Robert Harold Lundie "Jock" Strachan (1 December 1925 – 7 February 2020) was a white South African writer and anti-apartheid activist. He flew for the South African Air Force during the Second World War, trained as an artist, then became Umkhonto we Sizwe's first explosives expert. He was imprisoned for sabotage, and after his release served another sentence for telling a journalist about poor prison conditions. He wrote two semi-autobiographical books, and completed the Comrades Marathon twice, winning a medal once. He married twice and had three children.
Early life, art and running
Harold Strachan was born in Pretoria on 1 December 1925. His father had been a metalworker in the Clyde shipyards who had emigrated from Scotland to South Africa in 1902, and his mother was a teacher from an Afrikaner family. When Harold was three his mother left his father for another Scotsman, Jimmy Brown. Brown died in 1931 from the effects of poison gas in the First World War, and his mother moved with Harold and his two sisters to Pietermaritzburg in Natal. He attended Merchiston Preparatory School then Maritzburg College, where he began to develop his political consciousness.
Strachan joined the South African Air Force straight from school, and served as a pilot towards the end of the Second World War with the rank of lieutenant. He trained on the Tiger Moth and did advanced training on the Airspeed Oxford. From 1946 to 1949 he studied for a Fine Arts degree at Natal University College in Pietermaritzburg. In 1948 the ruling National Party introduced apartheid, a system of institutionalised racial segregation and discrimination against the black majority. In 1949 Strachan completed the Comrades Marathon, an ultramarathon run between Pietermaritzburg and Durban. For a period after he left the air force, as a reservist he used to enjoy spending a month of each year flying the Harvard to keep his proficiency.
In 1950 Strachan won a scholarship to study at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London, and married fellow South African Jean Middleton. In 1951 he took a course in painting restoration at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. In 1952 he returned to London and worked as a security guard, and in 1953 he managed his brother-in-law's painting and decorating business in Chingola in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where he encouraged the black workers to unionise. During the 1950s he worked with the artist Selby Mvusi. Before he ran the 1954 Comrades Marathon, Strachan is supposed to have prepared for the race by drinking gin and vermouth with his wife. He finished sixth in 7 h 48 min and earned a gold medal. He was friendly with the English satirist Tom Sharpe until they fell out over a woman. Strachan worked as a lecturer and teacher from 1955 to 1960. He was divorced from Middleton in 1958.
Activism, sabotage and imprisonment
Strachan's opposition to apartheid arose from his personal ethics, rather than ideology. He became a founder member of the Liberal Party of South Africa in 1954, along with Alan Paton and Peter Brown, and in 1957 joined the Congress of Democrats. In 1959 he married Maggie von Lier, his former student. In 1960, during the protests after the Sharpeville massacre, he and Maggie stood between armed police and black protesters, preventing the police from firing. A warrant was issued for their arrest, and to avoid it they fled to Swaziland. Three months later they returned to South Africa, Harold under the name Robert "Jock" Lundie, and settled in Port Elizabeth where Harold worked with Govan Mbeki, and helped him produce and distribute the newsletter Izwe Lomzi ("Voice of the People"). In 1961 he joined the illegal South African Communist Party (SACP), and edited their newspaper New Age. He accepted Mbeki's request to improvise explosive devices for the newly-formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and experimented with substances such as nitric acid, potassium permanganate, magnesium, glycerol and icing sugar.
Strachan, who was MK's first explosives expert, designed a simple incendiary device based on petrol and initiated by glycerol filtering through beach sand onto potassium permanganate. He later researched and created an explosive device based on a form of ammonal, inspired by his reading of Robert Graves. He trained other operatives, who then disseminated the expertise through a clandestine cell system. His home-made bombs were planted at strategic infrastructure targets like electrical substations and railway lines. As far as is known, there were no deaths in these attacks.
