Durban - Flipping through old photographs in his business archives, Chris Brown, the head of the painting contractor company, Smith and Winfield, assumed that a 1950s picture of the old 45th Cutting garage was there because the company had given the place its latest lick of paint.
“It would have been one of the first jobs the company did under my father’s ownership,” he said, pondering the challenge facing the company, the country and the world: the coronavirus pandemic.
His father, Hinton Brown, had bought the business from a deceased estate.
Among the assets he brought to the venture were his solid character and willingness to help others, Chris recalled of his father, who died in 2012.
He only learnt what must have driven Hinton to put so much into his business as well as into Rotary, to fly doctors to remote places such as kwaNongoma and Manguzi, after finding his diaries just before his death.
“He had been shot down while flying with 1 Squadron over Italy
during World War II and escaped from the Germans with the help of Italian villagers,” Chris recalled.
German soldiers hunted down his father, but he got away. However, they executed a priest who had helped him.
Chris and family members have since travelled to the village in Italy to look for these special people, and found them. Including an old woman who remembers a parcel sent to her community from the South Africans, containing coffee and chocolate, to thank them.
“It was the first time she had ever tasted chocolate in her life.”
Chris said they found it unbelievable that South Africans had volunteered to fight in the war, so far away from home, rather than being forced to do so through conscription.
During Hinton Brown's time with the company, history threw the Soweto uprisings of 1976 at the economy.
“I was conscripted once a year for a month each time to serve in army camps when I had started working at Smith and Winfield,” recalled Chris.
Fast-forward to the ’90s and the country was navigating new territory.
“The change of government caused great uncertainty and put the brakes on any investment and spending. Now we have Covid-19!”
On reflection, Chris feels that while his family have owned Smith and Winfield 70 years, more than half of its 120-year existence, the era before them saw many more challenges, which the company survived.
“I can only imagine what Mr Smith and Mr Winfield must have gone through 120 years ago when, 13 years after starting the business, the Anglo-Boer War broke out,” he said.
“The start of World War I followed 15 years later and resulted in the death of about 20 million soldiers and civilians. The conditions led to the outbreak of what was known as the Spanish flu. My research into this on Wikipedia reveals that this had an estimated death toll of 17-50 million people worldwide.
“Then followed World War II in 1939 that dragged on for six years, pulling in volunteers from South Africa - and resulting in the loss of an estimated 85 million lives worldwide.”
And there was the Great Depression before that.
Chris said he believed the company would also pull through the current crisis facing the country, and the world.