Harry James Barker

Dad, just Harry to most colleagues, friends and family, lived his life by his own rules. For those close to him he made it quite clear that he expected us to be part of them as “they were for our own good”.

One rule that was most fundamental to everything that drove him through his long and often troubled life was honesty, not in just an individual sense but one that was total, intellectually, physically and morally. It was this rule that brought him to South Africa to escape the social injustices of the post 1st World War, class-bound England. (Herein is an irony in itself). It was the same honesty that drove a man with three degrees to enlist as a foot-soldier and to go up north to fight for a cause he deeply identified with in 1939. It was the same honesty that broke up his first law firm and that eventually drove him to early retirement before his renaissance with Bowens and eventually Webber Wentzel. It was this honesty that brought him the greatest of respect in business and social life and above-all at home.

It was his open and ruthless honesty that made me and I am sure, William aware of the injustices of the political and social system in which grew up and had me most often standing alone in political and social debates at school, university and throughout my life.

My Dad was a giant among men, yet he was never ostentatious, frequently self deprecating and chronically lacking in self confidence. Yet with these failings he drove himself to achieve the perfect result in all he attempted. He scaled high peaks, drafted legal documents of great beauty and clarity, published books, wrote countless poems and songs. He gave to all around him a feeling of confidence and reliability. Dad, Harry, was always there to give advice, always well founded, concise and logical, but often hard to take! It was his honesty about the quality of his life that drove him to undertake this last act of desperation and undergo an operation which had almost no chance of success.

Finally one other rule which has stuck in my mind all my life was “leave while you are still enjoying yourself”.

This he did on August the 17th 2006.

We are here today to bear witness to this special person and unusual life, to a one who made the world just a little better place for 99 years. I will miss him greatly but will grow in strength from having known him as a father, mentor and friend for 61 years, an honour given to very few sons.

Harry is dead, long live Harry!!

Oliver Barker, 6th September 2006

Harry with baby Jillian, early 1933.

For the next 74 years, that date never went uncelebrated. Many of the books you gave me as a child still have space on my bookshelves: a magnificent edition of Peter Pan; Alice in Wonderland and the Water Babies; The Odyssey, The Iliad, and Legends of Greece and Rome. In later years, your letters reflected the all-embracing perspectives of a Renaissance man. Allusions to French writers and poets, German philosophers, Roman sages, the Bible rubbed elbows with commentary on politics, the law, mountaineering, gardening, family news—plums in the pudding of life for me, Jack Horner-like, to delightedly, or thoughtfully, examine on my thumb. You set an epistolary standard that the advent of email has rendered all but extinct. Who, these days, would (or could) decline in such eloquent terms an invitation to visit?

“You remember the Roman Governor in the Acts of the Apostles? If you don’t, his name was Felix—a happy name—and he tried St Paul when the Jews accused Paul, and left him in prison till he was brought before Agrippa, who, having listened to Paul, exclaimed, ‘Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.’ Well, this is all to introduce my next remark: ‘Almost thou persuadest me to travel to America.’”

I did not remember Felix or Agrippa, but then you always credited me with a depth of knowledge I could seldom live up to. And, sadly, I never had an opportunity to share with you our country of adoption. You would have reveled in New England’s rugged coastline and fall colors, but would have had to travel 3,000 miles to the Rockies to find mountains worthy of your climbing skills.

From your earliest years you were a climber. Despite a childhood of penury and deprivation, you were somehow aware of heights of the mind, and you thirsted to scale them. I see that sensitive six-year-old, torn without warning from home and family, and my heart weeps in incomprehension. And yet, in the loveless and often vicious environment of Redhill Orphanage, you developed the courage and determination that were to serve you so well. Thanks to one man who recognized your potential, you found a precarious foothold on those heights. From then on, you clawed your way up, negotiating chasms of despair, thorny outcrops of ill-health, and treacherous screes of love-sickness, learning the obligatory Latin in two months and obtaining a London University BA with honors. You were on your way.

But all this was long before I knew you. Memories of early visits to Doveton Road are of Margot’s sunny presence, my cousins’ lively company, the serenely colorful garden, with Sellina’s welcoming smile and Schatzi’s bustling little persona rounding out the picture. Later, the gentle and gracious Meg was there to greet us, with Brutus as backup host, and I could look forward to discussions with you about Cezanne or English history or South African politics, or just this and that. On our most recent visits, the latest only last year, we were thankful for Barbra’s cheerful and solicitous concern for your welfare.

