Happy Anniversary to Horace Clarke player He and his wife celebrates their 28~years of marriage Today….
Anti-apartheid publisher and former professor of education at Wits, Peter Randall (MEd 1981, PhD 1989) died on 5 June 2024. He was born in Durban in 1935 and completed his teacher’s training in 1956, also obtaining a BA through UNISA. Throughout his working years, Randall was a prolific editor and writer
Randall met his wife, Isobel (née Hickman), at teachers’ training college, and they were married in 1958. They had four children, one of whom died as an infant. The surviving three Randall children are all Wits alumni: Lee-Ann (BSc 1986, PhD 2019), Susan (MA 2006) and David (BA 1994, PDM 1996).
From 1957 to 1961, Randall worked for the Natal Education Department. He and Isobel then moved to the UK, where they worked for Essex County Council for two years before returning to South Africa in 1964. Randall became involved in anti-apartheid politics, and from 1965 to 1969 he was the assistant director at the South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg. From 1969 to 1972 he was the director of the Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (Spro-Cas), and in 1972 he co-founded Ravan Press with Beyers Naudé and Danie van Zyl. Ravan punched above its weight, publishing dissident voices and often attracting state censorship.
In October 1977, Randall and Naude, among others, were served with banning orders. Randall had been employed part-time by Wits as a teacher organiser, but his banning order prevented him from continuing in either the Wits or Ravan roles. Wits applied to the Minister of Justice for permission to employ him full-time and continued to pay his salary. Permission was granted six months later, and in 1978 Randall took up a full-time post at the university, with both administrative and academic responsibilities. He completed an MEd (1981) on the private school system in South Africa and a PhD (1989) on the history of education and teacher training. He continued working at Wits until his retirement in 1995, eventually becoming professor assignatus and director of teacher training.
From 1957 to 1961, Randall worked for the Natal Education Department. He and Isobel then moved to the UK, where they worked for Essex County Council for two years before returning to South Africa in 1964. Randall became involved in anti-apartheid politics, and from 1965 to 1969 he was the assistant director at the South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg. From 1969 to 1972 he was the director of the Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (Spro-Cas), and in 1972 he co-founded Ravan Press with Beyers Naudé and Danie van Zyl. Ravan punched above its weight, publishing dissident voices and often attracting state censorship.
In October 1977, Randall and Naude, among others, were served with banning orders. Randall had been employed part-time by Wits as a teacher organiser, but his banning order prevented him from continuing in either the Wits or Ravan roles. Wits applied to the Minister of Justice for permission to employ him full-time and continued to pay his salary. Permission was granted six months later, and in 1978 Randall took up a full-time post at the university, with both administrative and academic responsibilities. He completed an MEd (1981) on the private school system in South Africa and a PhD (1989) on the history of education and teacher training. He continued working at Wits until his retirement in 1995, eventually becoming professor assignatus and director of teacher training.
In 2006, the South African History Archives (SAHA) obtained from the State Archives copies of all documentation on Randall that had been kept by the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) during his years of activism. A set of the files was given to Randall, and another was archived at Wits.
From 1999, Peter and Isobel Randall spent much of their time in the UK, establishing a home and enjoying their retirement. In 2007, they became naturalised British citizens while retaining their South African citizenship. While teaching in Britain in the 1960s, they had picked apples during their school holidays, and they resumed the theme of casual labour on their return to the UK as retirees. They spent a year working as packers in a car-part factory, eventually graduating to the assembly line, and also worked briefly in a nursery, where they “gapped” seedlings, but they found the hothouse more sweltering than Africa. Randall got a job sorting mail during the busy Christmas period and acted as Isobel’s chauffeur during her seven-odd years as a supply teacher in the UK.
Despite his keen intellect, Randall was warm and down-to-earth. He enjoyed being active – even winning a marathon in his late teens – and embodied lifelong learning. His balanced approach to life was certainly one of the reasons for his longevity. He had a meticulous approach to mowing the lawn, ironing the sheets, sweeping the driveway, and polishing the silver. He enjoyed leisurely walks, although in later years he was unable to keep up with Isobel’s small but rapid stride.
Randall celebrated his 66th wedding anniversary in Johannesburg in January 2024. He had become increasingly frail, and on 29 February he was hospitalised after a fall. Underlying issues were diagnosed, and his health gradually deteriorated despite interventions. Isobel seldom left his bedside during his last lengthy inpatient admission.
Randall followed the events leading up to the May 2024 general elections in South Africa with interest. On 2 June, he asked for a summary and was shown the IEC map of the results that were finalised that day, and he remarked on the “tribal loyalties” in his province of birth, KwaZulu-Natal. He passed away three days later, still in hospital, surrounded by family. Details of his publications, political work, and academic achievements are available on Wikipedia at Peter Ralph Randall. He is remembered as a loving husband, caring father and grandfather, and visionary thinker.
Source: Randall family
Deanna Petherbridge (1939-2024)
Deanna Petherbridge, née Schwartz, (BA FA 1960) who died aged 84 in her London home on 8 January 2024, was described by The Guardian as “the prime example of an artist celebrated within her field but rather less well known outside it”.
Throughout her life she stuck firmly to the single medium of drawing and built a career around it. “I had come from a country with immense poverty and discrimination,” she once said in an interview. “Drawing is a way of thinking visually at a democratic level. It’s the poor person’s way of inventing.”
Although she was small in stature, the scale of her work was “monumental’”. Her work featured urban landscapes, often in pen and ink, characterised by novel perspectives “untethered from gravity”. She was a chronicler of wars, natural disasters, political and economic forces. Her exhibition in 2017, The Destruction of the City of Homs (106cm high by 228cm wide) and The Destruction of Palmyra (each triptych 142cmx122cm) were drawings about the horrors of the conflict in Syria. Most of her work didn’t contain people and was instead a study on what she called “urbicide”. Her book The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (Yale University Press, 2010), remains a standard text on the subject.
Petherbridge was born on 11 February 1939 in Pretoria to Frieda and Harry Schwartz, the youngest of three daughters who all graduated from Wits. Her eldest, surviving, sister Claire Lazar (BA Logopedics 1956) remembered that Petherbridge played the piano beautifully as a child and had “an impish personality and was always fiercely independent. Her doodles were magical – and she did it all freehand.”
Petherbridge matriculated from Pretoria Girls High School and was one of only eight graduates who completed a Fine Art degree in 1960 at Wits under the guidance of Professor Heather Martienssen (BArch 1947, BA Hons 1948). She left South Africa in the same year, taking on various jobs ranging from “working on an oil rig to spending a protracted time in India”. In 1967 she acquired a house on the Greek island of Sikinos and divided her time between studio time there and London. It was here that her dual interests in architecture and travel added the geometric elements of Islamic building dimensions to her sketches. “I discovered that pen and ink was more portable and have stuck with it all my life, really,” she said. “Even large drawings like mine can be rolled up and carried over the shoulder.”
After a brief early marriage, she was in a relationship with Guy Petherbridge, whose name she adopted.
She lectured at Reading University and then Middlesex Polytechnic in the 1980s and was appointed professor of drawing at the Royal College of Art in 1995. She launched the Centre for Drawing Research, the first doctoral programme of its kind in the UK. She was an honorary fellow of the Warburg Institute, and research fellow at both Yale University in 2007 and the Getty Center in Los Angeles between 2001 and 2002. In 1996, she was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
