Aloha and Welcome to this LEGENDARY SURFERS chapter on surfing in South Africa, from inception up until the 1960s.
Heather Price
South Africa’s first documented wave riding, while standing up on wooden surfboards, took place at Muizenberg, Cape Town, in 1919. A Capetown woman by the name of Heather Price befriended two United States Marines returning aboard a U.S. naval vessel, from World War I. The two Americans had with them a solid wooden “Hawaiian” style surfboard which they used at Muizenberg and which they also encouraged Heather and her sister Muriel to ride.
In later years, Ross Lindsay’s wife Kay (Heather’s niece) visited Heather, in Zimbabwe, before her passing. At that time, Heather gave Kay the images that document the event. She said emphatically that “she surfed standing up” and made it clear that she advanced beyond lying down flat on the board.
Heather’s riding at Muizenberg in 1919 was an isolated event and did not spark further interest in surfing in South Africa, at that time. The Marines took their boards with them when their ship sailed back to the United States.2
Tony Bowman
Also returning from the war in 1919 was Tony Bowman, a World War I pilot. After working in Johannesburg, he settled in Cape Town in 1921. Some time after 1922 and reading Jack London’s The Cruise of the Snark – where London described George Freeth and surfing at Waikiki – Tony determined to ride some waves of his own. He set about building a surfboard, which he later described as a “boat,” that he and his friend Tommy Charles could ride together. With Tony “paddling madly,” Tommy steered.
From Tony Bowman’s memoirs, he recalled “some time later” that he wrote the Honolulu Tourist Association, requesting surfing pictures, so that he could deduce the dimensions of the boards being used at Waikiki at that time.
Somewhere along the line – probably after 1929 when Tom Blake started building the first wooden chambered hollow surfboards – Tony and two friends, Lex Miller and Bobby Van Der Riet, constructed three boards using a timber framework covered with ceiling boards and wrapped in painted canvas to help make the boards watertight. The “Three Arcadians” made the boards in a workshop behind the Arcadia Tea Room. Later, they would improve their designs and were soon joined by others as surfing became popular at Muizenberg Corner. 3
Agatha Christie
Acclaimed English author Agatha Christie surfed in South Africa in early 1922, after arriving in Cape Town on February 6th. She and her husband, Archie, were introduced to the sport of prone surfing on wooden bodyboards – "surf bathed with planks" – at Muizenberg Beach. They were on a world tour to promote the British Empire Exhibition when they discovered surfing, with Christie later learning to stand up on a board during their travels to Hawaii in August of the same year.
In 2011, Pete Robinson, of the Museum of British Surfing, wrote about Christie’s surfing experiences in South Africa and Hawai’i:
“After the First World War her husband Archie was offered a position to help organise a world tour to promote the British Empire Exhibition to be held in London in 1924. The couple left England in January 1922, leaving their baby daughter in the care of Agatha’s mother and sister.
“They arrived in Cape Town, South Africa in early February… and were soon introduced to prone surfboard riding at the popular Muizenberg beach. She would write about her experience in her novel published two years later [entitled] The Man in the Brown Suit.
“‘Surfing looks perfectly easy. It isn’t. I say no more. I got very angry and fairly hurled my plank from me. Nevertheless, I determined to return on the first possible opportunity and have another go. Quite by mistake I then got a good run on my board and came out delirious with happiness. Surfing is like that. You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself.’
“The party continued their tour through Australia & New Zealand before arriving in Honolulu on August 5th, 1922. Agatha and her husband quickly took to riding surfboards standing up at Waikiki (as Prince Edward had done two years earlier), although the larger boards and surf proved a tough test of their new skills.
“The couple were badly affected by sunburn, cut feet from the coral and the near destruction of Agatha’s silk bathing dress by the Waikiki surf. To protect their feet they purchased soft leather boots and her flimsy costume was replaced by ‘a wonderful, skimpy emerald green wool bathing dress, which was the joy of my life, and in which I thought I looked remarkably well!’
“The local beach boys would tow them out through the break, help them select suitable waves and retrieve their lost solid wood surfboards.
“Staying in Hawaii until October that year Agatha said, ‘I can’t say that we enjoyed our first four or five days of surfing – it was far too painful – but there were, every now and then moments of utter joy. We soon learned too, to do it the easy way. At least I did – Archie usually took himself out to the reef by his own efforts.
