JON ABBOTT IN BISHOPS COLLEGE's CLASS OF 51's RACE TO 100

 Dear Readers 

Jon

I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth which resulted in me being undernourished as a child. My dad owned Markhams, the men’s clothing business that had branches in Cape Town and Johannesburg when I was sent to Bishops. To prepare me for Big School I first went to the very fashionable Wet Pups (Western Province Prep School).

Dad had been the 1921 Bishops Rhodes Scholar, so as the eldest of three boys a lot was expected of me when I became a border in School House. Unfortunately I let the side down badly as I plugged matric. I’m now waiting for the pass mark to be reduced to 10% before trying again.

I redeemed myself slightly with some success in athletics not only at school but afterwards when I represented Western Province at the SA Junior Championships putting the shot and throwing the javelin. “All brawn and no brains,” was what masters at Bishops might have said.

          After a short time training to follow my Dad into Markhams I decided it was not for me. It was too boring measuring men for suites; asking them which side they hang and generally being subservient. My present wife Gayle is constantly reminding me that if I had stuck it out she could have been the wife of a millionaire now and not a struggle ex-journalist turned Private Eye. My old man sold out to the Foschini Group, which inexplicably changed the name to Markham (without the S) and now has close to 200 Markham outlets.

At aged 22 I spent a year criss-crossing Africa hitch-hiking alone to get to England to become a journalist. On the way I bought a dug out canoe from one of the locals and paddled 700 miles down the Congo that is reputed to be the deepest river in the world. This was by far the craziest part of my African safari because I had no life jacket and I can’t swim. If I had drowned Bishops would have been to blame for not stopping me from ducking swimming when I was there.

Kenya was being terrorised by the Mau Mau when I arrived, so to replenish my meagre finances I spent three months in the Kenya Police Reserve in charge of a Police post at 12 000 feet on snow capped Mount Kenya. That had its moments.

For instance some joker had ensured that there was an unexploded hand grenade down the long drop. It was never occupied for long that’s for sure.

My brief stay at Dr Albert Schweitzer’s hospital at Lambarene in French Equatorial Africa was a real eye opener. The sanitary arrangements for the patients and their hangers on would never have been allowed anywhere in his native France, and certainly not at a hospital. Yet it was the founding of this that was the main reason for him being awarded the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize.

I hadn’t cased the joint at all before I arrived in England. A great start for a would-be journo. The unions were very strong then and the one for journalists decreed that an apprentice started at 17. I would have had to have been paid as if I had several years experience, so papers were not rushing to employ me. Miraculously I got a job on the Melton Mowbray Times, a weekly that was so small it had missed the union’s scrutiny. The town is famous for pork pies of all things.

The paper consisted of a weedy little editor dominated by a Fleet Street veteran with long, nicotine stained finger nails, effectively running the show as the news editor with three reporters, a girl and one other chap about the same age as I was. It was a real sweat shop. The girl was in tears almost every day and after eight months I was the most experienced reporter.

I moved on to bigger weeklies and the Express and Echo, a daily in Exeter before joining two ex-Fleet Street journalists to form the Exeter News Agency.  It was a reporter eat reporter jungle in which we not only wrote for all the Fleet Street papers, like the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express etc, but also competed with their own West Country correspondents.

          I returned to South Africa to join the very conservative daily The Star in Johannesburg where I like to think I introduced investigative journalism. I won the grand sum of R70 for the best story of the year in 1971 for my tyre re-grooving expose`. From there I graduated to the Sunday Times to do investigations where I also wrote a hard hitting weekly column Business is Business for two years. Raymond Ackerman of Pick n Pay fame, the Patron of Bishops, who turned 90 in 2021, got a ticking off in one of them. We were in the same house at Bishops with him being a couple of years ahead of me.

Digging up the dirt on shysters earned me the runner up spot in the 1974 Stellenbosch Farmer’s Wineries National Award for Enterprising Journalism. In addition my muckraking resulted in two Government commissions of enquiry, a military board of inquiry and the first resale price fixing conviction several years after this was outlawed. It involved Pentax cameras sold by a subsidiary of Premier Milling.

          I left journalism to become a self employed Private Investigator specialising in life insurance. For 20 years all the major life companies like Liberty Life, Old Mutual and others that have since been taken over or gone under had me chasing all over Southern Africa, and even to India on one occasion to get to the bottom of illegitimate claims.

On a personal level I was about as successful as I was in my matric. Journalism and marriage don’t mix, was my excuse. It took me two wives before I found Gayle, who has been such a glutton for punishment that she has stuck with me now for nearly 50 years. She was also responsible for typing miles of reports and doing the admin that was the backbone of our two person PI business.  She is a St Mary’s (Joburg) Old Girl (she’ll kill me for saying that).

Sadly in addition to my parents I have survived two ex-wives, my younger brother Michael and a half brother David, who were both at Bishops, and two grown up children Simon and Samantha. These are the crosses you have to bear the older you get. My youngest brother, health crank, artist and bridge teacher Anthony is still alive and at 80 is doing his best to catch up with me. If I could have had my life over again I would have taken him to task for embarrassing me at the old school by not only passing matric, but going to university as well.

My wife Gayle who 
deserves the biggest
Long Service Medal 
of them all

Gayle and I have a daughter Belinda married to Cam. A designing woman (aren’t they all) she is a fair dinkum Sheila now with her own fashion house in Melbourne. Then there are the older ones in South Africa, pretty Mandy, a former hairdresser now living a life of luxury married to Erick, an advocate and on the go transitional coach Sally; Gayle’s daughters from her previous marriage. Sally became a Covid leper after she survived it twice, but hopefully people speak to her now. The customers fortunately didn’t know that when she was promoted to a Brand Manager at Clover Dairy she fell with her bum in the butter. She is married to paddler of note Alan Witherden, who has been a canoe judge at the Olympic Games and other international canoeing events for as long any anybody can remember. He’s an international business consultant in his spare time. And to think that we once thought he had a steady job.

