PETER BRUCE: Salute to Dick and the Foxton charm package

My friend for many years, Dick Foxton, has died and I don’t want to let the moment pass. His funeral is this Friday at the Catholic Church in Rosebank, Joburg, at 2pm. 

Dick was a media man. He’d once sold advertising for, I think, Newsweek, and when I met him about 28 years ago he ran his own PR company. It was a most extraordinary show — I had come back to SA after 20 years abroad and I was editor of Business Report, recently created by the Independent Newspaper group, then owned by Tony O’Reilly, and I was completely lost. 

In a way Dick rescued me. He seemed to know everyone and when your first job in a country is editing a daily print title you have a lot of rapid catching-up to do. I can’t remember how I met him. Typically he would perhaps have called me. 

Whatever the case, our first meeting was the beginning of countless lunches and drinks, every one of which I know I hugely enjoyed. He was fantastic company. A survivor of the famed Group Editors PR story, I soon worked out that his business now consisted of the CEOs (and only CEOs) of some of the country’s biggest companies — Anglo Platinum, Nissan and Southern Sun among them. 

They all paid him generous fees and his conditions and his proposition were simple. His “client” was the CEO and not the company; he did not do PR in the normal sense (no press releases or enquiries) and nothing said in his company was on the record. 

In return he would guarantee to the CEO regular off-the-record access to print, radio and TV editors rather than the junior reporters their communications staff might be dealing with. Lunches were regularly held at the Grillhouse in Rosebank, which had private room and a good wine cellar. Private lunches would move around a little wider, to the Saxon Hotel or Mastrantonio in Illovo or to the Illovo Club, which he loved. 

Almost always the conversation would start with politics and shift to cricket and then descend into anecdotes about the people he’d met. I’m sure I heard them all many times. It was Dick, when I became editor of the Financial Mail in 1997 and then Business Day in 2001, who persuaded me to write a weekly column. I remember telling him the story of how my boss at Business Report had once referred to rugby boss Louis Luyt as “the thick end of the wedge” and he replied “That’s what you call your column!” I did.

He was a fabulous name dropper and he had really been around. A few years ago he wrote an autobiography, The Man With No Name, and it is stuffed with the names and anecdotes I used to hear about. He was close to Sir Donald Bradman, the father of modern cricket, he advised FW de Klerk, he’d  corresponded with broadcaster David Frost, with Desmond Tutu, Harry Oppenheimer, Kgalema Motlanthe and hundreds of others.

He chased down a meeting with Mother Teresa and had a lifetime pass, it seemed, to the Oyster Box in Durban in return for a story I never understood, no matter how many times he told it to me. 

His great love was cricket. In all the years I knew Dick he lived in an apartment literally over the fence from The Wanderers in Joburg. My favourite lunches with him always included fellow editors Barney Mthombothi, Tim du Plessis and Mondli Makhanya.

He was always flattering, but I never really knew what he thought of me. I do know that when he spoke privately to me about Barney and Tim and Mondli it was with a deep respect and affection. Perhaps, if there was a favourite, it was Barney – the two of them would talk endlessly about cricket and so extensive was their knowledge they could spend an age on just one innings or a memorable over. I loved listening to them.

He could effortlessly sniff out the many conceits of the English. A member of the MCC, based at Lord’s cricket ground in London, he offered to get me an MCC bowtie. This during a period when I became editor of the FM, of a sartorial conceit of my own. When Michael Coulson, the veteran deputy editor I had inherited at the FM (and who was also a member of the MCC), first saw me wear it he was outraged. It takes decades to become a member and to earn the right to wear the MCC colours. 

This amused Dick no end and he decided he would also get me a Lord’s Taverners bowtie. The Taverners is an exclusive charitable club within the MCC and it is literally impossible to get in. When I walked into the FM newsroom wearing it for the first time Michael saw it from 50m away and almost exploded. 

I shudder to think how many filet steaks and how many bottles of red wine I shared with Dick. Fortunately, the lunches he hosted with his clients were off the record, so I didn’t really have to remember anything. And he would generously always offer to have his driver take me back to the office or, if the lunch had gone on a bit, straight home. The transport was always a lovely new Nissan, which is how that client paid his fees. 

Dick was born in India in 1942 and raised in Kenya, and he had an unmistakeable colonial air about him in both his manner and his colourful dress. He only ever used an old Nokia phone. “A word in your shell-like,” would open a phone call. He spoke at my wedding and never forgot my birthday or my wife Robyn’s birthday. I’m sure it was all part of the Foxton charm package, but it never felt manufactured and he never once asked me for anything. He was always thoughtful and kind. 

The only time I struggled to get him on the phone was when a newspaper broke the story that he was engaged to Thuli Madonsela. I never probed too much, but when comms resumed it was clear he’d found a soulmate. All of us now had to hear Thuli’s views on everything, including what she thought of our columns. It was all good. “As his partner,” she wrote in the foreword to his book, “I thank God every day for bringing this amazing man into mine and my children’s lives.” 

I’m glad he was in mine too. 

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.