UNCLE WILLIE AND AUNT AUDREY DE BEER

My father Barend De Beer's younger brother, Willem Petrus De Beer, on his wedding day in the 1950's. Uncle Willie was a professional coach builder at the former South African Railways and other private companies. In those days the SA Railways had some real state of the art passenger coaches in the world. Especially the Orange Express and the Blue Train. This is no exaggeration. SA Railways was one of the tourist destinations for visitors who sailed from abroad and boarded the comfortable trains from Cape Town and Durban to the Victoria Falls or Lorenzo Marques in Mozambique (read Maputo). In the beginning, passenger coaches were mainly constructed with wood but later on with aluminium and steel. Al the same they were finished off like shopfitters will finish of passenger aeroplanes and passenger boats. It was their pride to brag about the coaches that have been ordered by the former Rhodesias (read Zimbabwe and Zambia).

When we were little kids we liked uncle Willie because he was a devoted angler and an outdoor kind of guy. He could also play an electric guitar like Elvis Presley! On his little Second World War stock, an inflatable dingy for Royal Air force pilots when ditched into the drink, he would row us into a little dam, Bay's water (Bloemfontein), to shoot dug with our catapults.

He was the only Willem Petrus in the de Beer-family by birth, because their father, Karel Johannes's brother, Willem P., had no children of his own. He and his wife, Aunt Trien (nèè Frazer), adopted a son and named him Willem Petrus. This WP de Beer became a lecturer in English at the former Bloemfontein Teacher's Training College as well as the deputy principal. His children carried forth the WP de Beer name.