The Lady in White

A wartime legend, Perla Gibson stood on the dockside and sang herself into the hearts of thousands of Allied troops as they sailed from Durban for the battlefields of Europe and the Far East. Graham Jooste tells her story.

- Graham Jooste

During the Second World War, Durban harbour was a busy way station for troopships. Soldiers and airmen from New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain and elsewhere, as well as training bases in South Africa, all spent a brief period of leave here before sailing for the jungles of Burma and British Malaya or the battlegrounds of Europe.

As the ships entered the harbour, the men would crowd along the landward rails to watch a woman dressed in white and wearing a red hat welcoming them with songs.

“She sang for hours all the songs we knew,” wrote one soldier. “Songs we learnt as kids; songs we’d heard at the cinema, over the radio and in the dance hall; popular tunes we’d sung many a time; and songs one usually hears in semiclassical surroundings with the appurtenances of spotlights and soft accompaniments.

“Yet they lost nothing by lacking these attributes; rather they gained in meaning and eloquence, coming from this lone white figure picking her way to and fro along the quay.”

Perla Gibson’s custom of singing to the ships appears to have started when she was seeing off a young Irish seaman whom her family had entertained the day before. As he embarked, he asked her to sing something ‘Irish’ for him. Gibson, a trained soprano, responded with ‘When Irish eyes are smiling’, and received tumultuous applause from the troops.

Seeing this reaction, she made a commitment to drive down from her home on the Berea and sing to the troops whenever a convoy entered the harbour.

A TALENTED SINGER

Gibson was born in Durban in 1888, the daughter of Otto Siedle, a prominent shipping agent of German extraction. She studied music and art in the US and Europe and gave recitals as a soprano in New York and London.