The Airmen's Stories - F/O J R Bailey

James Bailey, who has died aged 80, founded Drum, the magazine for, and largely written by, black Africans. Jim Bailey was a notable example of the offspring of a rich family who breaks away from his roots and takes up radical causes or unconventional interests. He became Drum's "angel" by accident.
In 1951 he was approached by a friend who thought there must be money to be made from millions of readers in South Africa and elsewhere in English-speaking Africa. But the first issue sold only 24,000 copies. Bailey recognised what was wrong: its tone was "far too patronising" He got rid of Drum's first editor and in his place hired Anthony Sampson, a young English friend with no more journalistic experience than himself. The appointment was highly successful. Under Sampson a team of gifted, if way-ward, African writers and photographers came together and produced something not seen before, an authentic voice of the African masses. Before long, Drum was selling 350,000 copies.

Several eminent editors succeeded Sampson, including Tom Hopkinson, who had been the renowned editor of Picture Post. By its heyday in the 1960s Drum was read by five million people throughout Africa. It chronicled life under apartheid with vividness and increasing bitterness. Drum was the only paper at Sharpeville on the day of the shooting in 1960. Inevitably the Pretoria government disliked Drum and bore down on it. But as independent Africa emerged, what passed for black majority rule north of the Tropic of Capricorn proved as inimical to a free press as white minority rule to the south.
In Nigeria Drum was nationalised by General Gowon's dictatorship; in Ghana it was threatened by another military regime and various governments in central and east Africa were hostile to an independent voice exposing corruption and brutality. Bailey finally sold Drum in 1984.

James Richard Abe Bailey was born on October 23 1919, a scion of the "Randlords", that knot of gifted and ruthless financiers who had pioneered the diamond- and gold-mining industry in South Africa. His father, Sir Abe Bailey. 1st Bt, was born as long ago as 1864 and one of the few mining magnates who were South African by birth. As a young man in Johannesburg, Abe Bailey was a member of the "reform committee" of Uitlanders linked with the Jameson Raid of 1895.

From modest beginnings Abe Bailey became a millionaire, chairman of 14 companies and a companion of Cecil Rhodes's (whose seat in the Cape legislature Bailey inherited). After the Boer War he worked with Louis Both as one of the creators of the Union of South Africa. He was a friend of Winston Churchill's and a famous host at his houses near Cape Town and in Bryanston Square, London. It was at the latter that the meeting took place in December 1916 which led to Asquith's replacement as Prime Minister by Lloyd George. By his second wife. Mary, daughter of the 5th Lord Rossmore, Sir Abe had two sons and three daughters. The elder of the sons is Sir Derrick Bailey, 3rd Bt; the younger was Jim.

Both Derrick and Jim were sent to Winchester. Both of them also served in the RAF during the Second World War and both were awarded the DFC, Jim destroying at least six enemy aircraft. Their mother, Lady Bailey, who had flown a Gipsy Moth from London to Cape Town in 1932, served during the war as a ferry pilot delivering aircraft.

On the outbreak of war Jim Bailey was called up from the Oxford University Air Squadron in which he had been active as an undergraduate at Christ Church. In June 1940 he was posted to No 264 Squadron at Duxford, equipped with Boulton Paul Defiants, obsolescent and vulnerable turret--gunned fighters. On August 28 Bailey flew in the squadron's last action before 264 was withdrawn from daytime fighting. His gunner, Sergeant OA Hardy, damaged a He111 bomber, but their Defiant was so badly damaged that Bailey had to make a forced landing.

Soon afterwards, Bailey was posted to No 85 Squadron at Castle Camps, Cambridgeshire. Hunting enemy aircraft in the dark without airborne radar was a thankless task for a Hurricane pilot. But in July 1941 Bailey was posted to No 1452 Flight to fly Havocs experimentally fitted with Turbinlite airborne searchlights. He hoped for greater success, but the Turbinlite scheme failed. Bailey moved at the end of the year to No 125, still flying Defiants in the night fighter role. When the squadron graduated to radar-equipped Beaufighters, Bailey hunted enemy reconnaissance aircraft over the Irish Sea, Orkney and Shetland, bagging a Ju88 and damaging another.

Later he received command of a Flight in No 600 at Monte Corvino in Italy. Fighting over Anzio, Rome and Elba, he shot down four bombers and one fighter at night. As a relief from the horrors of the war Bailey tried bee-keeping, taking his bees from one airbase to another during the Italian campaign. But this only "confused the poor sods" he said and they never produced any honey.

At the end of the war Bailey returned to Oxford to complete his degree, rejoining the University Air Squadron. But the war had left him with a sense of loss and futility. "The RAF introduced me to a global village of men of all classes, races and backgrounds but it also killed most of my existing friends."

Sir Abe had died in 1940 and Jim went back to South Africa after the war to take care of his father's estates. But he found himself estranged from his country by the continued repression, which became worse after the Nationalists took power in 1948. Instead of leaving, or retreating into "internal emigration", Bailey threw himself into the life of South Africa. He and Drum had difficult times in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but he could claim with some justice that the new South Africa which emerged under his old friend Nelson Mandela was partly his creation.

He published several books of his own, poetry, memoirs and idiosyncratic history. Eskimo Nell (1964, reissued in 1990 as The Sky Suspended) was an account of his war. In ‘Sailing to Paradise’, he argued that mankind had been a much more closely integrated global community in the Bronze Age than other historians had acknowledged.

Jim Bailey married first, in 1958 (dissolved 1963), Gillian Parker; they had a son. he married secondly, in 1964, the pianist Barbara Epstein; they had two sons, of whom one survives.

With acknowledgments to the Daily Telegraph