like the school principal, the magistrate and the minister of the local congregation. Sundays were strictly Calvinist in Graaff-Reinet, a town very much under the influence of the Murrays, who like other austere Scottish church fathers had become ministers of the South African DRC. Children had to attend church and Sunday school, sport on Sunday was considered sinful and even sewing was forbidden on the sabbath lest the needle pierce God’s watchful eye. John Rupert never went to church, but his wife Hester took the children while he went mountaineering. Although she did not flaunt her religion, she was devout. And whatever his religious convictions, her husband’s values were staunchly Calvinist: an ethos of hard work, integrity and sobriety governed Anton’s upbringing and indelibly stamped his character. So rigorous was John Rupert’s moral code that he never defended an accused who had confessed his or her guilt to him. Yet the absence of rigid orthodoxy on the part of his parents left the eldest son with a lasting distaste for niggling rules and regulations that curb innovativeness and individuality.
Boetie Rupert started school in 1923 at the age of six. Although there was no school uniform, the children had to wear shoes. On his first day at school Boetie was pushing his baby brother’s pram and ended up in a water furrow. His brand-new shoes and outfit were drenched and he had to go home to change into old clothes and shoes before venturing out on his school career. Boetie completed substandards A and B in one year. He was left-handed but, counter to the common practice in those days, he was not forced to write with his right hand. For that he could thank Dr Karl Bremer, their family doctor, who had recently qualified abroad and brought home some enlightened ideas. He lived across the road from the Ruperts and his daughter Elizabeth (Van der Merwe, a writer of children’s books) was a classmate and close friend of Boetie.
Initially his scholastic performance was mediocre: in Sub B he came ninth in his class. Then a rebuke by his teacher in front of the whole class shamed him into excelling. Soon he was top of his class, to the chagrin of Elizabeth Bremer, his inveterate rival. She remained at the Volkskool till they were in Standard 7; then her father became a member of parliament − later Minister of Health − and the Bremers moved to Cape Town.
Hester Rupert was much loved by the young, who shared many childhood joys and sorrows with her. She read books with Boetie, a voracious reader in his own right. Apart from the family’s collection of children’s books, he scoured the well-equipped town library for newspapers and magazines like Scientific American and Illustrated London News, besides any book that captured his lively curiosity. At night his mother sat up with him while he read and studied and brought him a hot drink at bedtime.
With his father he went for long walks across the veld, sometimes to the Valley of Desolation (the Ruperts called it the ‘mountain cathedral’). He loved this wide, arid landscape, so ancient a dinosaur footprint would cause no surprise, and considers it ‘an absolute privilege’ to have grown up in the Karoo. According to Anton Rupert’s brother Koos, their father preferred mountain climbing to going to church – in a poem he had written about the Valley of Desolation, he described it as ‘the church where I want to pray’. Years later Anton Rupert pointed out in a newspaper interview that many of the great faiths came from the desert − Moses, Jesus and Mohammed had all been desert dwellers. ‘That is where you get seven-year droughts, where the starry night skies make you aware of your puniness, and where you are forced to think.’ By contrast, he quipped, Karl Marx found the inspiration for the communists’ bible, Das Kapital, in the vaults of the British Museum.7
The young Anton spent time at his father’s office, learning about the legal profession. John Rupert impressed on him the importance of meticulous attention to detail, a virtue that Anton was to inculcate in his own children and employees in later life. He also taught him to be wary of praise: ‘Today they shout hosanna, tomorrow they crucify you.’ A compliment, he added, entailed responsibility: you had to live up to it. Among the values John Rupert imparted to his son was the importance of honesty and being true to one’s word.
Boetie Rupert’s introduction to radio was a crystal set broadcasting the 1929 election results. What impressed the twelve-year-old Boetie no less than the second victory of his hero Hertzog was the novelty of radio waves. He and a friend decided to build their own crystal radio. For an aerial they chose a length of galvanised wire, which they wanted to fasten to the roof of the house. While they were on the roof the aerial dropped onto the power lines, causing a short circuit that left the neighbourhood without power for hours. His father was furious.
It was at about the same time that Boetie and his friend Elizabeth stood watching a municipal vehicle procession one day when they saw a billboard advertising cigarettes. In what could have been a prophetic moment, the young Rupert told Elizabeth South Africa should not be importing such cigarettes: ‘We should be making them ourselves.’ He was expressing a sentiment that had been gaining ground among Afrikaners for quite some time. Already in 1880 Di Afrikaanse Patriot had referred to ‘foreign fortune seekers who are completely in control of commerce in our country’.8
In the late 1920s Japie Heese founded the Voortrekker movement for youths at the Hoër Volkskool. Boetie joined and wore the little green badge in his buttonhole. In 1931 it became a countrywide movement, an Afrikaans counterweight to Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts. Boetie did not excel at sports, although he enjoyed a friendly game of tennis or rugby. Later in life when a journalist from the American magazine Fortune asked Rupert what his favourite forms of exercise were, he remarked: ‘I do mental gymnastics and I jump to conclusions!’
As a child he often played ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with the other boys. On one occasion one of the town’s pranksters, Robey Leibbrandt, was involved. Leibbrandt, the Olympic boxer and Nazi sympathiser who would receive a death sentence for treason during the Second World War, had been born in 1913 and as a teenager went to school in Graaff-Reinet. His father, a Boer combatant described by Smuts as one of his bravest men when clemency was granted to Robey in 1948, was stationed at Graaff-Reinet as an officer in the permanent force from 1914 to 1924. One day during a game Robey and his brothers hanged the son of the school principal with a rope from a tree. Fortunately, his toes were touching the ground and some older men cut the rope to release him. The much younger Boetie, who had just started school, witnessed the incident.
In 1928 the school magazine included an essay by the twelve-year-old Boetie that gave an indication of his later interest in wildlife. Describing a visit to the Pretoria Zoo, he wrote: ‘The first thing which attracted my attention was the gorgeously coloured speaking-parrots. Then I came to the cage of the gorilla – a mighty big and strong animal. After a few minutes walking I came to the monkey cage from where I walked to the hippopotamus, a very large animal with the largest mouth I have ever seen.’ He concluded: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed this well-spent and interesting afternoon.’
When Boetie was in Standard 6 he went on what was meant to be a one-day visit to his uncle Fred Knoetze, a printer at Somerset East who published the local newspaper. The driver who had given him a lift there forgot to pick him up and he spent a whole week with his uncle, who showed him everything at the printing works. ‘The whole printing process, the type faces, the colour samples absolutely fascinated me,’ he related later. This early interest in printing, colour and form would culminate in the scrupulous attention that Rupert as a master of marketing would give to each new product in the tobacco and liquor trade.
In Standard 8 he obtained four distinctions and was among the ten top students in the Cape Junior Certificate examination. In 1933, his final year at school, he was one of a class of 35, some of whom had started school in 1922, the year the Volkskool was founded, and had completed their entire school career there. At a reunion of eighteen of the surviving members of that class 50 years later Anton Rupert − by then an honorary citizen of Graaff-Reinet − on behalf of the three Rupert brothers presented the school with a Bill Davis sculpture entitled His Hands, inspired by a poem by the Afrikaans poet WEG Louw.
Anton matriculated in 1933 with three distinctions, for English (lower grade), Chemistry and Physics, and a remarkable 92% for Mathematics. His marks for Afrikaans (higher grade), Latin and History were slightly lower, but he averaged 78,9% and won a £10 prize for the best matriculant at Graaff-Reinet. By then he was finding schoolwork boring and was glad to put it behind him. He had just turned seventeen and was planning to study medicine.
That