“‘Most people, however, had a Hawaiian boy who towed you out as you lay on your board, holding the board by the grip of his big toe, and swimming vigorously. You then stayed, waiting to push off on your board until your (beach) boy gave you the word of instruction.
‘“No, not this, not this, Missus… no, no wait – now!”
“‘At the word “now” off you went and oh, it was heaven! Nothing like it. Nothing like that rushing through the water at what seemed to you a speed of about two hundred miles an hour; all the way in from the far distant raft, until you arrived, gently slowing down, on the beach, and foundered among the soft flowing waves.
“‘It is one of the most perfect physical pleasures that I have known. After ten days I began to be daring. After starting my run I would hoist myself carefully to my knees on the board, and then endeavour to stand up. The first six times I came to grief, but this was not painful – you merely lost your balance and fell off the board. Of course, you had lost your board, which meant a tiring swim, but with luck your Hawaiian (beach) boy had followed and retrieved it for you.
“‘I learned to become expert, or at any rate expert from the European point of view. Oh, the moment of complete triumph on the day that I kept my balance and came right into shore standing upright on my board!’” [a]
Another internationally known writer George Bernard Shaw bodyboarded Muizenberg in 1932, age 75.
“Snowy” McAlister
Eight years after Agatha Christie’s bodyboarding in 1928, Charles “Snowy” McAlister, one of Australia’s earliest stand-up surfers and a multiple Australian surf-board riding champion in the 1920s, travelled overseas. He was part of that year’s Amsterdam Olympic circuit making a sequence of stopovers – including visits to South Africa and Britain – where he gave public board-riding demonstrations.
After reaching Cape Town by ship, it’s likely that Snowy first gave stand-up surfing demonstrations at Muizenberg Beach, Cape Town’s most popular surf-bathing beach and the cradle of South African surf culture.
As we know, Muizenberg already had “surf-riding” (prone and body surfing) in the 1910s and 1920s, but there is no extant digitized newspaper clipping of Snowy’s demonstration there. We infer his presence from shipping routes and the beach’s prominence.
We do know that Snowy surfed Durban (KwaZulu-Natal), giving well-publicized demonstrations at Durban’s main beaches (South Beach / Addington area), where surf-bathing and prone-board riding were already popular by the 1920s.
“Durban locals had already taken to the waves with home-made wooden belly boards by the time Aussie surf champ Charles McAlister introduced stand-up surfing in 1928,” underscored the World Beach Guide. [b]
Snowy used a heavy Australian timber board and stood up, trimmed, and sometimes did headstands or balancing tricks. This was a far cry from the prone bellyboarding South Africans were used to, so it stood out and was reported in the local newspapers.
“They thought I was mad,” Snowy exaggerated, but it’s true “the police escorted me from the beach worried about my safety.”[c]
Durban
Some later accounts attest to Snowy McAlister’s demonstrations helping accelerate interest in stand-up riding at places like Durban, but especially Durban. Other contributors were Surf Life Saving Clubs (SLSC’s) and the introduction of the Crocker Ski.
Swimming in the warm waters off Durban beaches had become popular. In 1927 and 1928, the Durban Surf Life Saving Club and Pirates Surf Life Saving Club were founded on the Australian lifesaving model. Members were competent ocean swimmers and held safety in high regard. They borrowed rescue techniques where they could, adapting them to the Durban coast while patrolling crowded beaches.
A Durban standout surfer of the 1930s was Tony Bowman’s friend Tommy Charles, who was known for standing up on bodyboards, while a handful of lifesavers and strong swimmers experimented with wooden planks.
