1961: By Ladybird round Africa

A very potted History of modern South Africa: the Dutch East India Company, on their route to Indonesia, established a small, impoverished colony at Kaapstad/Cape Town in 1652. Dutch colonists did not get on well with the local Khoikhoi ('Hottentots') or San ('Bushmen') people, but oddly enough, were quite friendly with the Bantu to begin with. Most of the Dutch settlers were Boers, i.e. farmers, who didn't want to live in any city, they wanted land. Over the next 150 years or so they travelled east and northwards, taking the land and establishing farms and settlements. They were often annoyed by the Company's attempts to control them from back in Amsterdam and simply moved further and further away from the Cape so they could get on with cattle farming in peace. About 40,000 acres was considered a reasonable spread.

When the Netherlands were conquered by the French in the 1790s, the British Royal Navy sailed in and occupied the Dutch colony. After the defeat of Napoleon, Britain took the Cape over completely (1814) in order to be sure of communications with the most important part of the British Empire: India. The British were mainly interested in the ports of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London and Durban, but annoyed the Afrikaner Boer population by things like abolishing slavery, making them pay taxes, etc. They also tried to be 'fair to the natives', though weapons technology and military organisation were always going to prevail in the end. By the 1830s many of the Afrikaners were so fed up with British meddling that they decided to move beyond the Vaal River which had been established as the border with independent Bantu peoples (who were also big cattle farmers, note), and go settle somewhere else: hence 'Transvaal'. This was the Great Trek, central epic of Afrikaner history, remarkably similar to what was happening in North America at exactly the same time. Tough, God-fearing, gun-toting pioneer men, women and children putting all their possessions onto ox-wagons and moving away from pesky government to establish a new world where they were free to live the independent life of their choice.

Although the Bantu had been in Southern Africa for thousands of years the early 19th Century was a time of enormous political change for them too. Kings with superb organisational powers, notably Shaka who established the Zulu army and state, and Mzilikaze of the Ndebele (Matabele), emerged. Just as in America there was great savagery and great bravery from both sides in the inevitable Boer/Bantu clash. The Boers managed to establish their independent Republics (four at first, later Orange Free State and the Transvaal), though black resistance never ceased. The British colonies of the Cape and Natal were also involved in several 'Kaffir Wars' in the first half of the 19th Century, but on the whole got on reasonably well with the Boers. If you were an Afrikaner in the southwest and didn't like the way Britain ran things, you could always move northeast. Everything changed with the discovery of diamonds near Bloemfontein (Orange Free State) in 1867...
 
I'd be quite annoyed if I looked in at this thread hoping to see DC-4s in action and got that last posting, but it was based on reading a book by a South African historian, and we do need to know what the Ladybird family, Daddy, Alison and John were walking - or rather, flying - into. More FACTS (for John?) to follow later, but let's board Springbok 343 for Durban first:



The late David Frost? It's now rare, but always nice to have a little walk across the tarmac and go up some steps to get to an aircraft. Funnily enough, my last one was with KLM at Heathrow (it went to Schiphol for a connecting flight to Boston), when we took the traditional coach to a jumble of Airbuses.



One passenger panicked at the sight of so much BA, but the aviation geek had spotted our Dutchman's lonely blue livery and was able to point it out to reassure her that she wasn't on the wrong bus (the stewardesses' uniforms were another clue).



If you are interested in FAJS in the 1960s, Gate 7 will put you there, right in front of the terminal building. Here's the flightplan:



This moved out the moment I'd finished setup:



That's on the 2-D screen which is almost as good as the virtual one on this Jens Kristiansen (JBK2) version of the Skymaster. It is different in many ways from flying the Canadair C-4 and you do have to control Autopilot from the keyboard (Z key).



Let him go, and move cautiously out...



