ELIZABETH FLOYD
Neil actually grew up in Kenya and his parents left Kenya at the time when the new government came into place and came to South Africa, and he went through a fairly standard middle class upbringing.  I think when he came to university initially he was not exposed to explicitly a political environment, but certainly was a kind of young intellectual who was looking at other realities than the ones that he had been brought up in.
 He was at medical school in Cape Town but it was when he came to Jo'burg that he met up with people who were more directly involved in issues, particularly the Labour Movement. Initially in Johannesburg he was a doctor working at Tembisa Hospital. He then had the problems with the Army.  His initial plan was to leave the country when he faced a call-up but by the time that that came he was involved enough to decide to stay, but it was quite difficult because as a draft dodger, he couldn't take a conventional job.
 He then was involved in setting up the Johannesburg Branch of the Food and Canning Worker's Union.  In the '60's food and canning had been very extensive, it had then kind of lost ground under the repression and they were reexpanding.  Food and Canning was part of a range of unions at that time which were going in similar directions. SAWU people came up here and he assisted them in getting going, and he linked up with people like CAWUSA and  The Municipal Workers Union.  Through that experience he became more and more exposed to the realities that people faced and more responsive to that kind of organisation, and very committed to the union movement.  And when the pressures and the dangers built up, I think felt so involved in that that he didn't really think about extricating himself from it. 
 But the dual problems of being in the union movement at that particular point and being a draft dodger, put him under tremendous pressure, and his life really was completely involved in the union.