Page 40 - Be Reasonable – Do It My Way , Peter E. Daly AM, My Story

CHAPTER 3 - JOHANNESBURG TO DURBAN TO CAPE TOWN TO PORT ELIZABETH AND BACK TO JOHANNESBURG
Relief Branch Manager
The General Manager of L&G in Johannesburg decided to copy the banks’ ideas of appointing Relief Branch Managers when the Branch Manager went on his sabbatical. Most Branch Managers in the insurance industry in the early days were seconded on tours of duty from England. Their contracts usually provided for them to have extended home leave (up to three months once in every three years). I was therefore sent to stand in for them as a sort of locum.
I had the opportunity to visit lots of different places around South Africa as far flung as Benoni, East London and Cape Town. In fact, I probably visited every branch in South Africa at one time or another. Sometimes it was just for a short period when people were on local leave then usually I just drove there and came home for the weekend
Here I was , a whipper snipper from Johannesburg, coming to rule the roost. Some of the staff were not over-enamoured with the concept, but I seemed to get on really well with the Chief Agents and Brokers; perhaps something to do with my entertaining skills? When it was time for me to go back to Johannesburg some of them wrote to Head Office asking for me to stay permanently!
It was during this time that I came up with the idea of getting a caravan. I put a proposal to the General Manager that instead of paying for all the hotels they should buy a caravan and we would stay in the caravan parks. He agreed and we first used it in Durban. Later on we bought a bigger one (six berth), which the company car towed around.
We took the caravan to Port Elizabeth, where we built a house in Cassia Place Sunridge Park. One of our neighbours there was a doctor who we met up with again when we came to Australia. He was living in Albury. We visited him there and had our first experience of Australian flies! Yet another strange coincidence was that our next-door neighbour in Lusaka was the manager of The
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