That guy's missed it. And now we're just waiting for clearance:

 
The discovery of diamonds - it's the best place on the whole planet for them if you like sparkly stones - and gold on Witwatersrand in 1886, made the territory of the Boer Republics attractive to people other than Calvinistic Dutch farmers. Valuable minerals are there in abundance, but it wasn't like California where you could stake your claim and go pan for it yourself. Cecil Rhodes realised that to extract gold and diamonds from deep under South Africa required enormous joint effort, and it was he who united several small concerns into the great De Beers mining company. The new influx of prospectors were known as Uitlanders, and the British government were concerned that they lacked rights and were treated unfairly by the Boers. It was nothing, of course, to the lack of rights and unfairness that was the daily experience of the black three-quarters of the population, most of whom were now reduced to being indentured labourers on the land, or very low-paid miners. There is also a large 'Coloured' population in South Africa, mainly descended from Indians, but including interesting cultures like the Muslim Cape Malays, who actually saw their civil rights reduced as the firm Afrikaner idea that God decided how significant you are when He assigned skin colour prevailed over vague British attempts at fair play. As a young lawyer in the 1900s Gandhi himself was in South Africa and formulated some of his philosophy and practice of passive resistance, but of course he went home to deal with the big one, India itself.

There's no escaping history. After their whistle-stop look at the pretty jacaranda trees, let's take the Ladybirds down to Durban:



We soon pass a large lake just south of Vereeniging which is the Vaal Dam:



Where they make the electricity for the big conurbation of Johannesburg/Pretoria, which also includes Soweto (= South West (African) Township), southwest of Johannesburg, most notorious of the black shanty towns that grew up beyond the white skyscrapers and suburbs and provided all the cheap labour.



The next large body of water we'll see will be the Indian Ocean. Mountains ahead and to our left:



It's the great escarpment of the Drakensberg which runs down the eastern side of the Orange Free State and separates it from the sea.

 
Hi,
This is a wonderful thread!
Have you any idea of the cost of this jaunt, in old money? I think it would be horrendous. but perhaps Mr Ladybird has private means.

Andy.
 
Think you're right Andy! I recently heard that before deregulation of airlines in the '70s it cost the equivalent of a fifth of the average British worker's annual pay just to get to the Costa del Sol - everyone took their holidays in Blackpool. Using the Timetable Images website you could work out what Daddy Ladybird would have to pay in £s, shillings and pence and it'd come to the equivalent of hundreds of thousands in today's money. The books are always very vague about his 'business', but having a boy and a girl accompany their father is a clever device for getting them to exotic places. The dominance of British airlines appearing in the AI down East Africa, French further to the west (which we should see on the way back) certainly illustrates how and where the old imperial powers kept their spheres of influence. But it's also interesting that the mining companies found it worthwhile to set up a whole airline just to bring workers in, men whose luggage consisted of little more than the clothes they stood up in and a blanket. After flying with Wenela every passenger got a small metal aeroplane badge as a souvenir; rather a thoughtful touch.



The Ocean ahead. We flew over Ladysmith and Pietermaritzburg, this AI Skymaster spotted on the ground below:



I think you can see FAPM, Pietermaritzburg Airport in this picture:



The British army fought two wars against the Boer Republics, 1880-81 and 1899-1902. In both cases the Boers inflicted serious defeats on the British to begin with, but were eventually defeated by sheer weight of numbers. Every male Boer, from young boys to old men, knew how to use a rifle and ride a pony, so they had effective firepower and enormous mobility. Fighting a guerrilla campaign the Boers were organised into small, dedicated units known as Commandos, the name the British adopted for their Special Forces in the 20th Century. Note that the First Boer War followed on immediately from the much better-known Zulu War: everybody's heard of Rorke's Drift (thanks to Michael Caine), but Majuba Hill, a British catastrophe of 1880, is not remembered (except by the winners in South Africa!).



Durban ahead... here's the approach to the airport:



And there it is:

 
Hi Ralf,

Just wanted to post that I (at least) am eagerly awaiting your next installment. :) Assuming the flight isn't over yet, of course.
 
Yes! After some CD drive problems that would not have troubled anybody in their wildest dreams in 1961, we are now ready to proceed...

Landing in Durban (FADN) on the Indian Ocean eastern side of South Africa:



Full flaps and slow right down to less than a hundred knots to bring your DC-4 safely to earth.



This is a bit quieter than Johannesburg was, but there's a little AI we'll take a look at.



One of those Twin Cessnas arriving amongst the GA... Could it be the mysterious Lady in Orange?



