A Reading reader reports: Students at Reading University have launched an emergency cash appeal for the defence of an ex-lecturer under arrest in South Africa on charges under the Sabotage Act. The lecturer, 40-year-old Mr, Bertram Hirson, is critically ill in hospital at a Johannesburg gaol, after being kept in solitary comfinement for 83 days, Mr, Hirson was a. temporary lecturer in the Physics Department from January to December last year. News of him being charged only came through a few weeks ago. According to the student newspaper Shell, Dr. Green of the Physics Dept. to whom he had written saids
"Mr. Hirson wrote to me from hospital. He said that in June he had been ‘returning from a conference at Durban,..ewhen he was stopped by police at a road block, He was taken back to his office at the University of Witwatersrand..and arrested under the '90-day' detention law,..."
This initiative by the students and staff at Reading is to be commended - anyone who would like more information, etc., should write to Shell, Reading University, Readingy Berks.