Howie Frizelle (1952-2024), a personal tribute

Next to a river somewhere in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands circa 1976 in the bountiful beard period?

By Mark Harrison

It seems as if Howie was always there but I suppose earliest memories go back to around 1974, i.e. 50 years ago. We were suitors of the Toscano sisters, Elena and Carmela and were probably the envy of our peer-group in Durban. As "outsiders" in a tight Italian community it was inevitable that we should become friends.

Apart from that, I liked the guy and I think he probably liked me, too.

From as long as I can remember Howard (Howie, H) always liked games of wit and chance and we both spent a lot of our spare time hanging about playing stuff like backgammon at the Toscano residence in what was then Cowey (now Problem Mkize) Road in Durban. Probably waiting while our partners prepared for a dance at the Italian Club Alternatively we might have been hanging about before going off to a drive-in cinema for the evening as a foursome. Heaven forbid that, with a strict Italian Papa in attendance, we should be tempted by the notoriously nefarious goings-on that happened to young couples who visited drive-ins a deux.

Elena, being the elder of the two sisters always got to sit in the front of the car, which meant that Howie usually did the driving. Similarly, he tended to be the one ferrying us to and from the Italian Club. So it was somewhat poetic that, when Carmela and I got married in 1974, Howard was the appointed driver of my Dad's Mercedes transporting the bridal entourage to the church and the married couple from there to the ubiquitous Italian Club for the reception. Efforts to locate a photograph of Howard the Chauffeur have sadly failed. Nonetheless, he got used to the front seat in our joint efforts and that is where he ended up on our inaugural attempt at the annual Dusi Canoe Marathon. More of that later.

Above: le belle ragazze, Carmela and Elena Toscano; accompanying us to some event or the other with Carmela as the official photographer.

​After Carmela's and my wedding we sped off to London for a year and neither of us saw Howie until our return in 1975. Somewhere around that time we developed a penchant for paddling about, initially in battered kayaks and latterly also on paddle-skis. We tried to convince ourselves that the latter were there to keep us fit and strong for kayaking/canoeing but the beach was a drawcard, too.

But the canoeing continued in proper earnest and barely a weekend went by when the two of us weren't taking part in some river race or another. Most times we were accompanied by Elena and Carmela and often also by Howard's brother Mike and his wife, Debbie. In fact Howard and Mike often paddled together in a K2 (a double kayak). The rivers we paddled ranged from Durban's local uMngeni to the mighty uMkhomazi and Thukela rivers. A favourite of Howie's and Mike's was the uMzimkulu which quickly became my nemesis. Smashed up Howie's K2 on my first attempt (while it's owner was partnering his brother and I had a stand-in, my friend Andrew) and wrecked my shoulder in my own K1 on a later attempt while shooting a weir. 

My propensity for wreckage didn't, however, deter my brother-in-law-in-law from asking me to partner him in his first "Dusi". More of that after the break ... 

Above: (clockwise from the top left) helmeted Howie on the right obtaining river info from a fellow canoeist; attending to his cherished K176 after lifting it off his trusty Opel; it wasn't only canoes that got smashed up on the uMzimkulu; I believe I took this pic in Australia while I seconded my friend on a two day event, if I remember correctly, on the Hunter River.

The Dusi

There is another river, the Msunduzi, which is smaller than those mentioned above but which is a tributary of the uMngeni and connects the provincial capital uMgungundlovu/Pietermaritzburg with Durban, KwaZulu-Natal's (KZN's) biggest city.

Africa's biggest canoe race, fondly known as the Dusi[1], is run over three days annually between the two cities, on these two rivers. 

​Late in 1976 H asked me to partner him in his K2 (a new one after I'd smashed his original in the uMzimkulu) in the 1977 event. It had originally been planned that he paddle it with Mike but Mike was now doing the event with a different partner and we needed to do some serious training. I won't say it had become a grudge match  ... 

We did, however, need to do some serious training. The unspoken objective was to reach Durban before Mike and his partner - officially we needed to finish in the top 50 because the paddlers who achieved this were mentioned in dispatches in the following year's programme/calendar.

Having pretty much level-pegged for the first two-and-a-half days we came to a point on the uMngeni where a strategic decision had to be made. The river entered into a set of dangerous rapids and we could either paddle all the way to the finish or we could take a legitimate portage over a steep hill, known as Burma Road, thereby mitigating the risk of smashing up our boat.

​I believe we were quite a bit ahead of Mike and partner when we reached the take-out point for Burma Road and decided to take the mitigation strategy. I don't know what was worse: Mike overtaking us irretrievably having taken the river or the fact that we just missed the top 50 by one place[2].

Howie paddled the Dusi frequently after that and I'm sure he finished in a better time and position on many occasions. I'm willing to bet, however, that none of those would have been more special for him than completing the race one year with his daughter, Marian.

​Other sports

I paddled the Dusi one more time on my own so all I can lay claim to is dilettantism. The same can be said of the Comrades Marathon, also connecting the 50+ miles between the two cities, which I ran once and H did a prodigious number of times and also managed to encourage his gorgeous wife to do the same, if my memory serves me well.

Then Howard and I ended up in Australia together. This escapade is covered in depth in another blog so I won't but the link is here[3]. Just to say that Mr Frizelle was THE sublime character to have as a road trip companion.

Above: (l to r) Howie expounding to the family ... wish I could remember the subject; Howie searching for the perfect skimming stone on Gt Keppel Island in the Great Barrier Reef area ... feel sure his stone skipped many more times than mine.

So why was Howie the sublime companion?