“Bathing in those days consisted of waist to chest high venturing into the sea, with the more adventurous souls body-surfing and planing on rudimentary wooden ‘belly boards.’”4
Fred Crocker
One of the adventurers was Fred Crocker, a railways carpenter and member of the Pirates SLSC. By the mid-1930s, he was experimenting with various types of watercraft. “He was quite keen on going out on boats and things” and “he had made a few boards that didn’t go too well,” remembered Gabie Botha, a World Life Saving President, two time shark attack survivor and friend of Fred’s.5
The true birth of stand up surfing in South Africa did not come until after the Empire Games were held in Sydney, Australia, in 1938. Alec Bulley, South African swimming coach and member of the Durban SLSC, had visited a Sydney beach during the time of the games, to see what the lifesavers were doing there and to sketch the watercraft being used in the surf. Upon his return to Durban, Bulley gave his sketches of the Crackenthorpe Surf Ski to Fred Crocker who built a crude replica.6
A “History of the South African Surf Ski” states that Crocker “used some wooden floorboards and built a surf ski. This first ski (14 feet long, 2 ½ feet wide) weighed ‘a ton’ taking four junior lifesavers 10 minutes to carry it 60 meters to the water, with rests.” 17
“The Pirate’s prototype (Fred’s) was twelve feet long and two feet wide, which tapered back and front. Boarded over deck [and] flat bottom made the craft very heavy, and two men needed courage and energy to handle it.”7 Peter Forster of the Durban Surf Club constructed two more a little later.8
“Once you caught a wave,” remembered Gabie Botha of the Pirates SLSC, “the ski picked up momentum and before you realized it, you were way out in front of the breaker going crazy. Paddles were like giant ping- pong bats. In a strong westerly wind we often lost the paddles being blown out of our hands.” 18
“The next thing he made was the Crocker Ski,” Gabie Botha recalled. “The Crocker Ski came in when I was in the war. That was about 1943. He started building Crocker Skis. Lou (Johnson) used to write me and tell me how they were building skis; he told me how they built them with a wooden frame and with them in the air-force, they used to pinch the airplane dope.”9
The Crocker Surf Ski was a take-off on the Australian Surf Ski patented by Dr. G.A. “Saxon” Crackanthrope, a stalwart of the Manly Club, N.S.W., Australia.11 Unlike the Australian model, Crocker’s designs were first designed as stand-up craft.
The Australian designs were flattop, “closed-up canoes” with no seats. Instead, during the war in 1939, Crocker, then stationed at Durban Air Force, sought to build a light and stable craft from aircraft canvas. Thus was born the famous Crocker Ski: canvas on a slat frame, water proofed with aero plane dope, 3 meters in length, almost 1 meter wide, a slight banana shape from stem to stern, no point, but about a half meter straight back. It was not a fast craft, but it was stable. One could paddle on it and catch waves, standing up or sitting down, depending on the waves, with the paddle anchored to the nose. It too was a flat top with no seats! At this stage it was for fun, not competition. 19
Crocker kept refining his designs. Around about the time of WWII, Crocker, himself, experimented with a narrow “sit-down ski” which was later used as a surfboard without the double bladed paddle. It was this type of board that was first ridden by surfers in Durban.16
Crocker’s skis helped establish a community of stand-up wave riders at Country Club and other beaches in Durban. The way the skis would be ridden was to stand up holding a double bladed paddle that was secured to the nose by a rope, with ties to the paddle shaft. This tether was useful to pull the nose of the craft up as the rider leaned backwards when paddling out and for steep take-offs.15
About this model, “In 1945 Fred Crocker constructed a smaller ski of his own design,” detailed a South African SLSC Souvenir Program from 1957. “It was 10 long, later reduced to 9 feet and two feet 6 inches wide. With a pointed nose and squared stern, was 6 inches in depth and had a framework of light timber. A revolutionary method of covering was introduced, being 18oz canvas, painted. The next improvement was the use of dope in place of paint, and made the ‘Crocker’ ski almost leak-proof, with the added advantage of strengthening the canvas, besides enabling the use of 10oz canvas which lightened the ski considerably. The ‘Crocker’ ski was hailed as the ideal craft to ride any size or type of wave.”10
Oom: John Whitmore
Enter “Oom” – the Afrikaans equivalent of “uncle” ‑- John Whitmore, who spent the better part of his life pioneering surfing, Hobie Cat sailing, and bodyboarding on the Southern tip of Africa from the 1950s into the 1990s.2
Whitmore was born in the beachfront suburb of Sea Point in Cape Town in 1929.4 He attended an English school while having been brought up to speak Afrikaans at home. Consequently, he grew up completely bilingual. Years later, this bilingualism served him well while on surf safaris, as he had the ability to talk with the many farmers along the Cape coastline and thus gain access to remote surf spots in the 1950s and early 1960s. 5
