Another piece in the puzzle of Dallas

On 22nd November 1963 I was playing in the street outside our home in Rosebank, Cape Town. My mother appeared at the front gate and called me in - with customary firmness but unusual urgency.

"Come inside at once," she said, "they have killed Kennedy."
"Who is Kennedy?" I asked in six year old innocence.
What I should have asked of course was, "Who is 'they'?"

So whose pawn was Lee Harvey Oswald? Behind the picket fence, on the Grassy Knoll stood 'Badgeman' - or did he? When was JFK's last game of chess? How did this latest finely turned piece find its way past the Warren Commission?  Still so many unanswered questions fifty years on. Maybe mum knows.

Trade routes run the length and breath of Africa. This dusty foot soldier has made it from Mfuwe village in Eastern Zambia's Luangwa Valley to the leafy suburbs of Johannesburg.

Wood floats

Wood floats. It's a simple principle with a more detailed scientific explanation available. It's also the genesis of every successful mercantile fleet that has ever taken to the sea. These two pawns come from opposite ends of the earth - tiny floating splinters from two great trading empires. The one was a spar fished out of a Venetian canal; the other a fallen flagstaff on Miyajima Island, Japan. Much travelled, smartly turned, well seasoned, both are now brothers in arms facing their new foes across a wooden chessboard in Johannesburg. How did that happen?

From ruler to ruled

A branch, recently fallen, picked up underneath a eucalyptus tree outside the Jan Smuts cottage at Irene. Given that the photographic evidence shows the koppie upon which the house is constructed (an old officers' mess, transported from Middelburg) was completely barren when Smuts moved in (in 1908), that he planted all the trees himself and that the mother tree of this branch (the rings indicate an age of over 30 for the branch) must be all of 50m tall and 100 years old – then this pawn came from Smuts’s hands.

8 A note from the past

In 1902 Bansall & Sons of London built an overstrung, underdamped upright piano action within a walnut casing - a small part of which fell loose when it was moved 109 years later.

7 White Smoke

We have white smoke. The Bishop of Frodsham emerges from the classroom.

7 From Woodwork to Divinity

A familiar journey from one lesson to the next, another shiny faced schoolboy drags himself across the quad.