Denis Mayer

Denis Mayer was born in Parkwood, Johannesburg, on 8 September 1923. His father, Harold, was the Recruitment Manager for the Chamber of Mines, and had come to South Africa from England in the 1890s to seek his fortune on the diamond and gold fields. His mother was raised on a farm near Barkly-West, were his father had first met herwhile he was serving in the Imperial Light Horse unit in the Anglo-Boer War.

On the death of his father he was sent to board at St John’s College (Johannesburg, Gauteng). Here he felt compelled to join the fight against Nazism after the ostentatious jubilation of a German pupil at reports in The Star of the sinking of the British battleship, the HMS Royal Oak, by a German U-boat in October 1939, six weeks after the outbreak of World War Two. While still at school, after the defeat of France by Nazi Germany in 1940, he engaged in a celebrated fist fight in the main school quadrangle with a pupil of French extraction, De Simonin, over his perceived support for the pro-Nazi Vichy France regime.

Mayer matriculated in 1940 and although he returned to civilian life after the war, his service as a fighter pilot in the fight against fascism in World War Two was his life’s defining experience. As a boy he avidly read Captain WE Johns’ books describing the adventures of flying ace, Biggles. His dreams of becoming a pilot were realised when he was awarded his “wings” in 1943 as a South African Air Force fighter pilot by Colonel Kalfie Martin, a veteran of the victorious 1937 Springbok tour of New Zealand. In 1944 he was posted to the Operational Training Unit at Waterkloof, Pretoria, Transvaal (now Gauteng) where the commanding officer was the highly decorated Colonel Doug Loftus, whose silver Spitfire is displayed in the South African Museum of Military History in Johannesburg. Mayer saw service in the South African Air Force in North Africa and Palestine clocking over 1600 flying hours in a number of aircraft including the Miles Master, the famous Spitfire and the US Mustang.

As a “liberal”, he was appalled by the racism regularly displayed by sections of white South African society toward people of colour. In 1945 he was deeply shocked by an incident when travelling on a troopship bound for the Japanese theatre in the Red Sea. An elderly Egyptian trader approached the troopship on a raft, wishing to sell brassware, rugs and carpets and was nearly knocked down and his carpets drenched by a large volume of kitchen slops thrown from the ship.

After the war ended he qualified as an accountant and worked predominantly at National Bolts in Boksburg, part of the Anglo-Vaal Group. In the 1950s he marched in the Torch Commando with fellow South African fighter pilot and Battle of Britain hero, Sailor Malan, protesting the removal of Coloured South Africans from the Voter’s Roll.

Mayer travelled outside of South Africa extensively and in 1961 in the “Khrushchev Spring” he visited the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on a South African passport and saw the embalmed body of Joseph Stalin in Moscow shortly before its removal during the de-Stalinisation era. He presented extensive slide shows of photographs taken by him in the USSR, and this, together with his efforts to assist black workers at his work place with personal and legal problems, attracted the suspicion of the Security Branch that he was a Communist. In the 1950s and 1960s he campaigned for the United Party and subsequently the Progressive Party. His memoirs record he voted for the African National Congress (ANC) in the first two democratic elections.

After leaving National Bolts in 1984 he worked for two different financial institutions before retiring in 2000. His charm and his qualities as a raconteur gained him access to the dinner tables of some of the captains of South African industry. He was often controversial and outspoken and would often cause a flutter amongst his dinner companions when he attacked those who defended Apartheid or expressed racist views.

He married Jane Eason in 1966, the daughter of a survivor the Battle of Delville Wood and a Royal Flying Corps officer, with whom he had two children.He was a frequent visitor to commemoration of Air Force events such as Battle of Britain Day and the Commemoration of the 1944 Warsaw Relief Flights to the Polish uprising against the Nazis by SAAF Liberator bombers.