2005 at Doveton Road

I also treasure recollections of my all-too-short membership of the Transvaal Mountain Club, when I met some of your friends: Fenger, Paul Houmoller, Doyle Liebenberg, Arthur Harris, and had the pleasure of singing the campfire songs you composed—some rollicking, some pensive—for which you are justly renowned in mountaineering circles. Doubtless they will echo in the kloofs of your beloved mountains for many years to come. Indeed, you mention in your Post Epilogue meeting a teenager whose mother sang your songs to her—the third generation!

I was happy to receive your Post Epilogue, which gave me insights on South African political events that I haven’t thought about for years. I marveled at the stream of letters you wrote to editors of newspapers and journals, including the Rand Daily Mail, The Star, the Financial Mail, and, your old favorite, the New Statesman. In addition to fearlessly analyzing and attacking the abuses of apartheid, you wrote eloquently and convincingly on subjects as diverse as knocking down the old Johannesburg post office, press freedom, releasing Mandela, structural changes in education, the use of language, the hazards of smoking. All this in addition to writing a landmark treatise on wills and learned articles in professional publications!

I marveled, too, at the tenacity with which you struggled against the WWII affliction that caused you so much discomfort for decades. Most of all, though, I marvel at the richness of your life, marked by the respect and affection of so many. Last week, Peter and I and our entire family gathered on the deck of a house we were renting on Cape Cod. Overlooking the tranquil beauty of Wellfleet Bay, we raised our glasses to you as an inspiration to us all, and the western sky, tinted with rose and lilac and peach, reminded me of a photograph you sent me in 1981 of daisies on the terrace of your garden, accompanied by this quotation:

“Dans les jardins de mon oncle,
Les paquerettes sont fleuries.”
(In my uncle’s garden,
The daisies are blooming.”)

May their essence accompany you in your new dimension, dear Uncle Harry, and may you find peace.

Harry Barker : A Tribute
by Piet de Wet, Webber Wentzel Bowens

I am privileged today to speak not only for myself and my wife Elaine, but also for the partners and staff of Webber Wentzel Bowens. Unfortunately, the partners and professional staff are away at an annual conference. Many of them would have liked to be here today.

I first met Harry in June 1953 when he was a partner of attorneys LeSeur De Jager & Barker. They had their offices on the 4th floor of His Majesty's Building in Commissioner Street, Johannesburg. At that time I worked for the Deputy State Attorney whose offices were also on the 4th floor. My office was adjacent to those of LeSeur De Jager & Barker. The partners and staff had to pass my office to go to the toilet, which enabled me to meet Harry and his whole staff, including a young lady whom Harry had engaged by the name of Elaine - to whom I was married in December 1995 and here she is now.

It was a coincidence that Harry and my mother were born on the same day, 10 June 1907.

In 1972 Harry joined Bowen Sessel & Goudvis which was later known as Bowens. I became more closely associated with Harry over all these years. I was a litigant and he was mainly involved in wills and deceased estates. He wrote a book on the Drafting of Wills and he also wrote articles from time to time in De Rebus, the monthly journal of the Law Society.

In 1994 Bowens amalgamated with Webber Wentzel and became Webber Wentzel Bowens. Harry, who was then aged 87 years, moved with us and continued his practice, although to a lesser degree.

Harry was truly a remarkable man. He walked upright without a walking stick. He drove his own motorcar until a few years ago. He frequently came to lunch at the office until a few years ago and later he only came in on Fridays. I sat next to him. He took part in discussions with partners and others and amazed me with his fantastic memory and widespread knowledge of events and dates and names. He was softly spoken. I never saw him angry.

He was a gentleman. I cannot remember seeing him at the office without a suit and tie. I was privileged to have been associated with him for a little over 50 years. It is with great sadness that everyone at Webber Wentzel Bowens and wives and friends who are here today have lost a great man. It is especially sad that he could not have celebrated his centenary.

Piet de Wet
Saturday, 9 September 2006

Harry James Barker : A Tribute
By William Barker

June 10 1907 – August 17 2006

In recent months, with my father, I began assembling a book of about 30 to 35 of his best poetry, spanning a period of about 80 years from when he left England, to very recent poems. They describe seminal episodes of his life: his loves, his anger, his adventures, and simple beauty. He wrote about 500 songs and poems, and those in the book, in my opinion, are the best. I have been ruthless as an editor. The book also includes pictures, scanned from his albums, and music, some of which he composed, and very short biographical notes where needed.

