Cape Town - John Yeld didn’t always want to be a journalist – his first job was in a bank. “I thought journalists were nosy people who poked into other people’s business. I didn’t understand why people would want to talk to them,” says the Cape Argus’s environment and science writer, a man who has made a career out of getting people to talk to him.
“I wanted a career in English literature,” he said.
But if he didn’t want to be a newspaperman, his familiarity with newspapers goes back to his earliest childhood.
His parents took the Cape Argus, the Cape Times and Die Burger daily, and he remembers at eight or nine walking down to Fish Hoek station with his father and other men on a Saturday evening to collect Weekend Argus’s Late Sport edition for AC Parker’s rugby reports.
After matriculating from Fish Hoek High School, John worked in a bank for a year, and then spent nine months in the army in Oudtshoorn. That was where he smelt renosterveld for the first time. At the time it was just part of being in the army, like digging trenches and playing soldiers. This was back in 1967, in the days before a Citizen Force soldier was expected to serve on the Border or beyond, or go on patrols in the townships.
He studied English Lit at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, and his honours year was a great year, studying under the likes of Guy Butler and Andre Brink, which led to his starting a masters.
But by then some of the passion had gone. Newly married to Nan Noble, a teacher, he spent his days trying to write perfect sentences. It couldn’t go on, and besides, a new interest had opened up: press photography.
“In those days Weekend Argus would devote a whole page to a photographic essay. One was on how the railways were mothballing the old steam trains at Touws River, and the Argus’s Dana le Roux took a fabulous picture of an old locomotive with clouds of steam piling into the Karoo sky. I thought, that’s what I want to do.”
For this interview we’re sitting at a pavement café in St George’s Mall. It’s slightly odd interviewing someone you’ve known as a colleague and friend for almost 40 years. So when he tells me that he acquired a good camera – taking the money from his and Nan’s Okavango Delta holiday fund – I can just imagine her face, and her quiet, cutting response.
John looks back and chuckles, but I suspect it wasn’t funny at the time. However he made it work. He applied for a job at the Argus, was turned down for lack of experience, and then, after a photographic course at the Ruth Prowse Art Centre, got a job with a commercial photographer. He learnt the trade, carrying cameras, working in the dark room and taking pictures. The construction company Murray & Stewart were his boss Richard Wege’s biggest client, and John dangled from cranes photographing construction sites, including that of the Civic Centre on the Foreshore (he’s that old, kids) and the Nervi Hall (now the Good Hope Centre).
Two years of this was enough to secure a photographic job at the Argus.
“It was a fantastic photography department, but with some really weird characters,” he says. And he lists them: Les Hammond, Peter Stanford, Willie de Klerk, Dana le Roux, “and the weirdest of them all, Mike Mackenzie”, my own late husband. Well, he was a bit weird.
And, to the bemusement of picture editor Jim McLagan, they got up to some weird stuff – like running hoses through the ceilings of the individual darkrooms and then turning on the water, knowing the victim couldn’t do anything until their film was processed except get drenched.
“I wasn’t very good in the beginning,” says John, “but they were all fantastically welcoming and were willing to teach me – I learnt an enormous amount from them.”
Them includes Leon Muller, then a sexy young darkroom assistant, and now the somewhat stately chief photographer of Weekend Argus. Leon, John and me – between us we have more than a century of Argus experience. Don’t mess with us, because we remember all your secrets.
John did a number of jobs with a reporter called Graham Ferreira, known to us all as Fynbos because of his interest in the environment. It wasn’t a hot topic in those days, but he was the Argus’s first enviro reporter and he was so keen he named his first daughter Erica (I bet she’s grateful it wasn’t Protea or Restio).
“I loved those jobs with him. We did several features at Cape Point.”
By this time John finally saw the charm in reporting and getting people to talk to him. He started off in courts to learn the craft and spent a couple of years covering the municipal beat and education.
But in 1984 he was offered the environment beat, and he’s never looked back.
He’s done other work in the meantime, notably covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for three years. He regards his time with the TRC as his professional highlight.
“It was a fantastic opportunity. I also got very emotionally involved. To be listening to all sides was a privilege.”
Working so closely with Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and the other commissioners – Mary Burton and Alex Boraine – was special.
“To this day the Arch remains my moral touchstone.”
But John did not cover the TRC full time – other reporters from the group stepped up, and that was when he went back to writing about the environment.
“It was a relief, because some of the TRC was very hectic. Some of the SABC people who covered it 24-7 had nervous breakdowns, it was that stressful.”
In the early years of John’s environment reporting the beat wasn’t as sexy or respected as it is now. A former editor of the Argus, Andrew Drysdale, would go through the first edition of the newspaper with a red pencil, scoring out all the environmental stories for the second edition.
“In those days environment reporting tended to be seen as nature conservation. Today it is understood to touch on everything – society, the economy, health, the so-called brown issues of sewerage, pollution – rather than just the birds and the bokkies and the blommetjies. Today the subject is taken seriously and subsequent editors have been more appreciative.”
There have been a lot of environmental reporting highlights: one was planting a tree in Newlands with the tree lady from Kenya, Wangari Maathai, winner of the Nobel Peace prize.
There there’s been the travel.
He’s been to Norway, Germany, the US, Canada and Thailand on jobs, covered the UN Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and last year was in Spain for the World Wilderness conference.
As a child John read about Scott of the Antarctic, and it became a dream to go there, one he has realised six times.
Retirement means John won’t come into the Argus every day, but it won’t stop his environmental involvement. He and his second wife journalist Martine Barker already have one book between them called Mountains in the Sea, about the Table Mountain National Park, and John wants to write more. He also wants to go back to his MA, but not in Eng Lit this time, in environmental journalism.
Looking back, he says: “I’ve been to some fabulous places, met some fantastic people – and a couple of wallies.”
Cape Argus