JOHN BOYD LYLE
Dad was born to CHARLES GORDON LYLE and FLORENCE JANE LYLE (nee SEABROOK) on 31 July 1906 in Bloemfontein. John Boyd Lyle was Baptised in the Bloemfontein Presbyterian Church but he was better known as JACK throughout his life.
We have no record of where he started school but I have a recollection of him speaking about Swakopmund in South West Africa (Namibia) with considerable affection. His father was an accountant with the South African Railways and might well have been in their employ when Dad was born. It is probable that they were sent to Windhoek and that Swakopmund was where they spent holidays. That the family did live in SWA was evidenced by an old kitchen table which we used for years, which had belonged to the Kaiser’s Government of the time. The table had the letters KDEV etched on one side which Dad said indicated its origin. A school bench and a steel, slatted chair which the Clarks had restored came from the same source and are in Pat’s daughter Heather’s home.
Dad used to joke that he was a St Michael’s “Old Girl” and we believe that he spent perhaps Sub A and Sub B at this girls’ school in Bloemfontein. The first school which Dad talked about to me in any detail was Jeppe Boys High. He seems to have been in Oribi House which was a hostel there but where his parents lived at the time is not clear. (He was confirmed in the Anglican Church of St John, Belgravia on 4 November 1923) It’s also not known which standards he completed at Jeppe but it is reasonable to suppose he got to Standard 8 there because his testimonial from his last school, Grey College in Bloemfontein dated November 1925 indicates that he spent Standards 9 & 10 at Grey. His 1925 Matriculation Certificate shows a Third Class pass (English: B, Latin: C, Afrikaans: E, Mathematics: D, History: E, Chemistry: E). Pat and I will testify to the fact that Dad spoke Afrikaans with a very poor accent so it’s ironic that he should end up in a job which called upon him to speak no language other than Afrikaans.
At school with him at Grey was Bram Fisher, anti-apartheid activist and lawyer. He would
also talk about Joel Mervis and his zany sense of humour. A teacher once asked the class to look out for a length of exhaust pipe which had broken off his motorbike, somewhere on the way to school. Mervis went out and bought a length of stovepipe and parked it on the teacher’s desk, asking whether it was the pipe the teacher had sought.
Dad was always keen on all types of sport so one can be certain that he played some sport at Jeppe. It’s a guess but with his weak eyes, he probably did not play rugby which leaves soccer and hockey. He must have played cricket as well. After school he took up golf and indications are that he was good at the game. I know he was a fine swimmer and played tennis as well. He used to brag about his “topspin service” which would “kick” and be difficult to return.
Certificates of service and testimonials show that Dad worked for a company known as Golden Valley Fruits Ltd. There is no record of when he began there – presumably sometime in 1926 or 1927, after finishing his education, because a testimonial from the firm states that he worked for them for five years and he left their service in January 1932. Golden Valley Fruits had large deciduous fruit orchards and Dad was in charge of labourers tasked with pruning and generally managing the fruit trees. He could prune and graft fruit trees expertly when he had his own trees in his garden and his hands stayed immensely strong right up until he died. The teams were Xhosa speakers as is (amusingly) evidenced by his dictionary in my possession titled ENGLISH – KAFIR DICTIONARY. The word forbidden today obviously was more respectable then and was a synonym for Xhosa. Dad seems to have been happy there and he often spoke about going to dances. The Golden Valley Hotel (At which I have stayed) has been there since those early days and this may well have been where Dad “hung out”. Dad always talked about a well known figure from World War 2, Adolf “Sailor” Malan who worked with him on the farm. I have no reason to doubt Dad’s word but I can find no record of this period in Malan’s biography so it’s possible I have the wrong man and that Dad talked about someone else – possibly a relative of Malan. Given Malan’s war record, he must have been a formidable man. His father was a farmer at any rate and might well have been the person who worked with Dad.
Dad probably left Golden Valley in early 1932 and I think this was when he undertook the “hike” from the Valley to Bloemfontein via Hogsback Sanitorium where he spent some time. He really loved Hogsback and often spoke about his hike when I was a little fellow. After Dad died, I took Mom to Hogsback to show her the “Eden” he so often spoke of most approvingly. When I was feverish in bed with whooping cough as a little chap, Dad told me stories about Hogsback and Katberg Pass, to comfort me. I recall how he described horsedrawn Cape carts with huge hoods, being blown clean off the pass during inclement weather. I still have a vivid mental picture of one of those carts sailing off into the sky with the horses dangling forlornly below. Dad took a lift somewhere on the road back home to Bloem but he generally walked the rest and slept in his greatcoat, next to the road at night. He told how, when he was pretty exhausted and nearing home, he had just about run out of provisions but managed to brew a last mug of coffee. I seem to recall that he still shared what little he had left with another chap, also out on the road.
That epic walk was something I wanted very badly to reprise, when I was a youngster. I hung onto that old rucksack for years with the intention of copying Dad’s achievement as closely as possible, by doing the walk exactly the same in every detail. Sadly I never did and never will.
