What a blast Saturday night was with every South African cheering and excited about the Springboks.
It was dirty and ugly, muddy and bloody but what the hell – WE WON!!!
And with all the jokes flying around, everyone knew which “kant” they were on.
I haven’t been so excited about a game since the 1995 World Cup when Stransky slotted that amazing last-minute drop goal.
Anyhow, on with this week’s column: Serendipity.
I have never really known how to use that word, or had occasion to use it. Now I do and this is how it came about.
Back in the early Seventies when I was cutting my teeth in the newspaper world, I worked as an apprentice reporter on a paper in the small English town of St Albans, north of London.
My lasting memory of that town was the roar of trains, as my dingy Victorian bedsit was right next to the railway line and trains clickity-clacked past all night long.
Last week I browsed through the website of the Herts Advertiser newspaper, curious to see what the paper was up to. I hadn’t seen a copy of it in 50 years.
There on Page 8 was an article with the headline “History of Ballito Bombshells”. I nearly fell off my chair!
How on earth could I arrive at a connection between my present home town from a newspaper in a town I had lived in way back?
The article said that the St Albans Museum was putting on an exhibition commemorating the Ballito Hosiery Mill – a manufacturer of women’s stockings – that operated in the town between the 1920s and the 1960s.
There has long been speculation amongst Ballito residents about the origin of the town’s name. Some thought it was Italian for ‘little ball’, but that would be ‘la pallina’.
Jack Nash wrote in his book “The Birth of Ballito” that the developer, Dr Eddie Rubenstein, was scratching his head over what to call his new township when he saw a pair of Ballito stockings, liked the name and named the place Ballitoville.
It later changed to Ballito Bay and then Ballito.
According to the St Albans museum, the name stemmed from the fact that the company’s first hosiery mill was in Ballington, a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
The name Ballito was an invention, derived from “Ballington” by marketing people. The Ballito Hosiery Mill was opened in St Albans to cater for a demand for mass produced silk stockings in England and Europe after the First World War.
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The factory had a large workforce with its own social club. Regular Saturday night dancing even featured the “Ballito Tango”, a dance invented by the Regent Street School of Dance! Fancy that!
There was a Ballito hosiery shop in the West End of London. Perhaps it was in Regent Street?
During the Second World War, the factory was commandeered as part of the war effort. Hosiery machines were pushed aside to make room for manufacturing shell casings for Oerlikon guns and parts for the de Havilland Mosquito and Tempest fighter planes.
That explains for me how the museum made the connection between Ballito and Bombshells!
So I found something I had not known, purely by chance of clicking on the website of a regional English newspaper.
That’s serendipity, defined in the dictionary as “Good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries; a lucky fluke.”
And by the bye, not connected but interesting, St Albans was built on the ruins of the ancient Roman town of Verulamium. Some of the original 1850 settlers of our North Coast were from that area, and named their new home Verulam.
You learn something every day!
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