Albie father, Bill Andrews and half-brother Jackie on Clifton beach

IN ALBIES WORDS: That's my dad, Solly Sachs, looking quite relaxed, and with him is Bill Andrews. My dad had enormous respect for Bill Andrews. Solly had been expelled from the Communist Party for right wing deviationism. Bill Andrews had also been expelled. Bill Andrews came back to the Party. Though my dad continued to have a very strained relationship with the Communist Party after that, he never lost his love for Bill Andrews. Bill, I think, found Solly to be stormy but rich in personality, and very effective as a leading creator of modern trade unionism in South Africa.

The little boy between them was Jackie Stapelberg. He was one of three little white kids who had been found abandoned at the central railway station in Johannesburg. And somehow Garment Workers Union members got to hear. Johanna Cornelius, who didn't have children, took the one girl and Hester Cornelius, her sister, who also didn't have children, took the other girl. Dulcie Hartwell (my dad’s second wife) and Solly, took the boy Jackie. They never formally adopted him. But he grew up with them in their home, and Johnny and I regarded him as our younger brother. Here he is on holiday.

So now Jackie didn't do very well at school. He got work as a telephone operator. And then Solly died, aged 76, in London. Solly had always insisted on being organised, ‘You've got to be organised!’ But he didn't leave a will. Johnny and I were basically left as heirs to his house in London, and we shared the proceeds of the sale of the house. Solly and Dulcie had had a child, Andrew, our half-brother. Johnny and I felt that Jackie, although he didn't have any legal connection, was really like part of the family. So, we split the proceeds of the sale of the house four ways. But that was only after paying a sum back to the International Defence and Aid Fund. Solly had sent out an appeal to a list of supporters of the Fund, where he had been working, to get some money for what he called the Sachs Family that had been persecuted by apartheid, to buy the house. And some of the people in the Fund were not amused at all. I paid back that amount and divided the rest. And who was the purchaser of the house? My uncle Bernard. Jackie later used his position at the phone company to phone me and say thank you. That was the last I heard from him. And then I was told some years later that he had died.

Bill Andrews, by the way, had a bungalow in Clifton. I think it was on or near First Beach. Meanwhile, another communist leader, Eddie Roux, had a flat overlooking Moses Beach (next to First Beach). Moses Kotane would stay with him and be able to walk over to my mother with documents for her to type. Some years later, other communists, Brian and Sonia Bunting, built a house on the mountain slope above Second Beach. Every year we would have a great New Years Eve party there, with truckloads of people coming there from the Cape Flats and the townships. And sleeping over on the lawn. As far as the Security Police were concerned, Clifton was seen as being at the heart of subversion! Today regarded as the Malibu of South Africa, Clifton was then seen as the heart of revolutionary subversion.