Dad’s father died in Bloemfontein in 1935. I presume Dad found work with the Free State Roads Department in around 1932. I don’t know where he started and in what capacity but it is likely to have been at Heilbron. Dad played golf in those years and his best golfing buddy was one Dr Abie Papert. I asked after this doctor when I audited at Heilbron years ago and he was still alive but retired. As far as I know, Abie was Jewish which is a little puzzling as Dad held quite strong anti-Semitic views in his later years! Dad probably moved to Ladybrand as Road Inspector from Heilbron in 1935, when his father died. The family seems to have moved to a large sandstone house named Cheerio en bloc (Including Granny Lyle, Dad’s siblings Charles Lyle, Bill Lyle and Betty Lyle) in Ladybrand. The house still stands today. Dad used to talk about climbing a tall tree in the garden in order to string an aerial for his shortwave radio, to pick up the BBC from Daventry. I have no idea what he could pick up but he liked Gilbert & Sullivan’s operettas and owned a set of 78’s of their music which he would play on an old wind-up HMV gramophone. As far as I know the radio was a Traveler and Pat’s daughter Heather has the radio which still works. (See picture)
By now, Dad was a keen golfer and he did very well at the game. They had a tournament at the Ladybrand Golf Club once, to which Bobby Locke was invited and Dad actually played with Bobby. He kept his golf card for years as it had been signed by Locke and sometime in the sixties he donated the card, which was displayed on the club notice board, to the club. When he left in August 1940 to join up, the Ladybrand Golf Club wrote him a letter thanking him for the hard work he had done in the interests of the club and attached a token of appreciation.
Records show that he assumed full time Army service on 16 August 1940. He often told how he had obtained a copy of the eye-chart which was in use when determining if recruits were medically fit for service. He actually memorized the chart and passed the eye test, even though he was so short sighted, he could not distinguish detail on it. There’s no record of where his training took place but I recall he sometimes used to talk about Zonderwater. I do know this was a POW camp during the war but it might also have been a transit camp for troops moving up to North Africa. Dad was a truck driver in SAR MT and drove his 3 ton truck through East Africa to Egypt – an astonishingly long journey, over poor, if any roads. He passed through what used to be Italian territory, such as Ethiopia and Somaliland and I remember him talking about Addis Ababa and admiringly about the wonderful roads the Italians had built in these territories.
Dad did not tell much about that marathon trip. He once told of the unit receiving tins of crab in their rations and everyone developing the trots after eating the crab. Everyone that is, except Dad. He had doused his share with his ever present vinegar and developed no tummy troubles. He went round and collected all the unopened tins of crab which no-one else wanted and when everyone else had to make do with their boring bully beef, Dad dined luxuriously on his crab …… and vinegar of course.
When Dad eventually reached Cairo, he used a spell of leave to visit the Holy Land and got to see places like Bethlehem, the Dead Sea and the Garden of Gethsemene. He brought back a pair of olive leaves from the Garden but it is not known what happened to them – I have a faint recollection of seeing the leaves once, possibly in a leather bound Bible which his
brother Charles had given him and which I still have.
He also visited the Pyramids and here is a picture of him and another soldier with the pyramids hulking huge in the background.
Dad was in the thick of all the troubles at Tobruk where so many South African troops were taken prisoner and sent off to POW camps in Europe. Among these unfortunates was his brother Charles who was marched to a POW camp somewhere in Italy. Dad and his brother Bill got away by the skin of their teeth in a precipitous flight away from Tobruk, all the while being strafed by marauding Nazi Stukas. Dad used to speak about “The Gallop” which I have assumed was their flight from Tobruk in order to escape the clutches of the Nazis.
He sometimes spoke of that hair-raising flight. He had accumulated his rum ration but on this occasion he decided to down it all and was in a merry but foolhardy mood to the extent that he was “catching the Stuka bombs and throwing them back up at the planes”. He also fell into a barbed wire entanglement at some stage and had to be cut out of it. He was scratched to ribbons but never felt a thing.
At some stage Dad landed in hospital somewhere in Egypt, with what I think was sandfly fever. I got the impression he spent some time in hospital but it may be that he had some other illness because sandfly fever does not seem to last long.
I have no record of exactly when and how he came home to South Africa but a reasonable assumption would be that he returned in late 1944 because P.O.W. Camp Orders from January 1945 show Sgt J.B. Lyle as being the orderly sergeant for the day. One presumes he was shipped down the East Coast, as most of the troops were after the War. He was posted to the P.O.W. Camp at Kroonstad, where Italian prisoners were kept and achieved the rank of Staff Sergeant, before returning to civilian life. In February 1944 Miss G.M. von Schlicht joined the Women’s Auxiliary Army Services in Bloemfontein and was apparently posted as typist to the Kroonstad P.O.W. Camp. Her rank was shown as Corporal and a copy of a letter authorizing the Paymaster to pay her mother half her basic monthly pay, is on file. She was assigned to the office in which Dad worked and he fell for her, hook line and sinker. He sometimes spoke jokingly of standing behind the Corporal’s chair while she was typing and feeling an overwhelming urge to gently stroke her hair. Dad wasted no time in courting the young lady and come 24 February 1945, they were married in St Margaret’s Anglican Church
in Bloemfontein. Mom looked very smart in a uniform made for her by an Italian P.O.W. She resigned from the Army in May 1945 and discharge papers indicate that they were staying at the Victoria Hotel in Kroonstad at the time. The hotel no longer exists. The happy couple had their honeymoon in Gordon’s Bay and I was born in Kroonstad in December 1945. If I wasn’t a honeymoon baby, I must have been jolly close to being one!
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