I struggled with this one, actually. Not because there was no rhyme nor reason but because he was such a multi-faceted character with his qualities moulding in with each other. If I had to break it down, maybe H would have approved with this random top 10 list or he could easily have Pooh-poohed the whole thing. At one stage we were very close and yet I still often found him to be an enigma.

• A sense of mischief - many's the time he'd get that twinkle in his eye when he knew he was up to no good but that it was good to be up to no good.
• A sense of humour and fun - this went hand and glove with the sense of mischief ... more often than not the mischief ended up being fun for all involved..
• Intellect - Howard's intellect was unquestionable. He very rarely made a serious statement without being able to back it up with evidence and sound opinion.
• Determination - He knew where he was going and he almost invariably got there in his own way ... all those Dusis and Comrades speak for themselves.
• A sense of fairness - this may well go with the following item so I'll add trust to the list.
• Loyalty and duty - I think he liked me and, while he may have reserved more overt displays of this for his close family, I always got the sense that he was on my side in difficult times
• Game for anything - our whole road trip had a side agenda to do with entertaining each other, enjoying the music (the two albums we had in the car, Kate Bush and Emerson, Lake and Palmer), silly diversions such as toad races in Queensland, competitive pebble throwing in the sea, delight with a boat trip out to the Great Barrier Reef.
• Anything's a game - with a brain a few jumps ahead of most other people's he could play out awkward confrontations with good humour.
• Eager participant in all his endeavours from paddling to brain-bending games of wit.
• Love of his family

Above all, I always enjoyed being in his company.
​
A career-changing conversation

As I mentioned earlier in this soliloquy, Howard and I spent a fair amount of time hanging around the Toscano residence, even after we were married. He loved his board games and after beating me hollow at backgammon in Newcastle NSW we were now back in humble old Durbs. H had just discovered Mastermind and insisted we played the game during every available minute. I was relating how, as much as I loved journalism, we just couldn't survive on a reporter's salary. It also happened that I was just starting to beat him at the odd round of Mastermind.

"You've got an aptitude for logic and IT," he stated. I was flattered but didn't quite know what to do with the information.
"I'll get you an interview at Countdown," he offered. Countdown was a huge IT division of an even huger retailing organisation in South Africa.
I went, I got the job. Now we were not only mates and sort of relations, we were also colleagues. 

He was obviously a bit senior in the firm but not too senior for us to fall into the habit of crumbed pork chops with creamy tagliarini at Aldo's nearby restaurant every Thursday lunchtime. He also knew where to find a bargain.

The other weekday lunch hours were spent playing cards in a darkened inner room in the concrete abomination where Countdown had its premises. I say cards but H was a great proponent of Hearts, a sort of individual inverse version of bridge (requiring significant skill[4]) where four players slug it out for money. The stakes were small but his acumen ensured that Howard came out tops, although happily not at my expense as the other two players, who shall remain nameless, were lambs to the slaughter.

Moving on

Eventually Howard and I moved on from Countdown ... into opposing camps. He, as perspicaciously as usual, chose the IBM route through Hitachi/Persetel and I remained in the Burroughs camp but working directly for that company. Burroughs lost ground to IBM in the early 80s and a merger with Sperry/Univac to become Unisys didn't help. I remember H showing me a marketing article on how percussive names such as IBM almost inevitably won out over sibilant ones such as Unisys.

Sadly sibilance wasn't the order of the day for Carmela and me and we went our separate ways. I married Shelley-ann (Shan) and Carmela became Mrs Kingsley-Jones. We all remain friends to this day living on opposite sides of the planet. Unisys gave me a leg-up in the UK while the Frizelles chose, in the medium term, to remain in South Africa despite the lure of family in Oz.

All was not lost, however, and the Frizelles visited us in our new home in Faringdon, Oxfordshire, in 1990, shortly after our daughter Kate was born. This visit is embedded in memory because Kate patiently sat in a pushchair in the Red Lion during an afternoon in which a significant sequence of beers was consumed.

A couple of years later Shan, Kate and I headed to SA for Christmas, which was mostly spent at my parents' small farm at Mooi River in the KZN Midlands. To mitigate our boredom and relative rural isolation Mum arranged for some lunches with our friends to which, amongst others, the Frizelle and Kinnear families were invited, attending with a burgeoning bevy of children. I do hope they all enjoyed themselves despite a fair old disparity in ages.

Above: just as the extended Toscano family absorbed Howard into their bosom, they also continued the relationship with my family in Durban ... Elena's parents, Aurora and Ciro, are seen here with my Mum, uncle and Dad, I believe being hosted by Elena in the Frizelle's garden in Durban.

Spread around the world

For various reasons we didn't get to travel to South Africa much in the 1990s and 2000s and when we did, in latter years, it was predominantly to the Cape where a large proportion of our families had migrated.

There was an exception last year (2023) when KZN became a focus to visit oldest and dearest friends. Sadly two of them were in their final stages of cancer. I managed to get to see Tony (Spikey Norman) Kinnear just in time and had planned to see the Frizelles but they were detained down the South Coast at the last minute and unable to make the rendezvous in Simbithi. I never realised how sad the missed opportunity made me until Howie hit the buffers early in 2024 and never recovered, finally slipping away on the March 17.

​My condolences to Elena, Stephen, Luke and Marian. 

[Endnotes]:

1. For some background on the Dusi see https://dusi.co.za/about-the-dusi/
2. A bit more colour on this in https://www.marksadventures.co.uk/fputn/fputn-back-to-the-newsroom-and-other-tales
3. Oz road trip with Howie https://www.marksadventures.co.uk/fputn/fputn-1978-oz-road-trip-bruce-hiway-etc
4. Hearts ,,, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_(card_game)