This is not the first time this man’s name has come up in the DCO forum on Facebook. I tried to get some of the people who knew him well to respond to my request for some of the stories in which he features but the response has been disappointing so I’m going to repeat some I’ve heard as well as relate episodes to which I was witness.
Theunie was quite an extraordinary man. He wasn’t quite as mad as a hatter but he was well past the point of simple eccentricity, to be sure. I was witness to the fact that he was highly intelligent and had a prodigious memory but his behavior often veered completely away from what one might expect of a middle-aged man, into bizarre and hilarious regions. He was relieving manager on the Free Sate region’s relief staff, so many bank clerks knew him and were witness to the odd things he used to do.
I first met him in Lady Grey on a Wednesday afternoon. I was there with Tom Wiggett and Theunie was relieving as manager at the branch. We happened to pass the garage and there he was under his car which was being serviced, looking things over with the mechanic. He was very fussy about having his cars serviced and must have driven many a small town mechanic crazy by watching and commenting non-stop on what he was doing. It paid dividends because his cars were in peak condition. But there came a time when he decided he needed a new car and he wanted to trade in his old one, provided he could get a good price. Two of his fellows from relief staff, Abel van Vuuren and At Botha being aware of how unpredictable he could be, went along to watch out for him, when he took his old car for evaluation.
The salesman went over the car with a fine tooth comb and was impressed with the condition of the car. I forget the exact amounts but negotiations went like this. “Mnr Theunissen, ons is bereid om vir jou R850 aan te bied vir die motor”. Theunie responded, “WAT! Is jy laf of wat ?” Hastily the salesman upped his offer as he would surely have left himself a good margin to play with. “Mnr Theunissen, ek het weer gekyk na die kar en ek dink ons kan darem by R950 uitkom, spesiaal net vir jou en omdat die kar se toestand so puik is”. Theunie then laughed scornfully and said, “Nee man, jy ken nie jou job nie. Die kar is dit nie werd nie. Gee my R700 vir die kar want dis al wat dit werd is”. The salesman’s response was not recorded but I can imagine the man’s face at this unexpected turn of events.
One of the first stories about him that I ever heard concerned a phone call from the Free State General Manager, Cecil Barry to Theunie. Theunie was relieving at Brandfort when Barry phoned. The conversation went like this. Barry said, “Is that Theunissen?” and Theunie replied, “No, this is Brandfort” and put down the phone. The conversation was repeated with the same result. Barry got really cross and called the accountant and told him to get Theunissen to answer his phone and to stop trying to be funny. Theunie wasn’t trying to be funny – he was just being Theunie.
One of Theunie’s eccentricities was a love of trains, especially steam trains which were still plentiful in his time. The town Fauresmith, where I started my bank career, had the distinction of having the railway line run the whole way down the main street, right past the hotel, shops and banks. A train would run from Springfontein and reach Fauresmith in the early morning and then carry on to Koffiefontein where it would turn and do the return journey, passing through Fauresmith at midday and on to Springfontein. When I left Fauresmith, I actually enjoyed the novelty of travelling up that main street and waving goodbye to the hotel staff as I passed! It was just like one of those Wild West towns from the movies.
Needless to say, Theunie simply loved Fauresmith but some clients however weren’t very impressed with the guy because if he heard a train chugging up or down that main street, he would abandon whatever he was doing and go out to the pavement, so he could wave to the train crew. Unfortunately he would simply leave a customer sitting in the office, often running out in mid sentence to be on time to do his thing. It was said that the slow moving engine on one occasion actually stopped outside the bank and Theunie was called up onto the footplate by the driver. That would have blown his mind for sure, that is, if his mind wasn’t already blown of course. He travelled all the way down to the station – some 400 metres or so and I’m willing to bet they let him blow the whistle as well.
