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Laurence Gandar

Laurence Owen Vine Gandar was a South African journalist and newspaper editor. He is best known as an editor of South African newspaper The Rand Daily Mail.

Early life
Laurence Gandar was born on 28 January 1915 in Durban, Natal, South Africa. After high school, he attended the University of Natal and obtained a Bachelor of Arts. He would represent the province of Natal in hurdles and long jump. After university, he started work as a journalist on a local paper. When war broke out in 1939, he enlisted in the Union Defence Force and rose from the rank of corporal to captain, becoming the Brigade Intelligence Officer in the 6th South African Armoured Division in Italy. He would marry his wife Isobel Ballance in 1944. ==Career==
Career
After the war he returned to journalism in Durban with the Argus Newspaper group and would eventually become an assistant editor. In October 1957, he was offered the role of editor of the Rand Daily Mail, one of many English South African newspapers owned by Anglo American.During June and July 1965, he and journalist Benjamin Pogrund wrote a series of articles on conditions in South African prisons for black South Africans in Port Elizabeth, Pretoria and the Cinderella Prison in Boksburg based on interviews with prison officials and prisoners. The articles cited assaults on prisoners, sodomy and unhygienic conditions in these prisons. During this period the newspaper was subjected to around the clock surveillance, Security Branch raids, the eavesdropping of the editor, journalists and the newsroom as well as infiltration by police informants and the intimidations and prosecution of informants. The attacks against the newspaper were also taken up by the government controlled South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and the Afrikaner newspapers and silence from the English newspapers. The government would instead of investigating the claims through the means of a judicial inquiry, prosecute two prisoners and two wardens sentencing one to three years in jail, 'confessing' to making up the charges and being a paid informant of the paper, a claim that the Rand Daily Mail was not allowed to challenge at his trial. They would be charged with contravening South Africa's Prisons Act and would eventually appear in court in November 1968, before Justice P. M. Cillié, in a trial that last 88 days. The prosecution would successfully argue that 17 allegations in the articles were false and the judge agreed finding the two guilty on two charges of publishing false allegations and not 'verifying' the facts. Gandar was fined R100 on both charges or three months imprisonment and Pogrund received two three-month sentences suspended for three years and subject to him not contravening the Prison Act. In 1965 he was fired as editor of the Rand Daily Mail by it board of directors because of poor circulation figures but after a threatened walk-out by the senior journalists, Gandar was appointed as editor-in-chief and Raymond Louw appointed as the new editor. Gander would remain in his new role until 1969. Gandar was appointed the first director of the Minority Rights Group in Britain which investigated and publicized the treatment of the worlds minorities, a position that lasted three years and afterwards returned to South Africa. ==Honours==
Honours
Gandar won a Kemsley Empire Journalist Scholarship and would spend a year in Britain. and in 1990 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Natal. In 2010, he was honoured with a posthumous award as a World Press Freedom Hero from the International Press Institute. Other awards include a gold medal award by the British Institute of Journalists and a World Press Achievement Award in 1966 for his newspaper from the American Newspaper Publishers Association. ==Death==
Death
He retired to the south coast of Natal and played golf and invested in the stock-market. His wife Isobel died in 1989. Laurence Gandar died in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal South Africa on 15 November 1998 shortly after the death of his son, and after several years of illness, from Parkinson's disease. == References ==
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