Waterford farmer who challenged South Africa’s apartheid regime

Diana Sandes, who has died aged 92, witnessed as the child of a distinguished British military family the high noon of the British empire, spending part of her childhood in 1930s Bermuda, where her father was garrison commander.

She witnessed also its greatest crisis as the wife of Terence Lindsey (Ben) Sandes, a South African-born RAF bomber pilot in the second World War. Then, with her husband, she arguably epitomised British democratic values at their best during a long period in South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, when both actively opposed apartheid.

In 1964 they moved to Ireland, after her husband, whose Irish father had been a surgeon in Cape Town, inherited Flower Hill House near Ballyduff Upper in west Waterford from a distant relative. During their time in Ireland, they farmed cattle, bred American five-gaited thoroughbred horses, and became prominent members of the local hunt, building a large circle of friends.

Diana and Ben became renowned as judges of horse trials at Punchestown, Camphire and Blarney, and were still judging at Punchestown’s three-day events well into their 80s.

Diana Sandes was born in Portsmouth, the only child of Gerald Wildman-Lushington, an officer in the Royal Marines, and Catherine Trounce, daughter of a Cornish banker. Wildman-Lushington later rose to the rank of major-general, in charge of commandos in the British armed forces. He later served as Lord Mountbatten’s chief-of-staff.

Diana Sandes married aged 19 in 1941, at a time when her husband was in constant danger. After the war, the couple ran a sheep and cattle farm in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, living in quite primitive conditions, at first without electricity or running water.

Anti-apartheid group

It was there that Diana Sandes became involved with the Black Sash movement, a group of white women opposed to apartheid. The group is still in existence as a multi-racial human rights advocacy group. She wrote a column for the local English-language newspaper, in which she condemned the increasingly racist regime.

On one occasion, she and her Black Sash colleagues mounted a silent protest at the opening of a nearby courthouse, which necessitated the then minister for justice having to be smuggled into the building by a rear door.

The Sandeses were subjected to a campaign of petty harassment by the security forces, which eventually induced them, in 1961, to quit the country, but not before they both had personally witnessed one of the iconic moments of recent South African history, the attempted assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd, the then South African prime minister, at the Rand agricultural show in Johannesburg in 1960.

There, they were seated about 50 feet from Dr Verwoerd when a gunman opened fire, hitting the “architect of apartheid” as Verwoerd came to be known, several times.

Verwoerd was eventually to be assassinated in Cape Town in September 1966.

When the Sandeses finally sold their farm, they did what Diana said was at the time “an unheard of thing; we held a party for our African staff, at which we shook their hands”. She added: “If I had the chance to do it now, I would embrace them.”

The Sandeses arrived in England in 1961, all their possessions loaded into a horsebox, and, before coming to Ireland in 1964, lived a relatively precarious life, partly on a houseboat on the Thames.

Diana Sandes was predeceased by her husband and by her eldest son, Patrick. She is survived by her second son, Neil, and by grandchildren.