Terence Lindsay Sandes: TERENCE LINDSAY Sandes, or Ben Sandes as he was always known to family and friends, who has died at the age of 89, was a South African who became by adoption in the early 1960s a Co Waterford farmer but who in a courageous and dramatic previous life had fought both the Nazis and apartheid.
As a Royal Air Force pilot at the height of the aerial offensive against Nazi Germany in 1942-1944, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for his achievement in bringing home safely his damaged Wellington bomber from an air raid, crash landing but saving all his crew. He was 23 at the time.
Later in South Africa, he took an active part in the political struggle against apartheid, particularly in the United Party and the Torch Commando organisation.
This activism led to harassment from the police from the late 1950s onwards, and he eventually left South Africa with his wife and their two children in 1961.
Sandes had been farming in the Karoo mountains of the Cape Province, and he and his wife, Diana, were present as exhibitors at the National Rand Show in Johannesburg in April 1960 when the first of two assassination attempts was made on Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, the so-called "architect of apartheid" - the policy of segregating people according to their race and giving preferential treatment to whites.
The Sandeses were seated within 10 yards of the then South African prime minister when a gunman shot Verwoerd in the head. (The nationalist leader survived, only to succumb to a knife attack in the South African Parliament in Cape Town in 1966.)
The event is vividly captured in a private memoir written by his widow, who recalls that the atmosphere at the show prior to Verwoerd's arrival (he was due to open it officially and present the major prizes) was "electric".
But an indication of how low the expectation of violence was, even then, in South Africa, can be gauged by the fact that when Ben Sandes saw the would-be assassin, pistol at the ready, he thought at first it was merely a joke in poor taste.
Diana Sandes wrote that after the shooting there was pandemonium, with the Afrikaans-speaking announcer in a panic. But he was soon relieved by a man who "in a rock-steady voice" urged everyone to remain calm, which they did.
The political upheavals of that year in South Africa included the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960 when police shot dead 69 black people, and wounded over 180 others, protesting against laws designed to restrict the movement of black people. The country was also declared a republic and left the British Commonwealth.
These events came after an increasingly difficult few years for Ben Sandes. After settling in the Karoo in 1947, Sandes had had at first a relatively happy time, joining with other farmers in a Soil Erosion Committee to fight one of the biggest problems in the Karoo, an area prone to semi-desert conditions.
However, the area had an Afrikaans-speaking majority, and many of these Boer whites viewed the Sandes with suspicion. One neighbour, with whom he had a working, but never warm, relationship, once remarked: "I hate all Englishmen, from Winston Churchill to Terry Sandes."
When the nationalists, victorious in the 1948 general election, removed the traditional voting rights of the coloured (ie Asian) people, Ben Sandes joined with an Irishman, Edward Kelly-Patterson, and others in a group called the Torch Commando to fight the measure. Despite its name, the organisation was purely political. Ben Sandes also became involved with the United Party, ferrying people to polling stations, a vital task in an area where one's nearest neighbourhood booth could be many miles away.
Despite his obvious respectability, the police increasingly subjected Sandes to petty harassment, such as stopping him at night on the roads in remote areas for awkward and meaningless questioning.
Fearing that they had no future in such a country, the Sandeses left South Africa by ship in 1961 with all their possessions in a horsebox, and eventually settled in Co Waterford. They were expert equestrians and became judges at the annual Punchestown three-day-eventing horse trials. Ben Sandes became chairman of the West Waterford Hunt, a position he retained for 15 years. They last judged at Punchestown in 2007, when Ben was 88.
Ben Sandes, despite the attribution of Englishness by his Afrikaaner neighbour, was English only in name. He was born in England in August, 1918, to an Anglo-Irish father and a South African mother, and brought out to Cape Town as a baby of a few months.
His father, Dr Tom Sandes, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, with origins in Co Kerry, was one of South Africa's outstanding surgeons of the inter-war period, with a worldwide reputation as a clinician. He had been awarded the OBE for tending to severely-disabled soldiers wounded in the first World War.
Ben Sandes was educated at St Andrew's College, Grahamstown, and narrowly failed to win a Rhodes scholarship. He nonetheless went to Cambridge University in 1937 where he read engineering. He never took a degree; having joined the University Air Squadron, he learned how to fly, and was called up on the declaration of the second World War in September, 1939.
While in Scotland, Sandes married Diana Wildman-Lushington, the daughter of a senior Royal Marines officer, Godfrey Wildman-Lushington, who was a close confidante of Lord Mountbatten.
Sandes, who died peacefully at home, near Lismore, is survived by his widow and two sons.
Terence Lindsay (Ben) Sandes: born August 4th, 1918; died March 12th, 2008.