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142 | denis beckett<br />
Shakespeare, lives in my head through phrases, like The Sky<br />
knowing he’s broke when he finds nothing in his pocket but<br />
his fingers.<br />
In Frontline’s youth I made a good pretence of managing<br />
the finances, but as hair grew greyer and trousers tighter and<br />
temper shorter the pretence wore thin. I’d got into writing in<br />
order to write. The arithmetic was supposed to understand that.<br />
The late great advocate ernie Wentzel often said that if he was<br />
a millionaire he’d pay me to write all day, but ernie died before<br />
he got there and there was a shortage of living millionaires with<br />
the same admirable philosophy.<br />
Frontline channeled money from advertisers to printers and<br />
I operated on the Micawber principle. Twenty shillings in and<br />
19/11 out meant happiness, but mainly it was 19/11 in and 20<br />
shillings out. When debtors’ prison loomed I would gird the<br />
loins and knock on charitable doors. In eleven years I took<br />
four hand-outs – two from anglo american, one from the ford<br />
foundation and one from the u.S. National endowment for<br />
Democracy. None of these were vast – I think around a quartermillion<br />
rands in total. By the standards of social interest projects<br />
this was virtual self-sufficiency. But Frontline wasn’t meant to<br />
be a “project”. It was meant to be a business, and one thing I<br />
learned about business is that it is not good policy for a chief<br />
executive to share any portion of the Sky’s philosophy.<br />
It might have worked with a full-scale kick-off but that is a<br />
thing we never had, despite an extremely near miss. at one stage<br />
Nasionale Pers was about to take 50%. I did not keep this a deep<br />
dark secret – for which I’m not sorry, secrets don’t work for me<br />
– and someone wrote in the rand Daily Mail that I was selling<br />
to Nasionale and “slavish adherence to the National Party”. That<br />
was a bit of slavish liberal cant that won me a bunch of cancelled<br />
subs but did not worry my conscience. My mission was tackling<br />
the government, not its ankle-biters. Ton Vosloo, Nasionale’s<br />
chairman, certainly wasn’t offering me lift-off in order to silence<br />
my voice. This deal reflected an opening of Nasionale as well as a<br />
new league for frontline. It was magnificent.
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