All I can do is to piece together clues from what I heard, read, and what she herself may very well have lied to my face. It was for a short time in 1982, but I often wonder whatever happened to her? Apart from the front pages of the Sunday Times now yellowing in some discarded archive, not much is known about her. Y.MP Professor Z, they just dropped the charges. Her premises were often raided, but when the cops found themselves in the company of Judge X Mr. The truth was, in fact, she rarely appeared in court. What’s in the papers? Phyllis Peake – again.
It was titillating reading on a Sunday – there was no TV those days, avoiding going to go to church, and no fishing in the Orange Free State on a Sunday. Every time there was the usual charge against her: procuring, soliciting, running a brothel, prostitution, racketeering, whadda, whadda. She frequently appeared in the Magistrate’s Court, usually dressed somewhat unconventionally, and once, I believe, with her hair dyed green. The sleaze reporters of the Sunday newspapers (Lionel Attwell for the Sunday Times and Gordon Winter for the Sunday Express) could never have survived without her. In case you don’t know, he discovered the gold that caused Johannesburg.Įveryone knew about Phyllis Peake in the 1960s.
But she played a larger part in making Johannesburg what it is today than George Harrison. I don’t think anyone today remembers her or even cares. “I wonder what happened to Phyllis Peake?” I’m the only one who’s asked that question, and then I asked it to myself. Somewhere on the 4th or 5th floor was the flat where Muriel Alexnader lived. In numbers 31/32 of Manner Mansions was the Benedicta Bonacorsi Drama Studio, which was to play such an important place in my life. I remember McGillavry’s because the radio advertisement used “The Scottish Soldier” in the background. Sobranie, and McGillavry’s Export cigarettes. They also sold unusual cigarettes like Idlewild menthol. They sold exotic tobaccos, briar pipes, pipe stands, and those Swiss army type implements that pipe smokers used to scrape the filthy gunge from their pipes, and then band the pipe on the heel of their shoes, usually over the Persian carpet. That was a connoisseur shop, and I’m sure they never sold Peter Stuyvesant or Westminster 85. The building had a corner island shop, Smokers Corner. There were two important people in Manners Mansions. I would cheerfully have crawled on the floor and licked their shoes. It was just that I was barely 21, and I held in total awe these people who knew everything. I’m not saying they were voodoo monsters. Scary people worked at Show Service: Percy Tucker, Aubrey Louw, and Pat Bray. No computers, no Comiputickets, just manual. There I had to load them carefully into wooden racks, and check them against the seating plan, so that the cashier at the Box Office could show patrons what seats were available on the plan, and then reach behind carefully, and take the right ones out of their slots. After that, I had to drive into Show Services, collect the unsold tickets and take them back to the theatre. Show Service sold tickets until about 5 pm. I saw him often as was the stage manager at the Alexander Theatre. I don’t know who he was, or why he had this privileged position. In those days, you could smoke anything anywhere. The corner table of Cheza on the arcade seemed to be the permanent home of an elderly man with a long brownish beard, and who smoked a Meerschaum pipe. You entered Rand Central through an arcade, at the bottom of which was Show Service on the right, and the Cheza coffee bar on the left. On the one corner was International House, or Ansteys (it seemed to have two names), on the other, Manners Manners, and on the third corner (northeast) was Rand Central. It is where Jeppe (now Rahima Moosa) crosses Joubert Streets. There is an intersection in the middle of Johannesburg that was important to me.