Death of Durban raconteur
Photographer, mercenary and hijacker Peter Duffy has died, writes Graham Linscott He kept Dad’s spirits up
PETER Duffy, Durban’s colourful press photographer, invader of the Seychelles and hijacker of an Air India plane, has died. He collapsed while sitting on a wall outside the Davenport shopping centre in Glenwood on Friday.
By an extraordinary coincidence, he died as the book recording his erratic and action-packed life was being printed in Morningside.
The police were called. They found his diary with names and contact details. In it was his boarding house landlord a few streets away. The police called the landlord who made the identification.
In this prosaic way ended the life of a man who fought as a mercenary in the Congo civil war of the 1960s; became known as a freelance social photographer in every nightspot in Durban; became a press photographer who revelled in being at the sharp end of news gathering; joined a group of mercenaries under Colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare and invaded the Seychelles Islands in an attempted coup; hijacked an Air India airliner to escape when the coup attempt went wrong; and served time in Pretoria Central Prison.
Duffy was a larger than life character and a wonderful raconteur. One evening I was in the Shamrock, a popular pub in Durban North. Also there were the executive of the Natal Rugby Union, and their wives, who had been to a function elsewhere. The place was crowded. Duffy arrived Peter Duffy took time out to relax on a Mahé beach. and began telling stories from the Congo, the Seychelles, the Air India incident and Pretoria Central Prison.
Who of us has that kind of combined experience to relate? He had the place spellbound. I looked at my watch. It was 3am. I said to the barman: “Isn’t it about time you closed?”
He said: “When you’ve got this kind of show, you don’t close.”
That was Duffy. He had the gift of the gab. He was entertaining. And he had stories to tell. He’d been around in a way few could equal in one lifetime.
Duffy was born and brought up in Scotland in a well-to-do family. He went to Gordonstoun, the public school that Prince Phillip and Prince Charles attended. Soon after school he went to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) to learn coffee growing. It was adventure all the way.
Duffy’s profile was that CHRIS Hoare, son of Colonel Mike Hoare, who served time in Pretoria Central Prison with Peter Duffy after the Air India hijacking, paid tribute yesterday to Duffy’s kindness to his father during that stressful time and the way he kept his spirits up.
Hoare, 98, lives with of the remittance man – the wayward son whose well-to-do family in the UK pay him to stay away. But he always denied another son in Cape Town.
“Everyone thinks of Peter as a tough, outgoing character, larger than life. But he also had an incredible capacity for human kindness and a sense of loyalty.
“He did so much to support my dad during that horrible ordeal. I will never that. He insisted he came to Africa of his own accord and paid his own way.
Whatever, his visits to Scotland forget it and neither does my dad.” were most infrequent.
Duffy’s raconteurship prompted a group of Durban professionals and businessmen to promote the publication of his life story. I was selected to write it, having known Duffy for more than 40 years (and having heard many of the stories more than once – and the detail never varied. Duffy was not a man for hyperbole. He was a stickler for accuracy. The facts were astonishing enough).
The book – his biography – is titled Ricochets: Gordonstoun to Africa’s wars. How absolutely extraordinary and sad it is that he should die as it was being printed. It should be on the shelves at Adams Bookstore this week and will be launched later this month.