John “took to the sea early,” wrote Paul Botha, Whitmore’s major biographer, “building tin canoes out of corrugated tin sheeting with wooden bow and stern pieces, to catch crayfish in the rocky gullies off Sea Point and even ‘surfing’ the waves in these canoes when there was swell. In his teens, during WW II, he and his pals started bodysurfing the local reefs and got into diving for crayfish and abalone, a career he was to pursue from 1953 to ‘55.”6
It was in the early 1950s that John got into surfing on boards. One day, while paging through a copy of South Africa’s skindiving magazine Findiver ‑- looking for ideas on how to make his own diving gear ‑- he came across a Jantsen ad featuring three surfers on a wave at Makaha. The photo in the ad was titled “High surf at Makaha.” 7 This was probably the famous shot of Woody Brown, George Downing and Buzzy Trent first released by the Associated Press in 1953.8
“That was it,” Whitmore said in an extensive interview at his farm in 2000, “I had to ride waves standing on a board.”9
Whitmore wrote to Findiver asking for info on surfboard materials and shapes. Armed with what he received from Findiver, he then built hollow plywood boards for himself and friends. Together, they started surfing the waves at the reefs in Sea Point and at Muizenberg.10
Although not the first surfers in South Africa, by a long shot, Paul Botha told me: “He and his friends were [rather] the first to pursue the sport/lifestyle of surfing on the Cape Peninsula, exploring the coastline for better breaks, and of course he built all the surfboards that he and his crew rode. 12
It did not take Whitmore long to transition from basic “kook box” construction to the further evolution of board design and construction as pioneered by Bob Simmons, in the States. “By chance a Swiss guy married to a South African girl living in America was sent a copy of a Cape Town newspaper in which an article covering John and his friends’ activities appeared,” wrote Paul Botha. “He started sending information to John in the early ‘50’s, which coincided with the appearance of polystyrene foam in South Africa. John’s enquiring mind was applied to how to shape this material and how to make it waterproof and strong enough to withstand the battering of the powerful Atlantic waves.”13
In his garage in 1954, John molded a block of styrene foam for a surfboard and then shaped it with a hand plane. Since only polyester resin ‑- that dissolves styrene foam ‑- was available, John covered the shaped blank with muslin soaked in Cascamite glue and painted with PVA. He did this in order to seal it before the glass fibre matting and the slow mix of resin were applied. 14
“Despite its rough shape and laborious glassing process,” wrote Paul Botha, “this board and similar Whitmore Surfboards models were used by John and his friends, who started exploring the Peninsula and riding spots such as the Outer Kom, Witsands, Scarborough in the Kommetjie area, Muizenberg in False Bay and the Pipe and Thermopylae in Sea Point.” 15
News of these Cape Town area foam boards soon spread to the lifeguards and surfers in Durban, in Eastern South Africa, who were riding “Crocker skis” and hollow plywood boards. 16
Whitmore also started making epoxy and polystyrene surfboards. He started supplying the likes of Baron Stander and Barry Edwards with these boards in the mid-1950s. During this time, he took to exploring the East Coast of South Africa, pioneering surfing in places like Mossel Bay, Port Elizabeth and East London and discovering surf spots at places like Buffalo Bay and Jongensfontein. 21
On the more inhospitable and wilder West Coast north of Cape Town, the fledgling Cape Town surf crew ‑- with Whitmore at its head – also made forays with their Whitmore Surfboards. They would spend weekends partying at the Darling Hotel (about 90 kilometers from Cape Town) and surfing at Yzerfontein and further up the coast to Kommetjie and Elands Bay ‑- first ridden in 1957.22
Dick Metz, 1959-1960
A momentous Cape Town day came in 1959 when John Whitmore crossed wakes with American hitch-hiker/surfer Dick Metz. They would quickly become firm and lifelong friends. 23
“In order for you to understand the depth of my relationship with John,” Dick Metz wrote Paul Botha in early 2002, “it will be necessary to go back and give you some of my history and our meeting in Cape Town. I am certainly not a professional writer, so please bear with me on my ramblings:
“I grew up in Laguna Beach, a small beach town between Los Angeles and San Diego, which happens to resemble the coastline, the weather, and the lifestyle in and around Cape Town. In fact, many people from Cape Town live here, including Shawn and Michael Thompson and Derek and Mark Jardine, along with many others. In the early 50’s, during the Korean War, many of us were in the military stationed in Hawaii. As a result, Bruce Brown, Walter Hoffman, Grubby Clark and many others got to know each other and surfed together from 1951 to 1953. All of us being rabid beach people and having a similar mentality, we conned our way out of front line military duty into lifeguarding and other non-military activities. As a result of these early meetings, after the service the above-mentioned people, along with Hobie Alter and others too numerous to mention, moved to Laguna Beach and Dana Point, which is just 3 miles down the coast. This group soon became known as the Dana Point mafia, with John Severson starting Surfer Magazine, Bruce Brown filming his movies, Hobie manufacturing surfboards, Walter and Flippy Hoffman inheriting their Dad’s fabric company, and myself founding the Hobie Sports retail stores. Of course, there are many stories that could be told of this time with the many characters, parties, and surfing.”24
“In the mid-50’s, before I left California, Gordon Clark was working for Hobie as his foreman and I was patching surfboards part time. It was in 1956 and 57 that Hobie started working on developing foam surfboards. They played with many different chemicals and finally came up with the concept of making high-density foam in a mold. Once Hobie started making foam surfboards, the competing manufacturers, especially Dale Velzy, really bad-mouthed foam as they continued to use balsa wood. Hobie’s competitors would not buy foam blanks from Hobie and, as a result, Grubby and Hobie decided to break up. Grubby took the foam business and changed the name to Clark Foam and Hobie continued to make surfboards. At that time I became Grubby’s first employee, pouring foam blanks in a new little building. Not long after this I set out on my journey.” 25
“In 1958 I decided that I needed more than to be cooped up into a store. So I sold everything and started hitchhiking, by myself, from in front of my house to an around-the-world adventure. I worked my way from Laguna to Central America and Panama and got a ride on a French army troop ship bound for Tahiti and Vietnam. I spent the next three or four months living and touring in Tahiti and the South Seas and eventually ended up in Sydney, Australia. After spending three or four months surfing the East Coast of Australia, I worked my way to Singapore, up the Malay peninsula, across Asia and India, and boarded an Indian labor ship from Bombay to Mombassa, Kenya. I spent the next 4 or 5 months hitching through Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. While waiting for a ride to Victoria Falls, I was picked up by a South African going to Cape Town to visit his mother.” 26
“We arrived several days later in Livingston in the middle of the night. The South African driver woke me up and said, ‘Here we are in Victoria Falls.’ As it was pitch dark and there were only a few thatched huts in the area, I turned to him and said, ‘Where are you going?’ He said, ‘Cape Town’ and I said, ‘I see no reason to get out in the middle of the night, lets go to Cape Town. I can always see Victoria Falls later.’ For the next six days we drove straight through to Cape Town, alternating driving and sleeping. When we arrived in Cape Town the driver was anxious to see his sick mother and dropped me off at Glens Beach. Keep in mind that at this stage I had been gone from the US for a year and a half and had been in black Africa for the last 6 months. My hair was to my shoulders, I had a beard and was wearing shorts, an aloha shirt, and a pair of sandals made out of old tire tread in Mexico.” 27
“As I walked the beach I was surprised to see a lone surfer on a very small wave lose his board on the rocks. I instinctively ran down to pick up John’s board so that it wouldn’t get dinged and as he swam ashore I told him it was one of the strangest boards I have ever seen. It had a very short fin and really square rails. He said, ‘Well, what do you know about surfing?’ And I told him I had started surfing when I was 7 or 8, lived in Hawaii for several years, and probably knew more than he did. As we talked he said, ‘You must come home with me and meet my mates.’ So off we went to his house in Bakhoven. That very day I moved in with John and his entire family and lived with them for the next few months, much to Thelma’s dismay. There were 8 of us and a dog in a small bungalow and I slept on the couch. Within 30 minutes after arriving at his house, there must have been 30 people, girls, guys, surfboards, wine, and some really fine South African steaks and sausage. We all got marvelously drunk, enjoyed a great meal. I immediately fell in love with Thelma’s young sister, Patty, and fell into the fire and passed out. A good time was had by all.” 28
“This is the part that John and I marveled at every time we saw each other ‑- the events and circumstances that brought us together. All of the chance circumstances just fell into place at the right moment: I hitched a ride that I figured would take me to Victoria Falls and ended up going 4000 miles to Cape Town on a whim. A few minutes deviation one way or the other would have meant that we never would have met.