 Alan, who is almost as old as I am, didn’t go to Bishops and nor did the husbands of the other two. Obviously Gayle and I were not very happy about that, but I better shut up now because to say I am outnumbered would be a gross understatement.

From the Bishops magazine

For the last 12 years I have been far from gainfully employed on my DearJon-letter Blog. Google pays peanuts and I’m the monkey. My Blog might well be sited as the other woman if I ever get divorced again. I have written posts on a wide range of subjects from congratulating the Yanks for celebrating my wife’s birthday on the 4^th of July to an investigation into how Jersey BBC radio host, Murray Norton effectively cyber bullied my 47 year old son Simon to death. This was not long after his sister Samantha, who was living in England, had jumped off a car park building a few months after the birth of her first child. There is also one on how I might have become King of England if my mother had not been so picky.

I have self published two books Dearjon Exposed, a collection of the best posts from my blog and The Butcher of Rosebank. This is a true story about Dr Wynne Lieberthal, who was possibly South Africa’s worse orthopaedic surgeon ever. It was based on information I collected during one of my PI life insurance investigations, because he was not only a terrible doctor, but a crook as well.

My wife and I now live in Cape Town near Kommetjie in an estate appropriately named Imhoff’s Gift for us blue blooded Abbott’s. It’s made particularly picturesque by flocks of flamingos on the adjoining vlei with mountains in the background.

Regards,

Jon

P.S. Fellow OD Mike Mathews’ memory is better than mine (I haven’t yet found a surgeon who does brain transplants, unfortunately). This is what he told me. “I recall your letter some years ago to the old OD magazine calling for a change in its format, design etc and have been much impressed with the new-look, biannual magazine which resulted from that letter. Well done!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

 

 

 

         

 

TWO CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY IN A MILLION

 Dear Readers and Bishops' Old Boys,

Richard Brasher

          Richard Brasher, who has just retired from Pick n Pay after eight years as CEO of this 1945 store grocery chain never ceased to amaze me.

          He doesn’t know me from Adam, yet when I sent him an email to his personal email address on a Saturday this year at 02.07 pm he replied less than half an hour later at 02.30.

          I asked him to pass on the following email to Raymond Ackerman as I did not have an email address for him. It went like this:

Dear Raymond,

Congratulations on your 90^th. I presume you are going for your century. Thanks again for the attached. It brought back good memories of somebody like you who could fit my little triumph into your busy schedule. Well done for making your 100^th – in anticipation.

Raymond Ackerman & his wife Wendy

Yvonne Cummins, who I assume is his PA, replied: “Mr Ackerman sends his sincere thanks for the birthday wishes sent to him via Richard Brasher. He really appreciates you thinking of him and he had a very special 90^th”

        

           The attached I referred to was this letter (those were the days when the postal service worked) he sent me in 1974 congratulating me on being the runner up in the Stellenbosch Farmers' Wineries' National Award for Enterprising Journalism for my series in the Business Section of the Sunday Times about crooked business. "This was a first-class effort and I think you can deserve all the congratulations you can get for your forthright reporting," Raymond wrote.

          I would never have thought that he would have been following my career like this. Alright we did go to school together at Bishops in Cape Town where we were borders in School House, but he was three years ahead of me. And that’s a life time at school. I can only assume he read about it in the paper.

          In 2017 in my role as a Consumer Watchdog on my blog I was trying to get a promised refund of R320.50 for our daughter Mandy from Aramex Couriers that has drop boxes in Pick n Pay branches, but all I got was the same run around as she was given. In desperation I sent an email to Richard asking him if he could get somebody to sort this out. The following day on the 25th working day after Mandy had been promised payment within 7-14 days I got the proof from Aramex that she had been paid.

          I then asked Richard: “Was this your magic? Just after my email to you R320.50 was paid into our daughter’s account. Thanks a lot.”

          He replied: “We are always happy to help.”

          My email to him was sent at 07.30 am and he replied at 09.39 from his iPhone the same day. How’s that for top notch service.

          After buying four stores in Cape Town trading as Pick n Pay in 1966 Raymond built them into one of Africa’s largest supermarket chains. He was Chairman until 2010 when he stepped down in favour of his son Gareth.

          I evidently didn’t pay as much attention as Raymond when I was at Bishops or I just didn't have what it takes upstairs.  

           My career was as a journalist on various papers including the Sunday Times where I did investigations and also wrote a hard hitting weekly column Business is Business for two years. My newspaper days ended when I became a self employed private eye specialising in life insurance.

          At a function at my old school to mark the 60^th anniversary of my year a former master who was organising it said to me: “I couldn’t find anything about your matric.” He had evidently researched the school records of those who attended.

          On another occasion my wife and I went to a lunch for Old Boys like me at the school and on the wall inside the building where the function took place there was a list of Bishop’s Rhodes Scholars. I had a job finding it and at one stage I said to my wife "Was my Dad making this up?"

But sure enough there it was: the 1921 Bishop's Rhodes Scholar - Cecil Willoughby Abbott, who went up to Oxford I think.

It must have been rather embarrassing for him having his first born at this very expensive school where he had done so brilliantly plug his matric. Putting the shot and throwing the javelin to provincial standards was no compensation. This might explain why I never became a millionaire like Raymond.

Regards to you all and here’s hoping you can keep Virus free,

Jon