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Keeper of freedom’s flame in the battle against apartheid
Communist became successful architect
and promoter of WWI war poet
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Ike Horvitch
Poet Isaac Rosenberg
Sixty-nine protesters were gunned
down by police in the Sharpeville township in 1960
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HE arrived at Heathrow carrying a small suitcase and clutching
a pineapple. Ike
Horvitch, who died aged 85 in Hampstead’s Marie Curie Hospice
last week, had fled from South Africa soon after Special Branch
officers arrived at his home at 3am to arrest him.
He was one of 156 men and women, among them Nelson Mandela and
other ANC leaders, facing a charge of high treason for fighting
apartheid, and on bail when the world exploded in anger over the
Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Their crime had been to sign a freedom
charter.
The first 30 to face trial over a period of more than four years
were acquitted. But not before the deaths of 69 protesters shot
down by the police at Sharpeville had cemented the fragmented
opposition groups.
The nationalist government ordered their re-arrest. Ike, in pyjamas,
hid in the maid’s bedroom of his temporary home on the edge
of Johannesburg, as his wife, Mitzi, told the officers he was
not there, inviting them in to search if they so wished.
Her convincing performance – she was a professional colatura-soprano
accustomed to appearing on stage — probably saved his life.
Once the officers had gone, Ike, with just £10 in his pocket,
fled in his tiny, three-wheel car to Botswana, 60 miles away.
After flying via Kinshasa, Lagos and Accra, he arrived in London,
having been granted asylum.
It was the end of one of Ike’s three remarkable lives that
began as a Communist fighting for equality in his native country,
a remarkably modest man who talked rarely in detail about his
exploits and sacrifices.
The second was as an architect, part of the talented triumvirate
of fellow South African architects – the others were Ted
Levy and Issy Benjamin – based in Holly Bush Vale, Hampstead,
who left their housing mark on the slopes of Hampstead and Highgate.
The third was as the proud promoter of the work of his uncle,
Isaac Rosenberg, the World War I poet and artist, after whom he
was named, and whose literary executor he became.
Rosenberg had lived, coincidentally, in Hampstead during his years
at the Slade art school, and Hollycroft Avenue, Hampstead, became
the home for Ike and his family in 1964.
Born in Cape Town, where his parents had emigrated to after meeting
and marrying in London, he trained as an architect at the University
of Cape Town.
His work as an active member of the multi-racial Communist Party,
speaking at public meetings and rallies, put his career in jeopardy.
In fact, he lost his first post as an architect because his name
was spotted on a Communist poster.
After qualifying in 1944 as an architect, he built the small house
where he and Mitzi, whose parents had fled the Nazis in Berlin
to arrive in Cape Town in 1936, brought up their three children.
Politically, he mixed with black activists Nelson Mandela, Oliver
Tambo and Walter Sisulu, with whom he did not always agree on
tactics, as well as white activists Helen Suzman, Hilda Bernstein
and Betty Sacks.
His first brush with the law came in 1946, when he and eight political
colleagues were charged with sedition because of their political
support for African goldminers striking in protest against their
working conditions.
They were taken 1,000 miles away to Johannesburg, initially without
bail, and it took two years before the charge was dismissed, and
they were released.
Life without a political party, following the Suppression of Communism
Act in 1949, enabled Ike to concentrate on architecture again
and build a new family home before, at 4am on December 5, 1956,
police produced a warrant for his arrest for high treason. He
found himself barefoot, wearing shorts, three in a cell with a
blanket and bucket and the light on all night.
Ike also faced a second charge, the only person to do so, because
of his directorship of The Guardian, a left-wing newspaper. The
prosecutor said the trial would last six weeks. It lasted more
than four years, Ike and others fortunately gaining bail. At one
time he drew portraits of his co-defendants, which were published
in The Guardian. The final indictment against the 91 committed
for trial in Pretoria, Ike among them, was split up into groups
of 30. Following Sharpeville, the government declared a state
of emergency when a one-day ANC strike paralysed the country.
Then the first 30 accused were found not guilty and Ike, with
others, realised it was time to escape to Botswana.
In London, he quickly won the post of architect in charge of building
the new Hilton Hotel in Park Lane. Then he joined Ted Levy and
Issy Benjamin, who created the brilliant but controversial development
of the grounds of Witanhurst, in Highgate, as well as Summit Lodge,
opposite Whitestone Pond, and the elegant office block at 100
Avenue Road, Swiss Cottage.
Ike talked little about his political adventures, deciding that
he had done his share at a high cost and that was enough. He forsook
his Jewish religion and disowned Communism once Stalin’s
great crimes became known, and called himself a socialist.
It was securing the enduring fame of Isaac Rosenberg, killed in
France on April 1, 1918 – his body never recovered –
that captured his enthusiasm. He helped with the writing of biographies,
the production of Rosenberg’s collected works and gave important
family memorabilia to the Imperial War Museum.
Yet Ike, too, was the keeper of the flame of freedom and justice.
He needs to be remembered for that alone. A memorial service is
to be held later this month.
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