“At the time, John was selling VW’s and on his off hours, John and I toured all the surf spots in Cape Province and spent long hours discussing the similarities of Laguna and Cape Town. For me having been gone from California for so long, being in Cape Town was just like being home.
“During this time, John and I developed such a sense of camaraderie and a tremendous bond with he and his family that exists till this day. During these many conversations, I told John that when I returned home I would help him get materials that would enhance his surfboard making ability.” 29
“After leaving Cape Town on my first trip, I spent considerable time in Durban where Harry Bold, Baron Standler, and the Durban boys became close friends and remain so to this very day.” 30
“From the time I left John, it took me over a year to get home. I had been gone for three years, 1958 to ‘61. Once I got home and showed my many pictures to all my friends and, having had such a wonderful time in Cape Town, I immediately got Grubby Clark communicating with John. Not long after that, containers of Clark blanks arrived in Cape Town. And about the same time Bruce Brown set out on making the Endless Summer. He was able to retrace in 6 weeks my trip to Tahiti, Australia, and South Africa, which had taken me 3 years. Bruce was the next [American surfer] person to meet John.” 31
By then, Gordon “Grubby” Clark, who had formed Clark Foam, knew more about blowing polyurethane foam than most anyone. Building surfboards using moulded surfboard blanks made from polyurethane foam meant a higher density foam than the styrene John had been making, was far easier to shape and could be glassed using polyester resins. 32
Also important for Whitmore, Metz put him in touch with his other “Dana Point Mafia” surfing buddies – people like Surfer Magazine founder John Severson and film-maker Bruce Brown. 33
John Whitmore was now married with two daughters and had traded abalone diving for the more secure job of selling Volkwagens. He started importing Clark Foam blanks from California around 1962-63 for his part-time job making Whitmore Surfboards. The VW business led to him owning the first Kombi to be manufactured in South Africa, 34 and also to inventing the South African version of roof racks for surfboards. The racks were made out of 5 centimeter aluminium pipe with clamps for the gutters. As VW’s were assembled in Port Elizabeth, John frequently drove past Jeffreys Bay and told his friends about the waves he saw breaking on the point. This lead to Capetonians Gerald “Gus” Gobel and Brian “Block” McClarty being the first to surfers to open up this world-class right-hand point sometimes just called “J-Bay.”
Whitmore also explored Cape St. Francis point, camping on the beach in 1959. Back then, this world-class wave was rimmed by wild, open beach. John and friends could boil water from the nearby stream and catch fish with hand lines from their surfboards. They rode the reef opposite of what became known as “Bruce’s Beauties” in 1963. 35
ENDIT
END NOTE:
For more about Oom, The Father of South African Surfing, please go to the LEGENDARY SURFERS chapter:
https://legendary-surfers.blogspot.com/2019/04/oom-john-whitmore-1929-2001.html
Also, a book about John was published in 2025: “The Oom: The Biography of John Whitmore” by Miles Masterson
Footnotes
1 Gault-Williams, LEGENDARY SURFERS, Volume 1, 2005.
2 http://surfingheritage.co.za/site/our_history
3 http://surfingheritage.co.za/site/our_history
4 http://surfingheritage.co.za/site/our_history. Quote from the website write-up.
5 http://surfingheritage.co.za/site/our_history
6 http://surfingheritage.co.za/site/our_history
7 Souvenir Program of the South African SLSC Championships, hosted by the Pirates SLSC, held at Country Club Beach, Durban, 21 April 1957. Parenthesis may not be from the original program.
8 www.surfski.com viewed in 2010.
9 http://surfingheritage.co.za/site/our_history. Gabie Botha quoted. Parenthesis may have been added later.
10 Souvenir Program of the South African SLSC Championships, hosted by the Pirates SLSC, held at Country Club Beach, Durban, 21 April 1957.
