A tale of four brothers’ reunion
Roberts family plays catch-up in Komani
REUNION with a difference took place in Komani last week when the four Roberts brothers all got together after some years. There was no special occasion, but one lives in the US, and the other three are scattered around the country, so they took the opportunity when the American was visiting South Africa to get together to reminisce and have a natter.
Eldest brother Arthur and his wife Pauline live at Madeira; Stan on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast; Viv has his home in Cape Town and Errol (better known as Tiger) has been living in San Diego where their daughter and some grandchildren are, for the past six years.
No one remembers how Tiger got that name – it is just one he always had – and Stan recalls with a chuckle how he was on telephone duty at the Umtata High School hostel when their mother phoned and asked for “Errol Roberts”.
“I did not recognise her voice and could not think of an
AErrol Roberts, so told her most politely that there was no Errol Roberts in the hostel, whereupon she replied, ‘Stan don’t be silly, go and call Tiger’.”
So Tiger and his wife, Brenda, came out to see their children in Johannesburg and it seemed a good idea that while she visited her sisters in Cape Town, the brothers all got together too.
The boys grew up in the old Transkei. Their father had a hotel at Coffee Bay and various trading stores. He also bought property at Port St Johns.
Arthur is the only one with tertiary education, having studied electrical engineering at Cambridge. Stan says he has more degrees than a thermometer, but when their father’s health deteriorated they were required in the businesses.
Stan and Viv worked on the copper mines at Kitwe where they learnt surveying and construction work and when they came back, they together opened Roberts Brothers Construction in Port St Johns in 1966 and on Arthur’s return, he joined them.
The company grew into the biggest privately owned construction firm in the Eastern Cape and is still going strong.
Mention any subject to the four and it inevitably triggers memories . . . At Port St Johns they developed Ferry Point holiday homes on the east bank of the Umzimvubu River, but at that time there was no road so their mother’s grand piano had to be taken across the river on a little rowing boat, (all and sundry came to watch) which very nearly sank!
This was where the movie Shout at the Devil was shot, with Roger Moore in the lead role of James Bond and Lee Marvin as a supporting actor. The cast, crew and some of their families all stayed at Ferry Point and they remember Moore as “a really nice guy”, but Marvin was something else.
Viv recalls Moore driving on to the beach and getting his vehicle stuck, then shouting, “Tiger bring the 4x4 – what will happen if the people see 007 stuck in the sand?”
In later years, the government bought out the Transkei properties and they moved their head office to East London and did a lot of work in the area, including establishing the Balassi Valley housing estate at King William’s Town and reconstruction of the main road from the Kei Cuttings to Ibeka on the eastern side of Butterworth.
When that job was completed, the four “retired” and sold out to the top people in the company with Stan staying on for a 10-year contract as manager and living at Balassi Valley, before later settling in Port Edward. Arthur and Pauline moved to Cape Town and Viv lived next door, while Tiger went to the US.
Arthur and Pauline later came to Komani, where Arthur was an electrical engineer and brought the town into line to go on to the national grid.
“We have not been very good about communicating, but we have always been very close as siblings and come from a close-knit family, so it has been wonderful to all be together again, even for such a short while,” Viv concluded.