One of the earliest memories of someone standing on a surfboard in South Africa was unearthed in the early 2000s. Cape Town surfer Ross Lindsay was in Zimbabwe visiting his wife’s great aunt, Heather Price, who was almost 100 years old. The old lady’s face lit up when he mentioned that he was a surfer.
She hauled out photographs taken at Muizenberg during the First World War. The pictures showed her surfing with American marines, who had brought their boards with them on US Navy ships stopping off in Cape Town.
There may be other sepia snaps, dog-eared and musty, buried beneath old papers in attics somewhere, but this is the first known experience of surfing in South Africa. The first contact with surfing came, aptly, over the sea. Wherever ships came to port, the seeds of surfing were sown. At first, surfing was a flirtation with novelty, usually on borrowed boards borne by sailors and passengers disembarking from those old steamers.
The first stirrings of surfing as a regular activity – apart from perhaps one or two lucky recipients of surfboards given to them as gifts – began in the early 1930s. Surfing was restricted to lifeguards – mostly in Durban – riding their heavy 16-foot wooden paddle boards on the way back to the beach.
At the time, surfers were beach sportsmen – lifesavers, divers or spear fishermen. Surf boards were copied from designs that came from overseas, many from Australia.
After World War II, Durbanite Fred Crocker built a light timber-frame paddle boat covered with canvas and impregnated with aeroplane dope. The invention had paddles literally tied to the nose. Many people caught their first wave on a Crocker Ski, the rider standing, holding and leaning back on the rope and digging a paddle into the ocean on either side of the board to angle right or left to ‘catch a broadie’ when the waves were ‘play’. And if they wiped out, they 'took gas', but if they caught a good one, it was a 'pearler'.
Beach culture began to flourish in Durban from about 1947. Guys like Ernie Tomson and Brian van Biljon were part of the original crew at South Beach. They were the ‘older guys’ among the younger batch of locals.
The ‘youngsters’ of the day included Cliff Honeysett, George Bell, Wendy Hall, Bruce Giles, Derek and Leith Jardine, Raymond and Anthony Heard, ‘Chookie’ and Vera Salzman, Jean Baxter, Harry Bold and Shorty Bronkhorst. Margaret Smith was South Africa’s first female surfing champion.
‘Some women of my early surf years, like Vera Salzman, could handle a “gun”,’ says Anthony Heard. ‘Wendy Hall would ride two-up with adept, angular surfer Bruce Giles – and even stand on her head while white water foamed all around. This – done without leash or skeg or shark nets – is courage.’
There were no shark nets in those days, and encounters were frequent, with several surfers losing their lives to Zambezi sharks. Heard recalls that they used to take a couple of small rocks in their pockets, which would be knocked against each other underwater to scare sharks away.
Jardine remembers his first wave as though it was yesterday.
It was in 1948 and he was riding a board borrowed from Tomson. In 1951, the South Beach crew founded the South Beach Surfboard Club, which was the first official surfing club in South Africa.
Meanwhile, the surfing lifestyle was starting to stir in Cape Town. By 1954, perlemoen and crayfish diver John Whitmore, in his early twenties, had built the first foam surfboard from designs he saw in an imported Findiver magazine. Surfing magazines were rare, if any existed at all, because the craft used by surfers were still being used as tools to pursue other hobbies, such as diving or fishing.
Carving up a block of newly invented polystyrene foam, he covered the board with muslin soaked in Cascamite glue and sealed it with PVA to stop the coating of polyester resin from eating the foam.
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