And here's our parking space:

 
Having reached Durban on the coast we're getting a bit ahead of Daddy, Alison and John, so you'll have to see the next few pages of the Ladybird book before we fly any further:



The above passage contains an unfortunate, unavoidable fact when Daddy mentions 'the Union of South Africa, until 1961 a dominion of the British Commonwealth.' As you know, the book was published that same year, the year South Africa voluntarily withdrew from the British Commonwealth and became the Republic of South Africa. This was the Afrikaner Nationalist party dream come true: no more British meddling in their homeland. Unbelievably they had drawn up a Republican Constitution in 1940 when they hoped that Britain was about to be defeated by their friends the Nazis - ! The final form of that Constitution wasn't quite so frightful as it would have been if Hitler had prevailed (when they would have immediately given South West Africa back to Germany), but it was pretty grim as the next few decades, when the National Party made sure it stayed in power, were to prove. Part of the problem was that the slightly more moderate Smuts had been so busy being an international statesman in the 1940s that he failed to prevent the Afrikaner ascendancy from taking over his own country. It is extremely embarrassing if you're Dutch to find out that so was Henrik Verwoerd, the architect of Apartheid (his family emigrated from Holland when he was a small boy).

Next picture in the book is most interesting from a subliminal message point-of-view:



Daddy Lion is a symbol of the British Empire. The Mummy Lion, licking her naughty, playful cub, represents 'the Mother Country' licking her colonies into shape. Everybody knows that this is not how lions sit around in the wild (they spend most of their time sleeping in trees or ripping hooved creatures apart), but that really is the hidden meaning behind this image. It also contains a visual reassurance, common in children's books, that everyone - Alison and John, the animals, you the reader - has a safe, sensible family to protect them...
 
On the German map of our trip round South Africa I showed the next leg as FADN - FAPE, Durban to Port Elizabeth. Looking more carefully at the book it seems they broke that flight along the coast at East London, so we now have FADN - FAEL:



Thought of going in this beauty:



She is ZS-BMH Lebombo (named after a range of mountains between Swaziland and Mozambique), South African Airways' historic flight DC-4. The aircraft dates from 1947, though you will notice the modern South African flag :southafrica: - known to local wits as the 'Electric Underpants' -on the fuselage. But for various reasons to do with ease of flying and my control setup, decided to stick to the old Skymaster ZS - BMC for Flight SA319.



This flight takes about an hour and a quarter, leaving around 10 o'clock in the morning.



A Viscount, Springbok 501, on the same route left just ahead of us. I knew we'd be a lot slower & lower, but there were moments near Durban when we were manoevering round and a little too close for comfort...



Anyway, concentrated on getting the climb right and left ATC to worry about our proximity.



Here's 501 just starting takeoff...



And there he goes!
 
Shortly afterwards, having acquired clearance, our old Skymaster tucking her gear in:



And we're flying down the east coast.



It's the Indian Ocean behind us, but we'll see the Atlantic eventually when we get to Cape Town.



The Viscount, Springbok 501, getting well in front of us and at twice the altitude:



And a rather lovely example of AI spotted taking off below:



It's a Boeing Stearman, the PT-17 version with a Continental engine:



Mmm, stripey. We pootle on over Pondoland towards East London...



Here's the Viscount beginning to manoever and descend for his landing:



Far ahead of us by now.
 
Apart from the Viscount, more AI flying around nearby:



Another Twin Cessna. FAGM is Rand, also the name of the currency of SA (it means 'edge' or 'ridge' in Dutch which can apply to the edge of a coin as well as a ridge of mountains. There's a Rand in West Virginia and another in New South Wales, though my atlas doesn't include the South African one). East London ahead:



It is indeed east of the original London, England, being on almost exactly 28 degrees East. The English one is at the Zero Meridian of course (between 51 and 52 degrees North. Cape Town is between 18 and 19 degrees East, in the same time zone as England. I hope this is all going in your notebook, John).

Final approach, gear down:



Nearly there...



...and we're on the ground.



It is significant that Daddy, Alison and John came to this major port and essentially fly right round the British-friendly coast of South Africa, generally avoiding the inland Afrikaner strongholds of Transvaal and Orange Free State. If it had been a Dutch Lieveheersbeestje book with Paatje, Juliana and Piet they would certainly have gone to Bloemfontein and learnt all about the great Boer victories over that wicked British army!



