Lord Joel Joffe. Could you tell me when and where you were born please Joel? Yes, I was born twelve, nine, thirty-two in Johannesburg. And tell me a bit about your childhood. Well my childhood was difficult I think. I wasn’t a very happy child I think and my parents were a, ill-assorted couple. My mother came originally from Palestine, as it was in those days, where her father was a very eminent musicologist and ended up in South Africa simply because her sister had gone to South Africa and got married. That’s the way these things worked [laughing] in those days. She was sent with her mother to South Africa by the father who found them a bit of a handicap having them around I think. And my father came from Latvia and as a boy of – used to live in, it wouldn’t be a pogrom, but wherever the Jews used to live in those days – and at the age of thirteen he was put on a train and sent to his uncle in South Africa, all by himself on this [laughs] plane, about to say, plane journey to Southampton, pick up a steamer over there, come to Cape Town to get on to the train and he was a little boy, I mean I’m not sure if he was thirteen, he might have been eleven. And I don’t think he ever really quite recovered from that experience. Did he talk about it a lot? No, very seldom actually. But he never, he never spent much time talking to us at all. [laughs] And he worked, he got a job in Johannesburg – his uncle, who lived in Krugersdorp, which is a little distance away from Johannesburg, got him a job in a store in Rosebank, which is in Johannesburg, now quite a wealthy area, and according to him he was, on the weekends he was locked into the store. [laughs] He was just, you know, probably earning a pound or two every week [laughing], locked into the store for the weekends. And what, to sleep there? Joel Joffe Page 4 C1155/10 Track 1 Yeah, to sleep there, yeah. To protect it or why…? I think they had to have somewhere for him to sleep apparently, I think it’s almost like indentured [laughs] labour actually. This was obviously another Jewish businessman who had a small store. It was at Soggetts Corner in Johannesburg and – in Rosebank – and then he eventually borrowed, eventually after working a couple of years there, and after actually when he came to South Africa, to Krugersdorp, he was sent to a school but after two years or so, as he couldn’t speak English that well he left the school and we never learnt, we never ever heard actually what happened at the school. And as I say, he was then sent off as this indentured labourer. And then after working there for a while he saved up a bit of money and he borrowed fifty pounds from a big tobacco company called L K Hurwitz over there, that’s the company which Helen Suzman’s father and grandfather owned, and he – and they lent him fifty pounds with which he bought a stock of cigarettes and a horse- drawn wagon and a black driver. [laughs] And he travelled around selling the Suzman’s cigarettes. But how, what an enterprising thing to do. Yeah, I suppose it was actually. And eventually he made a tiny bit of money and then became a sort of general merchant in cigarettes and then expanded into what was called a wholesale merchant. And what they used to do, he used to have travellers and they would go into the country where there were these shops which handled everything for farmers and others and they used to supply them, so he had 600 different lines in his business. Any rate, by the time he was thirty-two, he suddenly met my mother who had been shipped over and fell in love with her, or wanted to marry her at any rate, and her mother – and her mother told her to marry him. [laughs] Being an obedient daughter she married him and I think they were, my mother had a lot of vitality and not academic ability, but she had drive and energy and a considerable amount of insensitivity when I come to think of it, which is a great help if you’re a salesperson or something. And they got married [laughs] but basically we learnt subsequently that they got married but my father’s mother, who was Joel Joffe Page 5 C1155/10 Track 1 arranging the affair, she was a lady only spoke Yiddish, never learnt English, they lived in Doornfontein which is a very poor part of Johannesburg, a lot of Jews originally settled there but then they migrated to the more prosperous areas generally. But they stayed there and she failed to, my dad’s mother failed to invite my mother’s mother to the wedding [laughs], to the reception and my mother apparently, my mother’s mother then decided that my mother couldn’t go to her reception. [laughs] They had a reception without her. [both laughing] What a story! And my father was a depressive actually. He always thought – it must have been his upbringing, they didn’t have enough to eat – he always thought he was on the point of going bankrupt and therefore he worried all the time and he often lived in a world of his own. But he ran a business which was, you know, moderately successful and he had no real reason to fear that he was going bankrupt even though he would never be rich, and I think this was a real problem for them in the early days, I think they moved nine times in two years after they got married because he found he could get cheaper accommodation by forming a relationship with a builder who was building new houses [laughs] who moved them from one to the other. They had my sister [inaudible] and they had first my sister, then a miscarriage, and then me, and then two other brothers. And I was, I was always quite independent so at school, I wasn’t happy at school and I ran away from school when I was nine I think, from preparatory school. Which prep school did you… It was Saxenwold Preparatory School, which is a school for big Jewish popu… quite a lot of Jewish students, but it was on the border. We lived in Lower Houghton and it was on the edge of Saxenwold, close to Lower Houghton, quite a good area. And I ran away but I came back after a day I think, but I was difficult so they then packed me off to boarding school and I was, as far as I could gather, I was rejected by the better boarding schools and ended up at Marist Brothers, which is a Catholic boarding school. Joel Joffe Page 6 C1155/10 Track 1 Right, now this is fascinating. I just want to take you back in a little more detail about that. Your mother, you said she was very, had lots of vitality and energy – was she also musical? You said her father was… No, funnily enough she wasn’t particularly musical at all, which was curious. It skipped her and certainly skipped me. And my father was very unmusical as well. [laughs] But did your mother’s father, did he come too to Johannesburg? No, he was a very interesting man. He came to Johannesburg when he was twenty and he was a, and he’d just qualified as a hazzan and he came to Johannesburg to set up – it was a mining town in those days – to set up a Jewish synagogue, or to sing in a Jewish synagogue and he was very young, he was sort of nineteen or twenty, and he apparently – I’ve got a ninety-eight, no ninety-six year old aunt who has kept me reasonably informed on the family, it was her father and she did inherit some of his musical ability - and he formed a, through his music formed a relationship in Fordsburg which was where the mining people lived, I mean it was a small town in those… with a Roman Catholic priest and they used to, had a piano and therefore my grandfather went and played the piano and he went off, and he formed this and he used to go there regularly and then the Jews got very cross with him because consorting with a Catholic, and he got fed up with them and then went back to Germany I think.
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