Jack Shepherd Smith: Pioneer editor of lusty Scope 1930-2019
Wildly popular magazine of 1970s and ’80s regularly got up censors’ noses
● Jack Shepherd Smith, who has died in Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal at the age of 88, was the longtime editor of Scope magazine, the raunchiest, most irreverent, controversial and talked-about magazine in SA, which in its heyday sold 250,000 copies a week.
Shepherd Smith, whose attitude was “publish and be damned”, was in constant conflict with the state censorship board, which routinely banned Scope when it came out on a Friday, only to have its banning order overturned in court on Monday.
This did wonders for its circulation.
It may not have brought down the government but if it had stayed banned it would have had a drastic effect on the morale of what was then the South African Defence Force, because in the 1970s and ’80s soldiers on the border lived from one issue to the next.
In 1972 Scope was banned (overturned by the Supreme Court), for the seventh time in four years, for showing a black man and white woman embracing in New York.
But it wasn’t only naked female flesh with strategically placed stars that aroused the censors’ ire. They also banned it because of a cover article on abortion, a story on test-tube babies and pictures showing the development of the foetus in the womb.
Aside from “tits and bums”, Shepherd Smith carried serious journalism by top local and international photographers and writers about serious world issues such as nuclear disarmament and the Vietnam War.
Tempestuous relationship
Shepherd Smith had been writing the daily Idler column for the Natal Mercury for more than 10 years when the owner of Republican Press, Winston Hyman, hired him to write a similar column for his newly launched Scope magazine in 1966.
After several months he took over as editor. It was a tempestuous relationship. Hyman was a National Party supporter and friend of several cabinet ministers. Every so often he felt Shepherd Smith was crossing the line with some picture or story and would try to spike it.
There’d be a furious row, invariably ending with Shepherd Smith making it clear that he was the editor and Hyman must either fire him or stop interfering.
He left in the late ’70s to start Pace magazine, which was subsequently embroiled in the information scandal when it emerged that it had been funded by Eschel Rhoodie’s department of information, which wanted an apolitical, glossy black lifestyle magazine in opposition to Drum.
It was bought by Caxton and in 1981 Shepherd Smith helped start Caxton-owned Style magazine as consulting editor to the editor Marilyn Hattingh.
After a few years he left to start Avenue, a male lifestyle magazine also in the Caxton stable. He was devastated and furious with Caxton boss Terry Moolman when he pulled the plug on the magazine after a year.
He wrote an unpublished post-apocalypse novel about Earth after the depletion of the ozone layer, and in 1988 an authorised biography of Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who he greatly admired. In the 1990s he was editor of the Sunday Tribune magazine.
In 2009 he wrote Wire Me a Million, about con artist Billy Wolfe who operated in the US, UK and SA and floated the idea during a midnight call to Shepherd Smith from his prison cell in Tallahassee in the US. He based the book on interview notes from a former Scope writer who had died.
Shepherd Smith was born on May 26 1930 in Louwsburg, Zululand, the son of a cotton farmer father and an English teacher mother who had a close relationship with Alan Paton when they taught at the same school in Ixopo.
Shepherd Smith’s first language was Zulu, which he spoke fluently all his life.
After matriculating at Estcourt High School he joined The Mercury in Durban. In the early ’50s he got a job on the Rugby Advertiser in England as the boxing writer after telling them he knew Vic Toweel.
The billiard table at the Royal Hotel
He became friends with local resident Johnny Williams, the British and Empire heavyweight champion, and accompanied him to his fights by train. He remembered how, when he won, he was a hero on the train back, but when he lost he was shunned.
He fell in love with a fellow reporter on the Rugby Advertiser, Margaret Radford. He set fire to her hair with his cigarette while leaning over the desk to ask her out. In spite of this they married and moved to London, where he worked shifts at Reuters and washed dishes at the Strand Palace Hotel.
He returned with Margaret to SA in 1955 and began writing the Idler column on The Mercury. One column almost caused a civil war in the province.
“Last week they held a beauty competition in Ladysmith,” he wrote. “Nobody won.”
Ladysmith erupted and the town council passed a motion of censure on The Mercury. When the rage began dissipating, he threw another match.
“Last week they held a Miss Lucky Legs competition in Ladysmith. It was won by the billiard table in the Royal Hotel,” he wrote.
He shared a love of the bush with conservationist Ian Player and together they pioneered the famous Dusi canoe marathon from Pietermaritzburg to Durban.
He brought the same pioneering spirit to the magazines he ran. He had a superb eye for a winning picture or story and when a good one hit his desk he never allowed inconvenient details to get in the way of publishing it.
His run-ins with owners about censorship boards and budgets were as legendary as his most famous achievement, Scope. He returned briefly as a consultant in the ’90s but even he couldn’t stop it being closed in 1996.
He is survived by his wife Margaret and three children.