Soon Bosman met Ella Manson, at the reference desk of the Johannesburg Public Library, soon they were married. Wisely they departed to make a new life in London. There in 1936 – while working again for John Webb, who had now founded The Sunday Critic – Bosman made another attempt to put his prison period to some use. The upshot was a serial running to 15 000 words entitled Leader of Gunmen. It begins on 19 April with the following summary:
Parts of it read like fiction… The master-mind who built up an organisation of gunmen; he inspired them with his own recklessness and his own desperate courage; and then he flung them against society… Crime-wave upon shattering crime-wave… They terrorised a nation; members of the police force got scared and resigned; even the local judges wavered, so a judge was specially imported from another Province to try them – Judge Gregorowski, who had sentenced the Jameson Raiders to death a quarter of a century before…
A gang leader who saw his followers go one by one to their doom; they were hanged; they were shot; they passed behind prison-bars with life-sentences; their reason gave way and they were flung into asylums; or they died by their own hand…
But their leader was not vanquished: undeterred, he set about creating another organisation… a motley assortment of embezzlers, murderers, burglars, sneak-thieves, pimps, killers; he knit them together with a cold purposefulness and a grim energy that was almost Napoleonic in its quality – a wild and inchoate Napoleon, who thought on criminal lines and talked in prison slang… And the first instalment begins now.
The titles of some of the thirteen episodes of Leader of Gunmen give an indication of how the serial developed: “Chief of Police Arrested”, “Claude Satang Double-crossed by City Councillor”, “World’s Toughest Killer Talks”, “Most Sensational Escape in Crime Annals”, “Town at Gunman’s Mercy”…
Here is a sample of the serial’s bluff, jocular style:
Bishop was sitting in a prison-cell brooding over many wrongs. His cell mate was a rather superior young Englishman who had not been long in South Africa. (But he had been there long enough to find his way into Central Prison.)
“Yus,” Bishop announced sombrely, “I am what you call an eaten man.”
“How interesting,” his cell mate exclaimed. “I, too, am a public schoolboy. Eton, are you? What year?”
“Yus, it’s my year, all right,” Bishop answered. “My left year.”
Leader of Gunmen was Bosman’s first try at wrapping a history of South African violent crime into an entertaining package. Aimed at timid British readers, its tone was perhaps too bullying and insufficiently beguiling for it to succeed. By 5 July its publication was suspended.
Yet its hero is an interesting figure. He begins as a sergeant scouting for Smuts during the First World War,
not appearing in any way different from any of the thousands of young soldiers who had been drafted to East Africa. His ambitions were the ambitions of hosts of other normal young men of his age. He certainly had no dreams of one day becoming a gangster.
He was captured in 1917, escaped along with two other men. They passed through terrible hardships. Two of them died. The survivor was Claude Satang. He was tougher than his companions. But, when the South African troops found him, they had to identify him by his badge. He had lost his memory. So he was sent back to South Africa. Gradually, in the hospital at Roberts Heights, near Pretoria, Claude Satang’s memory returned. But with it there came also the frightening knowledge that his outlook on life had altered. He no longer had his casual and easy-going acceptance of things as he found them. In its place was a bitter and unreasoning hatred of society.
He did not understand it at first – this change that had come over him. Later, he understood only too clearly. But then he was in a prison-cell… Before him lay the years of the sentence he had to serve. Behind him was the most stupendous and incredible career of crime that the world had ever known… (Don’t miss next week’s instalment.)
Rather like the bluecoat’s tale in Chapter 2 in Cold Stone Jug, Leader of Gunmen concludes in the air, starting “just from anywhere and ending up nowhere.” From what may be pieced together of it in the Colindale Newspaper Library, it is of the same type as other works in that extraordinary rash of prison fiction Bosman mentions in Chapter 8 here, with titles like Ruined Through Being Too Kind-hearted and so on, through to Cold Stone Jug itself.
The Museum of the Correctional Services Department holds an actual copy of one of these, produced by Bosman’s own publisher, APB, in the same year as the final Cold Stone Jug. This is a South African classic of its kind, Christoffel Lessing’s treasury of prison lore called Kersfees in die Tronk (1949). Lessing had been inside for theft since 1928, and in Pretoria Central since 1933 where he managed to pass from Standard Six to a Bachelor of Arts. As Bosman was to do, he turned to Die Ruiter and to Die Brandwag for publication.
Like Bosman in Cold Stone Jug, Lessing in his Kersfees gives no details of his crime, nor does he repent. The hangings high on brandy, initiations in the star-yard, the scenes in the stone-yard with 6 lbs. hammers, the monthly concerts and boxing tournaments organised by the inmates, the whole establishment singing “Sarie Marais” together on Christmas Eve, Beauty Bell the safecracker and threepence a day… these are the highlights of the South African prison novel of the period. Lessing goes one further than Bosman, however; at least half of Kersfees is devoted to fantastic tales of breaks which every convict except Lessing seems to have pulled off. Kersfees is a rather more genial version of Cold Stone Jug, done in the raw. David Goldblatt the photographer has filled in the rest of Lessing’s biography (in the Stet of May, 1986), including a reading of his later English-language autobiography of 1950, Forth from the Dungeon. Lessing himself has reappeared (in the Stet of November, 1988), with a poignant memoir on the theme that could well have been Bosman’s own: that it is only on his release from prison that the ex-con’s punishment really begins.
At all events, Bosman in London wriggled out of providing a denouement for Leader of Gunmen, his objectionable first effort, with the following announcement (on 12 July):
We regret to inform our readers that we are discontinuing our very popular prison serial, owing to the constant criticism that is being levelled at certain stark features of the story. The Sunday Critic was not actuated by any spirit of sensationalism in publishing a description, for instance, of the manner in which a convict ate a portion of his live cell mate.
It is our sincere hope that, by drawing public attention to the debasing effects that prison life has on the strongest mind, we would be able to exercise a powerful influence in the direction of prison reform.
We therefore leave Claude Satang and his fellow-gunman, Dirk Joubert, in the African Bush. We leave them still uncaptured. We bid farewell to Cloete and Babyface de Klerk and Alec the Ponce. We depart from these stern characters, in the evening, when the dusk is falling over the grim walls of Pretoria Central Prison, and in the cells the cigarettes are being lit, and the hashish ‘smoke’ is being passed around.
Fratres, valete.
With that poignant salute, Bosman leaves off trying to make something of his prison experience. It would take him more than a decade before he was able to face it again, this time in the last part of his novel, Jacaranda in the Night, where his protagonist serves a stint on the stone-pile in Pretoria Central, and then in the manageable and mature form of the present book.
What works did Bosman read to sharpen his concept of the ‘prison memoir’?
In Cold Stone Jug he mentions as familiar from his childhood Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, with its fearful entombment in the dungeon of France’s Robben Island, the Chateau d’If off Marseilles (although he remembers it more for its presentation of hashish-smoking). He would surely also have known of Victor Hugo’s ticket-of-leave man, Jean Valjean, in Les Misérables (“Once I stole a loaf of bread to stay alive, but now I cannot steal a name to go on living”). Hugo himself had popularised the European prison reform movement in his remarkable Prison Writings of the 1830s, particularly about Paris’s La Roquette (“The inmates teach me to talk in their