I was witness to his obsession with trains in Colesberg where Mike de Villiers and I invited him round to the pub at the Central Hotel for a beer. I was quite surprised that he had accepted and actually sat sipping a beer because I had heard that he was fairly puritanical in his outlook, but it didn’t seem to extend to an ale with friends. He rambled on and on about people he knew – he had a remarkable memory for bad borrowers and he knew the R18 (Bad debts) accounts of many a branch, off by heart. All of a sudden he put down his half full glass on the counter and without a word to either of us, walked out, got into his car and drove off. Neither of us had a clue where he had gone and in fact, WHY he had gone so we just carried on quietly sipping our beers. Half an hour later he walked in again and picked up the conversation exactly where he had left off. Mike asked him where he had been and he replied that he had been down to the station, as a passenger train was due and he wanted to see if there was anyone on it that he knew. It transpired that he would walk up and down the coaches, peering in at the windows for familiar faces.
During that same audit Mike and I were taking a walk down the main street when we encountered Theunie also out of a walk. He walked with us for a while and then excused himself, complaining of discomfort and allowed us to walk on without him. Quite a way further Mike suddenly wondered where Theunie had got to and when we looked back, there was no sign of him. We walked back a bit and suddenly we saw him lying on his back, right in the road. Thinking he’d had a heart attack, Mike hastened back to him and as he reached him, Theunie jumped up. He exclaimed that Mike should always remember that if he was feeling nauseous, he should just lie down until the feeling had passed. Might have been good advice but doing it in the town’s main street was a little ill advised.
He drove customers frantic with his antics and I heard that he had a drawer full of Dinky Toys from which he would choose a car to zoom around on the table if the client started becoming boring to his way of thinking. I heard of cases where he would, while interviewing a client put his feet up on the table and sort of peer at the client through his waggling shoes. I also heard of one town where they got together a petition to ask LHO never to send him there again. I think it was in Ladybrand, my old home town where he used to go back to his hotel at lunch time for a snooze and actually get undressed and into his pyjamas for his kip. Knowing him, he was quite capable of going back to work in his pyjamas as well!
Country towns were all still serviced by telephone exchanges back then. You cranked a handle, lifted the phone off its cradle and asked the exchange to put you through to your number. In a certain branch, the office phone and the pencil sharper were closely situated on a desk and the staff watched Theunie crank the pencil sharpener vigorously and pick up the phone. After a while he asked one of the ladies to please pop across to the nearby exchange and ask them to answer the bank’s phone, as he could not get hold of them.
Another of his oddities was his love of those childhood novelties called “lucky packets”. One of the most blatant rip-offs of all time, a packet would contain a handful of really cheap and nasty sweets plus a little plastic toy and for that a kid would shell out quite a bit of pocket money. Theunie couldn’t resist them. He would buy a whole armful of lucky packets and go and sit outside the café on the pavement with his feet in the gutter and carefully open them. Within seconds he would be surrounded by little urchins, eager to share in the bounty because they knew he was only interested in the toys and that they’d get a taste of the sweets. He’d carefully pack out the toys next to him and literally gloat over them for a while, then just scoop them all into his pocket and go back to work.
He actually got married quite late in life to a lady who must have been in the Sister Theresa class of woman, if she could put up with his oddities but it’s a fact that Theunie was a kind, harmless and God-fearing man who would never hurt a fly. I think he retired early and went to live in Colesberg. I don’t think the LHO staff people at the time knew quite what to do with him to be honest. I often saw him at the branch in Colesberg during audits, where he would come in and insist on chatting with me. Sometimes he would suddenly stop talking and look wonderingly at me and say, “So Lyle, is jy nou ‘n Inspekteur?” and I would reply, “Nee Oom Theunie, ons is nou Interne Ouditeurs en dis wat ek is”. I think that to him, I was barely out of nappies and not nearly mature enough to be an Inspector. What was the bank thinking for goodness sake ??
They made him “Koster” (Verger) at the central NG Church in Colesberg and almost immediately regretted it because he took to bell-ringing like a duck to water. He would ring the church bell on a Sunday until dogs began to howl and chickens stopped laying. Parishioners and general public alike complained bitterly and he had to be asked to time himself and preferably keep it short and sweet.
I have barely scratched the surface where he is concerned and I’m sure this essay can be added to.
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