Robert Harold Lundie "Jock" Strachan (1 December 1925 – 7 February 2020) was a white South African writer and anti-apartheid activist.

[1] He flew for the South African Air Force during the Second World War, trained as an artist, then became Umkhonto we Sizwe's first explosives expert.

[2][3] His father had been a metalworker in the Clyde shipyards who had emigrated from Scotland to South Africa in 1902,[2][4] and his mother was a teacher from an Afrikaner family.

[2] Brown died in 1931 from the effects of poison gas in the First World War, and his mother moved with Harold and his two sisters to Pietermaritzburg in Natal.

[10] Strachan joined the South African Air Force straight from school, and served as a pilot towards the end of the Second World War[11] with the rank of lieutenant.

[2][10] In 1948 the ruling National Party introduced apartheid, a system of institutionalised racial segregation and discrimination against the black majority.

[15] For a period after he left the air force, as a reservist he used to enjoy spending a month of each year flying the Harvard to keep his proficiency.

[16] In 1950 Strachan won a scholarship to study at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London,[3] and married fellow South African Jean Middleton.

[2] In 1952 he returned to London and worked as a security guard, and in 1953 he managed his brother-in-law's painting and decorating business in Chingola in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where he encouraged the black workers to unionise.

[24] He became a founder member of the Liberal Party of South Africa in 1954, along with Alan Paton and Peter Brown,[25] and in 1957 joined the Congress of Democrats.

[nb 4][3][33] In 1961 he joined the illegal South African Communist Party (SACP), and edited their newspaper New Age.

[11][34] He accepted Mbeki's request to improvise explosive devices for the newly-formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK),[nb 5] and experimented with substances such as nitric acid, potassium permanganate, magnesium, glycerol and icing sugar.

We did a good job, actually.Strachan, who was MK's first explosives expert,[40] designed a simple incendiary device based on petrol and initiated by glycerol filtering through beach sand onto potassium permanganate.

[nb 6][48][49] He served thirteen months of his sentence in solitary confinement in Pretoria Central Prison, and had his teeth removed.

[51][52] When Strachan was named as a conspirator in the Rivonia Trial in 1963–64,[53] he refused to give evidence against Mbeki and Denis Goldberg, even when he was threatened with hanging.

When the story was published in the Rand Daily Mail, in late June and early July 1965,[1] the government invoked the Prisons Act.

[40] During his second incarceration he was not allowed to read or study; he helped raise the morale of fellow political prisoners by designing props and costumes for amateur dramatics.

[60] In 1978, and again in 1979, unknown assailants fired shots at his house, leading him to fortify parts of it with steel plate and breeze blocks.

[66] Dan Jacobson commented in the London Review of Books that Strachan had "seized eagerly on the expressive potentialities of South African English demotic speech ... in order to make something new and rare of it".

and Max on my right grips the arm on that side and declares 'Comrade, if we're going to conquer all South Africa one shithouse at a time we'll all be in the grave before liberation ...'[39] The book begins and ends with stories about angling for shad, a longstanding passion of Strachan's.