Design Office

Design Office

After graduating in 1956, I entered into a contract with Water Affairs, a requirement for a non-citizen, starting 1 January 1957. I was received by the then Chief Engineer, later Secretary for Water Affairs, Jan Jordaan. The then Secretary was Pieter Krygswet Goosen, whom I never met in the flesh. In those days, there were relatively few engineers, hence the high level of my reception. Shortly afterwards, I was confronted with the rigid rules of the Public Service: because New-Year’s day was a public holiday, I could only start on 2 January, travelling officially from Stellenbosch to Pretoria – hence I was docked a day’s pay!

I started work in the design office, which was a single large room outfitted with drawing tables and chairs. Only the two engineers-in-charge had own offices: Robby Myburgh and Eric Chunnett. If you needed guidance or instructions, you sometimes had to queue in the passage in front of their doors. Both were competent and highly respected engineers. The first task I was confronted with was the calculation of the backwater curve of the Vaal Dam, which was being raised. This was an enormous task before computers. Not only I, but also Ed Bayley, and Louis (Pete) Nutt worked on the same problem. I remember that there was always a lot of talking and laughing, especially by a character called Cas de Villiers. (At the time of writing this, July 2014, I received a notice that Cas died aged 91. After losing his wife at age 86, he remarried at age 87!) At one table right at the back was Johan du Plessis, later Director-general, who was always serious and at work. I remember the presence of some Hungarian engineers, who fled the country after the previous years’ uprising. (Zoltan Kovacs was one of them, but I met him only later in my career.) My sister’s husband, who was about to take up a teaching post at UNISA, asked me to find him a furnished house to rent for a few months. Answering a Pretoria News advert, I landed at the front door of a house in Main Street, Waterkloof. When I introduced myself to the man who opened the door, he asked me to my astonishment whether I worked at Water Affairs. It turned out to be Mr Bill Armstrong, one of the most senior engineers there, together with Mr Stallebrass, Mr Kleynhans (Littlejohn) and Mr Schlotfeldt. The Armstrong’s were about to go on leave to Europe for a while.

The work was exceedingly routine and boring and I was glad that I was instructed to accompany Johan du Plessis on a site visit to one of the possible sites for the Aspoort Dam on the Matjies River and the Winkelhaaks River, tributaries of the Doorn River in the Cederberge. It was the first time I saw a plain table being used as a survey instrument! The site was so remote that we had to walk in and overnight in the sand of the river bed, where we saw the spoor of a leopard the next morning! Afterwards we also did some reconnaissance work by means of a barometer in the Buffeljags River, near Swellendam.