/ 7 June 2013

So long Tom Sharpe, bawdy thorn in apartheid’s side

So Long Tom Sharpe, Bawdy Thorn In Apartheid's Side

Tom Sharpe (1928  – 2013)

His bawdy style and vulgar approach are said to have made bad taste into an art form,  like "PG Wodehouse on acid", in the words of one critic.

Sharpe did not start writing comic novels until 1971, when he was 43, but once he got going, he gained a large readership.

Surprisingly for a comic writer and such a jovial character, Sharpe came to attention first as a hero in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa in 1960. After leaving Cambridge with a degree in ­history and social anthropology, he had gone, in 1951, to South Africa, where he did social work for the non-European affairs department, witnessing many of the horrors inflicted on the black population. He taught in Natal for a time and then set up a photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg in 1957.

He wrote a political play, The South Africans, which criticised the country's racial policy. Although it was not produced in South Africa and had only a small production in London, it was enough to bring down on him the wrath of the Bureau of State Security. He was hounded by the secret police, spent the Christmas of 1960 in jail, and was deported back to Britain in 1961.

The ship he was put on sailed along the South African coast, stopping at every port, at each of which the police would come on board to question and attempt to intimidate him.

He had written many symbolic – and unproduced – plays in South Africa and he was, he said, as surprised as anyone when, in just three weeks, he wrote the novel Riotous Assembly (1971), a dazzling comic send-up of the South African police.

The inspiration for the book came from hearing about the old-fashioned English colonial aunt of a friend of his, who lived near the police station and complained that the screams of tortured prisoners disturbed her afternoon naps. The aunt came to life in the book as the eccentric Miss Hazelstone, who amazes a police chief, Kommandant van Heerden, when she says she wants to be arrested for murder because she has shot and killed her Zulu cook. In a marvellous piece of irony, Sharpe dedicated the book to "the South African police force whose lives are dedicated to the preservation of Western civilisation in Southern Africa".

He was teaching then at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, but was able to give up his job because his publisher, Secker and Warburg (now Harvill Secker), agreed to pay him £3000 a year for three years to be a full-time writer.

Sharpe, who died on June 6 2013, continued his crusade against racism in South Africa with Indecent Exposure (1973), in which Kommandant van Heerden returns under the mistaken impression that he has been given "the heart of an English gentleman" in a transplant operation, and gains a new persona, which manifests itself when he starts reading British novelist Dornford Yates.

Wilt (1976) introduced perhaps his most popular character, Henry Wilt, a mild-mannered teacher of literature at the fictional Fenland College of Arts and Technology, who gets involved in a murder investigation.

He is survived by his wife Nancy and his daughters. – Stanley Reynolds © Guardian News & Media 2013