He was not really interested in who benefited, if anyone; I told him that far from making anything from the book, it had already cost me a lot. I have decided to donate any profits to an educational fund: The Andries Olivier Ysterkoppe Vonds, administered by Landman and Landman, attorneys in Victoria West. It is an extraordinary fund, and he would have approved. I told him about the fund, years ago. Further details will be at the back of the book. Anyone wishing to be on the mailing list, once the book is printed, should e-mail me on barkerw@absamail.co.za

On April 14, 1945, Mike Burton, a climbing companion of my father’s was killed. Burton was already a decorated soldier, and he was going to recover the body of a comrade who had been blown up by a mine, when he himself was blown up by another mine. This was weeks before peace was declared. My father wrote:

“Why mourn we the beloved? They have peace –
Peace in the merciful dark whence we are born.
Why mourn we? Tis ourselves we mourn
For loss of noble hearts, for friendship’s break,
For the long road to travel with one traveller the less.”

WHEN I was small, I used to sleep in the smallest bedroom of the house behind me, that bedroom up there, and every morning, from babyhood, I used to hear him singing. He would strop his razor on an old Rolls razor strop in a metal box. “Thwack, thwack, thwack” it would go, like a metronome beating time. He would then start his scales, “la-la-la-la la-ah la. La-la-la-la ah ah ah.” Then as he washed his face and put on his shaving cream, he would start singing. Usually his first song would be one that would take him slowly through the range of his voice: Like Gounod’s

“Even bravest heart may swell
In the moment of farewell
Loving smile of sister kind…”

And I would know that he would have had to start very low, because after that middle part
“Yet when danger to glory shall call me… ”

He would then start
“Yet the bravest heart may swell …”

and if he had not started low enough, he would have to switch into falsetto. As I lay on my bed, waking each morning, I would hear him, and try to guess what was coming next. Often, like on a record, I would almost sense what would come next. He loved that old song, words by Thomas Moore:

“Oft, in the stilly night ‘ere slumber’s chains hath bound me,
Fond mem’ry brings the light of other days around me…”

He was young, and a baritone, with a tremendous range.
He would then switch to some other song, perhaps something in German, perhaps French, perhaps some English folksong.

But the favourite songs that I used to hear him sing, the very bestest, were OUR songs. These were songs that I knew HE had “made up” himself.

I heard him sing what has become known as “The song of the Magaliesberg”

“When the moon, above the krantzes
Silvers all the veld below
And the lovely mountain breezes
Softly come and softly go…”

And the words became etched in my mind.

I also loved

The song of the Drakensberg, also known as “Epitaph”

“Champagne shall be my castle gay
Cathkin shall be my bed
The Sentinel shall be my watch
And the Monk’s Cowl clothe my head
The great Cathedral be my church
The Organ Pipes will swell
And the stormy Saddle shall carry me home
When the Monk shall toll the Bell.”

This was often a sort of triumphant finale as he went downstairs.

One morning he was singing Edmund Waller’s

“Itisnot that I loved you less
Than when before your feet I lay
Buuut to prevent the sad increase
Of hapless love, I keep away
Of hapless love I keep away.”

And I interrupted him and told him he had forgotten the tune. It went

“It IS not that I love you less, than when before…” etc

But he had rewritten the tune, to fit the meaning of the words. It was like a chanted psalm, where the switch of the tune fits the meaning of the words. He could not stand the fact that the original tune just went its way without any regard for the way the words would have been stressed if they were being said by a doleful lover:

“Itisnot-that I love you less, than when before-your feet I lay…”

His own songs were also very special at campfires in the Magaliesberg and Krantzberg and Waterberg. I don’t think I ever went on a Natal Club meet with Dad, in the Drakensberg.

But he would usually sing his new songs at Mountain Club meets in the Magaliesberg. He would be as nervous as a new actor in a performance before the campfire started. As the fire was stoked, often by Paul Houmuller who loved a big campfire, and who would heave great logs onto it, sending sparks flying into the air, and then hoik a coal out to light a delicious-smelling cheroot, mugs of sweet muscadel would be passed around from bottle to drinkers. Olly and I would help pass these mugs, and I can remember sneaking a sip of the delicious liquid on their way.

Then they would start singing: usually some song that everyone knew, with lots of choruses.

