IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NATIONAL LIFE STORIES Legal Lives Sydney Kentridge Interviewed by Paula Thompson C736/09 1 IMPORTANT © The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected] 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. 2 SIR SYDNEY KENTRIDGE QC BRITISH LIBRARY LIFE STORIES COLLECTION LEGAL LIVES PROJECT This is the transcript of four interviews undertaken in March and April 2008. The interviews took place in Brick Court Chambers on 11th, 17th and 26th March and 1st April 2008. The interviews on 11th and 26th March are in two parts so there are six separate tracks in total. Timings have been included in square brackets. The interviews were conducted by Paula Thompson on behalf of the British Library Life Stories Collection as part of its Legal Lives Project. The transcript has been prepared in honour of Sir Sydney’s 90th birthday on 5th November 2012. 3 INTERVIEW 1 – 11TH MARCH 2008 TRACK 1 – [51:34] [00:00] This is Paula Thompson on the 11th of March with Sir Sydney Kentridge in his Chambers at Brick Court in London. Sir Sydney, could you introduce yourself? [00:14] Well you’ve got it right, my name is Sydney Kentridge, and I’m a barrister, I’m a Queen’s Counsel, and we’re in my Chambers. They’re called Brick Court Chambers because originally these Chambers were in Brick Court in the Temple, but as the Chambers grew bigger we outgrew Brick Court... the Brick Court rooms in the Temple, and so we now have this building just outside the Middle Temple which we call Brick Court Chambers, which is confusing for people who know Brick Court itself. [00:47] And could you tell us when and where you were born? [00:52] I was born in Johannesburg on the 5th of November 1922. So if you can do the simple arithmetic it means I’m now 85 years old, or I might say I’m 85 and a quarter. [01:10] And still very much in practice. And your parents’ names? [01:18] Well my father was Maurice Kentridge. He was a Member of Parliament in South Africa and a very prominent one, and my mother’s name was May. [01:29] And how... Were you one of many siblings? [01:33] I was one of three, the eldest of three. [01:36] The eldest of three. Can you remember your first house and describe it to us? [01:43] No, I don’t, I’ve no recollection of the house where I was born. It was in a suburb called Kensington. I know where it is, I’ve seen it from the outside, but the first house I remember was my maternal grandparents’ house, because, when I was very small, my parents stayed there. That was in a rather obscure Johannesburg suburb called Forest Hill where my grandfather had this house and he also owned a few cottages. Throughout the growth of Johannesburg, I would say Forest Hill was one of the very few suburbs that never came up in the world, it was always, I would say it was undistinguished, the houses were, the house, I remember it of course as I was there when I was three, four, maybe five years old, I thought of it as having a huge garden, being a huge house, but it was probably a small house with a small garden. [02:55] And your grandparents – their names and..? 4 [03:00] Well my grandfather was Wolf Kentridge and I don’t remember my paternal grandmother’s name. My maternal grandparents were Leon Shaffner and Rose Shaffner. He was a locksmith. [03:24] Your maternal grandfather. [03:26] Yes I never knew my paternal grandfather you see, he died in the flu epidemic of 1918 before I was born, but, although I was so young, and although I think my maternal grandfather died when I was either just five or even four, I have strong memories of him because I was very close to him: he used to make toys for me – he was a good carpenter also, and the very first time I went to a cinema, or as we called it in South Africa, a bioscope, I was taken by him to a Charlie Chaplin film at the local cinema; I was either three or four. But I remember him quite well. [04:22] And then the house that you remember growing up in. Can you describe that, whereabouts that was? [04:30] Well... the family house which my parents bought – it was in 1931, I was eight years old. And I really stayed in that house apart from absences overseas, I really stayed in that house until I got married, more or less. So that was a period of about twenty, twenty one years or twenty years. That was in a middle class suburb called Yeoville. I’d say the other suburb I mentioned, Forest Hill, was a white working class suburb, Yeoville was very much a middle class suburb, and the houses were small, but they were nice houses, well-built houses, not much garden, but decent houses, and pleasant enough streets, and close to my school, and, as I say, that was where I grew up, and so did my brothers. [05:45] And your parents, you said your father was a member of parliament. Had he always been active in politics, and can you tell us a little about him? [05:57] Yes, he was an attorney, that’s like a solicitor in South Africa, in Natal, and he went into politics for the Labour Party, of course it was a white Labour Party, all of politics was white. As far back as 1908 I think he got into the Natal Legislature, and then I know that in 1914 he got into Parliament, I think at a by-election. In 1915 he lost his seat in Parliament but he remained in politics. He moved up to Johannesburg, where he was very active in the Johannesburg City Council – he was Chairman of the Finance Committee of the Johannesburg City Council – and he went back into parliamentary politics in 1920 where he won a seat in Parliament, again for the Labour Party. And again he lost his seat the following year, but in 1924 he was elected to one of the Johannesburg constituencies, and he remained a Member there from 1924 to 1958 when he retired. He was what they called the Father of the House; he was the oldest sitting MP. But he left the Labour Party in I think it was 1932 when he joined General Smuts’ South African Party; as I say, he remained in parliament all these years, so there was a lot of politics in our household. [07:39] Did you ever go and see him in Parliament as a child? [07:42] Yes. Oh yes. See, we used to take holi- Parliament sat in Cape Town and we used to take our annual holidays in Cape Town, so I did see him there, yes. And, when I was a boy, I also sometimes went to political meetings, election meetings where he spoke, 5 and so on. And politics was much more his life than law. Although he was in practise as an attorney, politics was really his life. [08:17] So he kept up his practice simultaneously as being a Member of Parliament. [08:22] Yes, yes. [08:24] And whose idea would it have been to go to the meetings – yours or his? [08:29] Oh I wanted to go, I wanted to go. [08:34] And did your other brothers have an interest in politics as well? [08:38] Less than I did, less than I did. [08:45] And you said about there being politics in the house – was your mother politically active in her own right? [08:53] Well she was active as his helper, I mean, at election time, she was the organiser of the election campaign. She organised the canvassers and the workers and the Election Day transport, and she ran a, helped to run a Women’s Branch in his constituency. So she was very active as his helper. I don’t know that she had very strong political views of her own. [09:00] And in your, growing up then, in your house, can you describe the members of the household – did your mother have help, or, what was the setup in the 1930s in South Africa? [09:42] Well, in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, really, right up to the 80s or 90s, there were very very few white families who didn’t have a black servant, usually living in, in a room in the backyard, and we usually had two; a man, who did the heavy, heavier cleaning, and a woman who did the cooking, and sometimes we had a white nanny. But that was no sign of riches, because my parents were middle class; I mean, we lived in comfort, but they were not well-off, they had no, well because I said, my father, because of politics, didn’t have a very big practise, but it was just..