11 Gault-Williams, LEGENDARY SURFERS, Volume 3: The 1930s, 2012, ISBN: 978-1-300-49071-5.
15 http://surfingheritage.co.za/site/our_history
16 http://surfingheritage.co.za/site/our_history
[A] Robinson, Pete. “Agatha Christie rides the waves - 1922”. Museum of British Surfing archives, Jul 27, 2011.
[B] World Beach Guide, viewed 2025.
[C] Snowy quote source unidentified.
1 Botha, Paul. The Surfer’s Path, “John Whitmore: The Doyen,” Issue 20, October/November 2000.
2 See Botha, Paul. Email to Malcolm, 24 March 2002. “The word ‘Oom’ is the Afrikaans language equivalent of ‘Uncle’ and was used by all and sundry when speaking of John. Other names used for John were ‘JJ Moon’ due to his profile which its distinctive forelock and beard, and ‘Doyen’ because he was the foremost exponent of surfing in the early days of the sport in this country.”
3 Botha, Paul. Zag, March 2002.
4 Botha, Paul. The Surfer’s Path, “John Whitmore: The Doyen,” Issue 20, October/November 2000.
5 Botha, Paul. The Surfer’s Path, “John Whitmore: The Doyen,” Issue 20, October/November 2000.
6 Botha, Paul. The Surfer’s Path, “John Whitmore: The Doyen,” Issue 20, October/November 2000.
7 Botha, Paul. Zag, March 2002. Paul has this happening in 1949, but it had to have happened after 1953, when the photo was first released by the Associated Press. Of course, it could have been another photo, but this one is the one that first grabbed international attention.
8 Botha, Paul. Email to Malcolm, 28 October 2002. “I feel reasonably certain that the image John referred to was the one you have identified. However, he made numerous mentions of this being what inspired him to ride waves and it seems strange to me that he would get the date wrong by as much as four years on such an important element in his introduction to surfing. Perhaps Dick Metz would have a better idea of what picture it was – he and John would certainly have discussed it on a number of occasions.”
9 Botha, Paul. The Surfer’s Path, “John Whitmore: The Doyen,” Issue 20, October/November 2000. Whitmore quoted.
10 Botha, Paul. The Surfer’s Path, “John Whitmore: The Doyen,” Issue 20, October/November 2000.
11 Botha, Paul. “History of South African Surfing” at www.wavescape.co.za/top_bar/history/history.html.
12 Botha, Paul. Email to Malcolm, 28 October 2002.
13 Botha, Paul. The Surfer’s Path, “John Whitmore: The Doyen,” Issue 20, October/November 2000.
14 Botha, Paul. Zag, March 2002.
15 Botha, Paul. Zag, March 2002.
16 Botha, Paul. Zag, March 2002.
17 “History of the South African Surf Ski,” www.surf-skis.com/Surfskis.html.
18 “History of the South African Surf Ski,” www.surf-skis.com/Surfskis.html. Gabie Botha quoted.
19 “History of the South African Surf Ski,” www.surf-skis.com/Surfskis.html.
20 “History of the South African Surf Ski,” www.surf-skis.com/Surfskis.html.
21 Botha, Paul. Zag, March 2002.
22 Botha, Paul. The Surfer’s Path, “John Whitmore: The Doyen,” Issue 20, October/November 2000. See also Botha, Paul, Zag, March 2002.
23 Botha, Paul. Zag, March 2002.
24 Metz, Dick. Letter to Paul Botha, January 2002.
25 Metz, Dick. Letter to Paul Botha, January 2002.
26 Metz, Dick. Letter to Paul Botha, January 2002.
27 Metz, Dick. Letter to Paul Botha, January 2002.
28 Metz, Dick. Letter to Paul Botha, January 2002.
29 Metz, Dick. Letter to Paul Botha, January 2002.
30 Metz, Dick. Letter to Paul Botha, January 2002.
31 Metz, Dick. Letter to Paul Botha, January 2002.
32 Botha, Paul. The Surfer’s Path, “John Whitmore: The Doyen,” Issue 20, October/November 2000.
33 Botha, Paul. Zag, March 2002.
34 Botha, Paul. Zag, March 2002.
35 Botha, Paul. The Surfer’s Path, “John Whitmore: The Doyen,” Issue 20, October/November 2000.
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