Then someone would prompt dad. “Dad’s got a new song about Labyrinth” I might say in a piping voice. Weeks before, Dad, Olly and I, with June Davies and the professor of mathematics from Pretoria University, Nico van Warmelo, had climbed Labyrinth in Cedarberg Kloof. It was a long climb, about e-grade in the old grading, with some very exposed pitches, long drops and it ended with a chimney which tunnelled through the rock, which was why it was called Labyrinth. But a feature of the climb was also an uncomfortable traverse, several hundred feet up. In this there was a bulge in the rock around your middle, so you were edging along with your feet and hands, and you lost sight of your feet completely. Professor Van Warmelo had an enormous paunch, and he belayed my father as he led the climb. My father did the traverse, and then tied himself on to belay Nico. As Nico got to the traverse, we heard his cursing. Then we heard my father roaring with laughter. What had happened was that Nico’s trousers came adrift on the traverse. They slipped down below his paunch, and ended up round his ankles.
He had to complete the traverse, because if he had stopped he would have fallen, and like so many mountaineers, he wore no underpants.

So my father’s song described the scene

“And right in the middle of that Cedarberg crag
Nico van Warmelo strikes his flag --
Displaying the biggest professorial bum
That ever you’ll see, till kingdom come

With a hey ho ho, high ho ho
Haai los broeke, Van Warmelo…”

I am not sure if it was at that campfire that someone walked over to my father, round the fire and poured a large glass of beer over him in retribution: many of his songs teased and poked fun at his fellow mountaineers. Some took about 10 minutes to sing, and were a medley of 20 or more songs, like one that described a disastrous trip to the Drakensberg, in which the pack donkeys and the mountaineers became separated, and it took days to find the donkeys. While they were hunting the donkeys, all they had to eat was the mieliepap of the young Basutho man who had the donkeys and was lost with them. It was all in the song. He was always in demand at campfires, and even we never knew when he would come up with something new, or dredge up a song that everyone else had forgotten.

As a result of this experience, when I was seven years old, I joined the church choir. I was immediately in demand as a soloist, as was Olly who joined a little later. We could sing already, we did not have to be taught. I later sang in musicals at Wits, and was always landed a part. Later, in Cape Town, I joined the Symphony Choir and the Philharmonia, and later the Cape Town Male Voice choir, singing everything from church music to great choral works and folk songs, as a tenor and bass. I acquired a vast repertoire. Olly’s musical career went off in different directions, I would not speak for him, but it was equally diverse and distinguished.

One year I drove from Cape Town to Johannesburg, to come up here to visit Dad. On the way, I had no music in the car, because with my old sound system I could hear nothing at speed. I sang to myself, all the way, probably over a period of about 10 hours.

I did not repeat myself once.

I have my father to thank for that.

Dad had his faults, and he admitted to them. He was very careful with money, coming from a childhood of poverty. He used to switch off lights incessantly: I would leave my room to go to the bathroom, and come back and find the light off. Recently I stayed with my brother, and a nephew said archly to me: “Uncle William, is it true that in Cape Town people switch off their geysers to save money?” I roared with laughter, because that is what we do – what we have been asked to do because Koeberg cannot keep pace with demand in Cape Town. I told Jess about it, and she also laughed. It has come full circle. But the funny thing is that Harry anticipated a time when power would have to be saved, when if you did not flush your lavatory with your bathwater, you might have to forego flushing. In water-short Cape Town, we also do that! Harry did not need to do it, but he thought it was the RIGHT thing to do. He lived his beliefs.

I told him this, in a recent letter, and also face to face, because he seemed to be getting so sad about his old age, and at times his life seemed meaningless to him. He wrote:

Morning joy at 93
The sun’s reveille starts my daily round.
Farting, I shuffle slippered feet along
My clock’s run down, ambition’s gone to ground,
And all I’ve ever striven for seems wrong.

My tongue has lost its power to rejoice –
Forgets the lines once chanted without care
The urge to sing has vanished from my voice
And both my sewers are beyond repair.

I hoist my breeks, forget to zip my flies,
And fish my dentures from the cleansing mug.
Donning my specs to focus failing eyes
I shove my hearing-aid into my lug.

Accoutred thus, myself I dare to show,
And forth, a whited sepulchre, I go.

This was terribly sad to me, so in several letters, and also face to face, I used to tell him what he had done for me, for us. He had taught me to read, to love reading and books, he had coached me through my own attempts at writing verse, he had predicted things that I never thought would come to pass. I told him that he had taught me to sing, to love words and to use them, and that he had taught so many people, so much.