There's the red and white Cessna. No problems getting to our parking space since FAEL's not exactly the busiest airport in South Africa at this time of day.

 
No sign of Springbok 501, the Viscount that left Durban just before us. I checked Traffic Tools Explorer:



...he had already been to East London and was on his way! So we were the only airliner dropping off and picking up passengers there around 11.00 that morning.



Before we follow the Viscount to Port Elizabeth and then on to Cape Town, better catch up with the Ladybird folk. You'll recall that we left them looking at lions in the Kruger National Park which is right up in the top right-hand corner of South Africa, near the Mozambique border.



You now get the illustration that appeared on the paper cover of the book:



I hardly dare comment, but have already mentioned the fact that though plenty of black Africans appear in pictures in the well-meaning little book, none of them actually says anything in the text. What was happening in Apartheid South Africa was that the black three-quarters of the population were given designated 'Homelands' to live in, and the fact that everyone with dark skin also had to carry - and frequently produce - a 'Pass' in order to travel around what was supposed to be their own country has also been noted. Peaceful (but illegal) protest against the day-to-day restrictions of what were essentially race laws had already led to the Sharpeville Massacre when 67 people were shot dead in 1960, just before the Ladybird family visit. This drew the world's attention to what was happening in South Africa at the time, as did the contemporary Treason Trials of young African National Congress leaders including the lawyers Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. In their first trial in 1961, these men were acquitted, but the law was then changed to make 'sabotage' a treasonable offence. Although the ANC never used terrorist methods that have become depressingly familiar everywhere in the 21st Century (murdering innocent, easy target civilians and blaming 'the government' for making you do it), they did keep up a campaign of low-level civil disobedience, including actions like bomb attacks on power stations. The change in the law therefore enabled the National Party government to imprison Mandela and seven others for life in 1963.

The next page will enable Daddy, Alison and John to get slightly ahead of us:



Then there's another wildlife picture, and one can't help noticing that the Zulu family, once 'a proud warrior race', have been sandwiched in between the lions and ostriches, all part of the colourful, safely-tamed backdrop.

Although the Ladybirds drove from East London to Port Elizabeth, we will stick with the Skymaster DC-4 on Flight SA325:



Here's the route down the Eastern Cape coast and across Algoa Bay:

 
The WORST THING happened on this leg. I did the whole flight beautifully (apart from a go-around at the end), took lots of excellent screenshots... then realised I hadn't switched FS Screen on to start with. :redf: Had to do it all over again, though luckily FAEL - FAPE is one of the shortest stretches at less than an hour.



We move out:



Cessnas, Cessnas, everywhere!
On the ground and in the air..

These are by Henry Tomkiewicz. What I've done for the early '60s is to install GA like that as long as it's got props, no jet-powered business planes. You probably noticed that they don't have registration numbers, but in radio chatter they do get local South African (Sierra Zulu) prefixes, which is pretty cool and enhances the imaginary world.



Caught a quick glimpse of the busy harbour as we were climbing away:



Nice. Believe that came with the South African Waterways download which so far seems to have fitted nicely with the Early '60s African airports.





The spectacular scenery and busy port of Cape Town to look forward to of course.



We soon fly over the Great Fish River.
 
Some AI on the ground below in this part of the Eastern Cape:



A DC-3 and the inevitable Viscounts going about their business:



I think this was a look ahead to FAPE where we're going.



Algoa Bay ahead with Port Elizabeth on the far side:



This reveals the beautiful curve of the Bay:



We will land on Runway 09 by flying past the end of Cape Recife, then turning back to face the direction we came from.



This map shows how it was done:



Now approaching Port Elizabeth from the west:



You can just make out the runway lights, someone arriving from Pietersburg just ahead of us.
 
Closer...



Now you see Algoa Bay from the west.



And the Skymaster has landed:



It's lunchtime, we'll park and get something to eat.



A couple of other aircraft are waiting at FAPE and a Cub circling round:



Yet another Viscount approaching from East London:



We'll just have to sit here and wait for those steps to be brought over.



Notching up the hours with the DC-4 now, but I do miss the old Dakota...



Maybe there's a way to squeeze a little C-47 flight in somewhere round here?
 
There were three ways to fly from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town in the early '60s...

