The view of Cape Town nestling under Table Mountain when I arrived on the Priam on 24 June 1947 confirmed the words of Francis Drake. At that time, Cape Town was a relatively liberal city. Jan Smuts was the Prime Minister of South Africa and the leader of the United Party, which mainly represented the English-speaking white population, descendants of British settlers. The opposition Nationalist Party represented the Afrikaner white community, who predominated in the rural areas, but Afrikaners had also moved into the cities. Descendants of the Boers, they spoke Afrikaans, a dialect of Dutch. In 1947, the white population was 2.4 million. There were also people of mixed race in the Cape, known as the Coloureds, descendants of early white Dutch-speaking settlers and their Malay and Hottentot (Koi) slaves; they spoke Afrikaans. There were a million Coloured people in South Africa, a third of a million Asian, mostly of Hindu origin and living in Natal, and seven million black or, as they were known at the time, Bantu (‘Bantu’ meaning ‘the people’). Democracy was restricted to the white population. When the early Dutch settlers first came to South Africa in 1652, the native people of the Cape were the Hottentots. The Bantu people, at that time invading from the north, had reached the border of the Cape Province at the Fish River but not the Western Cape.

On the day we docked, the ship's officers decided to take the unattached ladies from the ship to dinner. We wandered around the streets of Cape Town and found what appeared to be a pleasant place for supper. When we sat down, we were told that only drinks were served and so we decided to leave. The proprietor, a Portuguese, then told us that we could not leave without paying an entrance fee of £2 per head. There were fourteen of us. We continued to argue, but the manager would not let us to leave and locked the door! It looked to me as if we were going to have an unpleasant quarrel and perhaps a fight because some of the waiters had put on knuckle-dusters.