Perhaps a fault was that he could not easily be teased. He took himself seriously. My cousin Roger once said to him: “Uncle Harry, do you still chew every mouthful 32 times?” Harry did not speak to him for six months. He had to chew his food, because his stomach gave him trouble. But he forgave Roger in the end, and loved him and wrote to him.

Dad had insight, insight because he used to speak to everyone, poor and rich, educated and simple. 44 years ago, I came home from school with the news that the ANC were all communists, that Mandela should be hanged with Oliver Tambo, etc: Propaganda taught by a Scotsman, David Patterson, a history teacher. Dad listened, and then said: “The only solution for this country would be to have a round-table conference, with everyone there: the ANC, Poqo, the PAC, the Liberals, the Nats.”
I thought my father was crazy: I was at a right-wing school, a militarist school. More than 30 years later, there came the miracle of Kempton Park, and everyone sat down, around a table.

I once knew a woman who was very close to top Nats. This woman used to boast about how she had dinner with Magnus Malan and Adrian Vlok. I boasted as well: My father listened, and then said “They are all murderous bastards …”
Kyk hoe lyk hy nou. Vlok is not even at the table. He is washing up.

Because he kept diaries all his life, one of the things Dad loved to do was to say was “I told you so” and he could pull out letters he had written to the press to show that things he said, things he was reviled for, had come to pass, and were accepted.

Dad had his faults, like all men … we ended up very close, and there was always a letter in the post. I used to write to him, because he became so deaf. I tried to phone, but as soon as the conversation strayed from “how are you?” and the weather, he did not know what was being said.

He told a story about deafness that he witnessed in the small town of Acrington Stanley, in the 1920s:

He was lodging in a small house, next door to a Mr Higginbottom, and a young man came collecting for the Acrington Stanley Patriotic and Benevolent Society. “Morning, Mr Higginbottom, would you like to donate to the AS PBS?”

“What’s that – I’m deaf”

“Would you like etc”

“Eh? The what?”

“The Acrington Stanley Patriotic and Benevolent Society!” bellowed the young man.

“Sorry, can’t hear a thing” said old Higginbottom.

The young man gave up, said good afternoon and retreated. But he struggled to close the gate.

“Mind the gate!” shouted old Higginbottom from the door.

The young man muttered. “Bogger yer gate.”

“And bogger yer Acrington Stanley Patriotic and Benevolent Society!” shouted Higginbottom.

Dad was a good man, a scholar, and a visionary. He did not believe in God, because he had had religion of the worst kind rammed down his throat, with beatings and cruelty, when he was a child. He also felt, as he told me quite recently, that he felt religion was a short cut to truth, a way of short-circuiting the huge mystery of life.

One of the last books he read was a book on cosmology, of several he read, a book by one of Stephen Hawkings’s colleagues, George Smoot, who dealt with profound discoveries of creation, and how it all began, billions of years ago. “Wrinkles in Time.” He recently read his sixth biography of Charles Dickens. Another was on the lost languages of small tribes in Europe. Biographies by the score. He never ceased to read, to think, to study and wonder, and he felt that to a large extent, belief can stunt rational thought. “If you believe, there is a danger you stop thinking”.

But this did no absolve him from morality, and a genuine desire to do good. His will, and the fact that he gave years of his life to doing free work for the Mountain Club, Lawyers for Human Rights, the Liberal Party and other democratic movements including the Race Relations Institute, the Cancer Association, is a tribute to this altruism.

My mother also used to work, several days a week, for SANTA in town and in Alexandra Township, and later in her life for the Wayfarers, a sort of black girl guides – some of a lot of charitable work she did. But this is not a tribute to my mother, who was also great, in other ways.

In 1974 he wrote Dedication: for the Wayfarers

I do not have to see
The love that follows me.
I do not have to know
How far the echo of my words will go.
I must not ask, when I have shown a light,
How far it reaches in surrounding night,
All – all that I must know and all that I must ask
Is where my duty lies and strength to do my task.

Invitation

Friends and acquaintances are invited to join the family for tea and scones from 2pm - 5pm on Saturday 9th September. Written dedications will be collated and verbal dedications will be offered from 15h00.


Address: 21 Doveton Road, Parktown West, Johannesburg.

RSVP: Please call Marguerite or leave a message at 011 487 2282

25 June 2005

May 1992