The 70's - Remember "Springbok Radio"

Sixteen men on a dead man's ship ... words from McCulley Workshops' best hit "The Buccaneer" - listening to Springbok Radio in the 70's, we were all very proud of South African music and it would be played over and over that most of the time you never even new that other music existed.

On Friday night round midnight David Gresham would do the Top 40 and we would all try and stay awake for it to find out who would be the Number 1 this week, but inevitabally we would fall asleep and have to wait until Saturday afternoon for a repeat of the show.

We had no TV in the early seventies so the radio was our only source of intertainment, and especially in winter when the only warm place in our cold house was between the sheets. The radio would be on just loud enough for us to hear it without mom & dad being able to hear it, else they would come and turn it off.

I remember also listening to the horror stories on "the destined hour" and having nightmares for weeks afterwards, especially the story of the little girl who picked a flower off someones grave and woke up the next day with scratch marks on her cheek. Then there was the story of the little girl who's stepmother hated her and let her play in an old fridge, the poor little girl eventually suffocated inside the fridge, but the kids toys got revenge, they found the stepmother strangled and the only fingerprints were those of the gollywog.


The week-ends had the best radio programms especially Friday and Sunday nights, Friday we had "Squad Cars" - " They prowl the empty street at night, waiting in fast cars ..."
Then Sunday nights would be "The men, from the ministry", "Father dear Father", "The Navy Lark" and "Test the team" oh yes and how could we forget Saturday afternoons with "forces favourites" with all our messages for the boys on the border.

Do you remember Tuesday nights, "consider your verdict" and how can we forget the afternoon programmes "The chappie chipmunk club" and "Jet Jungle", I can see all the characters of these shows in my minds eye, but now that Television is around you wonder what they would have looked like had they been Television shows and not Radio shows?

The Gangs of Jo'burg ... 70's and 80's

When I often tell people about the "gangs" we had while growing up in the South of Jo'burg they look at me in utter disbelief, so it's only if you were around at the time in the area would you be able to relate to this.

Yet to this day there are gangs ... the gangs we grew up with at school had the following names:

There was the "La Rochelle United" who as their name suggests hailed from La Rochelle, South of Johannesburg - La Rochelle was mainly inhabited by Portuguese and Spanish speaking people, and in the mid 70's when Mozambique was at war, a lot of Portuguese speaking people from there made their way to South Africa as refugee's some to be taken in by relatives in the poorer suburbs south of Johannesburg. Although I could never understand why these people were always seen as the poorer class, especially looking back now they always ate, prawns, lobster and really nice stuff that us middle class families could never afford.




Well the La Rochelle United gang mainly attended "Forest High" school in Forest Hill, now there were 2 rival government English speaking schools in close proximity to one another, Hill High and Forest High, depending where you lived you were sent to either of these school. I remember at one stage if you drove down Verona street in Rosettenville and got to High street in the dip, all the kids that lived on the right hand side of the street and up went to Hill High and all the kids who lived on the left and up towards Towerby went to Forest High.
But it really was just a mixture. Because we were rival schools and Hill High was in a better area, we were always thought to be the better school, besides The Hill had churned out well known sportsman, doctors and even politicians.
Okay so back to the Gangs, majority of La Rochelle united attend Forest and spoke Portuguese, The Hill had the "Cockney Rebels" which was started up (I think) by the Falconer brothers. Majority of the cockney rebels would have either been born in Britain or descendants of British.
While trying to see if there was anything on the Internet about the Gangs that I am mentioning her in my blog, I came across an article and found this section very interesting, and very true of the gangs in our days especially the La Rochelle united:

"Look at the gangs in America during prohibition in the 1920s. Most of them were either Italian or Irish gangs and practically all their members were devout Catholics," Mr Wicker says.
"They would go to Mass every Sunday and they gave thousands of dollars to the Church. Yet they would think nothing of murdering rival gang members.
Al Capone even wiped out a rival gang on the feast day of St Valentine."

While these gangs may have been brutal, they still had their own twisted sense of morals. "They wouldn’t shoot someone coming out of Church and Church property was always considered holy ground.
They would even send flowers to the funeral of a rival gang member that they had murdered. Church life and gang life were two separate entities," says Mr Wicker.

As one Irish gang leader put it: "I don’t sell moonshine (alcohol) in Church, and the father doesn’t hold Communion at my speakeasy (illegal nightclub)."Even though these gangs were vicious, they still had respect for the Church and members of the clergy.

While most of the time we only heard about the Gang fights and never saw any violence there were the occasions where it happened on our doorstep. There was the time that Hill High were playing Forest High in a rugby match at Hill, the La Rochelle united arrived brandishing knives, guns and any other weapon they could find, however, the principal had been forewarned and invited the Police. The gang members out numbered the police, but not wanting to be thrown in jail and have their parents come and bail them out, most of the gang members dispersed quite quickly. So the only gang warfare that happened that day was down on the rugby field.
There were other gangs as well, but none that really impacted our school life like the Cockney Rebels and the La Rochelle united, they were:
The Lebs - (A group of Lebanese immigrants), The Greeks, The Italians, The South Hill Gang (consisted mainly of Big Afrikaans speaking guys who all played rugby). But in those days if you professed to know anyone who was part of a gang, you were left alone and people wouldn't pick on you.

Our House ...

This is the house I grew up in, Michael Street in Linmeyer - by the way it looked nothing like this when I was growing up.

There were no high walls, no big gates and the centre feature and satelite dish were not there.


Welived here from 1964, my mother sold the house in 1998 which would have been a total of 34 years that she lived there.

Jo'burg in Pictures