But we must not take it too seriously
Jim Bailey
In Collection
#1388
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Poet
aviator

Dennis Kiley
AS A fighter pilot in the Second World War, Jim Bailey shot down nine German planes and they shot him down twice. He survived. This was fortunate for a whole generation of black South African journalists. He not only gave them the chance to become professional writers in Drum Publications, which he jointly founded in 1951, but to fight their way into world recognition as they tracked and attacked the idiocies and outrages of apartheid.

At the age of 20 Bailey saw his friends being killed around him, wrote moving and beautiful poetry about what he saw, and carried with him for the rest of his life a consciousness that he lived to speak for those who gave their lives fighting Nazism. He expressed this in a poem, "The Graves of Airmen", written in 1970:



He might no longer have been able to weep, but he certainly did not lose the ability to laugh. The sound of uproarious laughter was often the first signal that Jim Bailey was around. It was also an excellent weapon against the grim and pompous people who ran the apartheid system.

Having jointly founded the monthly magazine Drum in 1951 and then become sole proprietor, Bailey later added the successful tabloid weekly Golden City Post, which had separate Durban and Cape Town editions. He published Drum throughout English-speaking Africa over four decades, selling over 450,000 copies a month, with an immense pass-on readership.

He urged us on, his writers black and white, to use our own peculiar abilities to sniff out the most outrageous abuses of apartheid and report them in full, trying to keep just within the law. Where possible, we made fun of the enemy as well. For example, whenever some highly placed Afrikaner official fell foul of the Immorality Act we splashed the story, and we serialised the reminiscences of an African female cook about her illegal affair with a Dutch Reformed Church minister under the running headline: "My Sin with the Dominee".

Our African reporters were multilingual - Obed Musi could speak eight languages fluently and lurk at the prison gates to get information from anybody who went in or came out. Godfrey Nyasheng passed himself off as a hospital orderly to interview the survivors of the massacre at Nxusa Hill in Xhosa territory. My own ability to speak fluent Afrikaans came in handy to interview, in the assumed capacity of an Afrikaans reporter, figures like the vast and glowering Sergeant van Rooyen, who was responsible for wrecking the homes of suspected ANC organisers in the Zeerust bushveld area, and for beatings and shootings, and then to expose him on the front page. Bailey loved these exploits and encouraged and backed us up.

Jim Bailey, son of the mining magnate Sir Abe Bailey, was more likely to be found drinking and laughing with his African, Indian and "Coloured" journalists in illegal shebeens than at any Johannesburg or Cape Town society party. His style was, to say the least, informal. Everybody who worked for him, including the cleaners, always addressed him simply as "Jim". Even when he did struggle into a suit for some formal occasion, his irreverent sense of humour went with him.

He once had to be present at a gathering in Durban where Harry Oppenheimer, the chairman of Anglo-American, was standing next to the then Prime Minister, Hendrik Verwoerd (known as the "Architect of Apartheid"). Just as Bailey was about to greet these two important people, his Durban crime reporter, an Indian known by his surname of Khan, came up and he and Bailey exchanged hearty handshakes (which must have been quite a shock for Verwoerd). Bailey then turned to the Prime Minister and said with a polite smile: "Haven't I seen your face before somewhere?"

His sense of history and indignation against the follies of politicians was acute. In one of his many books, The Poetry of a Fighter Pilot (1993), he reprints a letter dated 10 May 1937, on 10 Downing Street notepaper, from Neville Chamberlain to his father, Sir Abe Bailey. Chamberlain makes some brief comments about gold and ends the typewritten letter, "I agree that things look bad on the continent; public opinion seems to be in process of being exasperated deliberately"; and then adds in his own handwriting "but we must not take it too seriously".

Jim Bailey comments furiously in a footnote: "This fatuous sentiment was the death-warrant for nearly all my friends and some 50 million people. Small wonder that Winston Churchill described the Second World War as `the unnecessary war'."

Jim Bailey's mother, Mary (daughter of the fifth Baron Rossmore), was, as he described her,

a world-famous lady pilot of Irish descent, who in 1928-9 made record solo flights in a De Havilland Moth biplane from London to Cape Town and back. She did it, she said, to get away from prams - she had borne five children in five years - and to pioneer the subsequent air routes. It was also a time when women were showing that anything that men could do, women could do as well or better.

He went on to say:

Her navigational skills were a little sketchy, for she had no more than an ordinary housewife's knowledge of mathematics. As a result, on one occasion she force-landed in the middle of Stalin's Russia when all the peasants were being starved to death around her. So, as children we were not left in ignorance on that score either.

With his characteristic love of a good anecdote, he also reports:

Before my mother set off on her second record-breaking attempt to fly from London to Cape Town, she took me to one side when no one else was listening and said: "Jim, how do you do trigonometry?" I replied: "I don't know. I'm doing it next term."

James Richard Abe Bailey was born in 1919 in London. He was educated at Winchester College. In 1928 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He said: "I detest violence. But at the same time the only honest way to be a pacifist was to prepare for war." So he joined the Oxford Air Squadron, and was called up the day before war was declared in September 1939, to the Royal Air Force, at the age of 19. In 1944 he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Of Bailey's writing ability, Gp Capt Peter Townsend said in a note about his published poetry: "I love your laconic style which you so sensitively blend with your appreciation of the beauty - and the tragedy - of life."

One of Bailey's most interesting and controversial books is Sailing to Paradise (1994), a boldly original work of reconstructed history about seafaring civilisations, which asserts that America was discovered and developed into a world power 7,000 years before being destroyed by wars.

James Richard Abe Bailey, publisher, writer and poet: born London 23 October 1919; DFC 1944; CBE 1996; married 1958 Gillian Parker (one son; marriage dissolved 1963), 1964 Barbara Epstein (one son, one adopted son, one adopted daughter, and one son deceased); died Lanseria, South Africa 29 February 2000.

Product Details
Nationality British
First Edition Yes
Personal Details
Read It Yes
Purchase Price $50.00
User Defined
Conflict WW2
Notes
8vo. Rung bound wraps with clear blue plastic covers. pp 62. Poetry from World War Two. Signed presentation from the author: 'With warmest regards from Jim.' About fine.