You could go direct by DC-4 leaving at 13.15 in the afternoon on Flight SA319, or you could take SA345 at 17.30 in the evening:



Takes a couple of hours. But there was also a Dakota, SA323, which left at 13.10, flew about half way along the coast (taking just over an hour), to George (with its rather unfortunate code FAGG), then went on to Oudtshoorn (FAOH), only 20 minutes north of there, before completing the trip west to Cape Town by 17.00.

We will go on one of the Skymaster flights, but since Harry & Co at Cal Classics have done the little airports at George and Oudtshoorn, thought it would be fun to see them and just fly FAGG - FAOH in the DC-3 with realism turned up to the max; it's only about 20 minutes.



Two famous Georges in History: G. Washington and King G. the Third - you can guess which of them the British, beleagured by Boers, named this place after.



(I love the detail in Rip Van Winkle that when he wakes up (after 20 years, not a hundred, Tim Burton take note for when you scew up a perfectly good Washington Irving story in your next movie), the town inn's name has changed from the King George to the George Washington.)



The mystery Ryan leaves just in front of us... Maybe the pilot is one of those San Bushmen? Can't see them anyway.



George is quite an important little town in Western Cape Province, but does not have a harbour; there's no major port between Cape Town and P. Elizabeth. We will cross the Outeniekwaberge range (just high hills, not really mountains) and go to Oudtshoorn to the NW of the Little Karoo plateau.



As you can see, the Dak can easily take that Outeniekwaberge in its stride:



And we soon came to Oudtshoorn, ostrich-farming capital of the world!



Nice corrugated iron buildings there and retro advertising posters which make this '60s scenery so cool. It will be round here that the Ladybird kids saw big funny birds in the earlier illustration from their book. The ostrich farmers must have made a fortune in Edwardian days when no lady's hat was complete without a few of their tail feathers, but the meat isn't brilliant.
 
"The ostrich farmers must have made a fortune in Edwardian days when no lady's hat was complete without a few of their tail feathers, but the meat isn't brilliant."

When I worked in Harrods, back in the 1980s, ostrich feather boas were still highly saleable items. Oh, and pan-fried ostrich in a creamy mushroom sauce is not to be sniffed at imo. ;-)

Loving this 'voyage' Ralf, utterly fascinating.
 
Did anybody ever come in and buy an ostrich feather boa AND a pan-fried ostrich in creamy mushroom sauce both at the same time? If they did, then they either LOVED, or HATED, the big bird. Anyway, I have eaten it at one of those London restaurants that did exotic meats like kangaroo and crocodile. Didn't think it was brilliant. Willy told me that his brother-in-law once had an emu which they cooked for Thanksgiving, and that was a bit tough too...

Meanwhile, back in South Africa '61, we board SA345 for the evening flight from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town:



We don't have to stick to the coast any more, but will fly due west, crossing Western Cape and the Little Karoo plateau. We'll fly quite close to Oudtshoorn (in the NE of the little Karoo, not NW as mistakenly posted above).



Nearly 5.30, time to move to our slot:



Incidentally, the airport was named after Dr D.F. Malan, first Nationalist Party Prime Minister (1948). Compared with Verwoerd he was relatively liberal. Not to be confused with A.G. 'Sailor' Malan, the South African Battle of Britain Ace who was briefly involved in politics with his War Veterans' Torch Commando which did point out that black veterans deserved as much credit for helping to win WW2 as the whites had done, though most Afrikaners ignored that fact.

We get clearance...



...and the old Skymaster hauls itself* up into the darkness with those four Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp radials:



A last look at the bright lights of Port Elizabeth:



And this shows how we exited FAPE:



*I was going to put 'herself', but then it would have to be a Skymistress, wouldn't it?
 
And for those who like ostrich feather boas, here's Heidi Klum with one:



She is obviously her enjoying chips dipped in ketchup (which doesn't say much for the catering at the Golden Globes). However, she's quite a MILF and we'll just have to pretend they had pan-fried ostrich in mushroom sauce for the second course...
 
"Anyway, I have eaten it at one of those London restaurants that did exotic meats like kangaroo and crocodile."

Ha, I'm obviously a better cook than the chef at that restaurant then! ;-)

Personally not keen on kangaroo, too gamey even for me, but crocodile is ok.
 
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