LONDON VAUXHALL DEALERS

Yohan Blake delivered a shock that will be felt all the way to London 2012 by handing the world's fastest man, Usain Bolt, a rare defeat in the Jamaican Olympic trials. On a night when anticipation of quick times charged the atmosphere of Kingston's national stadium, Blake did not disappoint the large crowd. In a furious dash down the track, he recorded a time of 9.75sec to claim the 100m title, comfortably ahead of a fast-finishing Bolt, who clocked 9.86, just getting by Asafa Powell for second, who finished third in a time of 9.88.

For Blake, this went a long way in settling doubts about the 22-year-old sprinter's quality, but for Bolt, the world record holder, it was a performance that raised questions in the buildup to next month's Games. All three men qualified for the Jamaican Olympic team and will line up against a formidable US contingent when the Games start on 27 July.

A few stunned spectators still slumped forward in their chairs stared blankly in disbelief following the sub-10 second race, hardly able to fully comprehend the sight of Blake still celebrating a well-deserved win on the bright blue track. Yet an upset had not been wholly unexpected.

Bolt finished first in his semi-final heat, in 10.01, only just ahead of Michael Frater, after another wretched start left the Olympic champion with plenty of work to do to get back to the field. He did it easily enough, as he had in the first round, but perhaps the disapproving headshake on crossing the line was the clearest sign that things were not quite right for him.

"Asafa and Yohan, these guys have good top-end speed so for me to get left in the blocks like that was not a good thing. I guess it was just one of those things," Bolt said.

"In the semi-finals the guy in lane seven moved and it threw me off. I keep seeing these guys in my peripheral vision. It's kind of hard to ignore them. When they move it throws you off and then you get left. After you get left like that it is always hard to get back."

Bolt's sluggish start had been cause for concern, particularly after losing his world championship title to Blake after a false start in the 2011 final in Daegu. This season there was no occasion more evident that timing his acceleration from the blocks is still a problem than the 10.04 he recorded in Ostrava, where Bolt got away slowly, before recovering with a trademark late burst. He beat Powell twice, with impressive times of 9.76 (Rome) and 9.79 (Oslo) but again seemed to find the starting blocks more like giant sand traps that a means of propelling himself forward.

At his best the 6ft 4in superstar has never been a quick starter. However, his tardiness should be a worry for both himself and his coach Glen Mills, who coaches Blake as well. But Mills, while stating that he was not surprised by the performance of any of the athletes, dismissed any concerns about a substandard performance in London.

"I wasn't surprised by his performance, Bolt is not at his best but he is good enough to compete," Mills said. "We are right where we want to be going into London. We just want to keep them healthy and that is key. We didn't send Yohan to Europe so he is in far better shape than Bolt at this time, but we have four weeks. We will take it in stride and we know exactly what to do."

Bolt and Blake are set for another showdown in the 200m final today as both cruised into the semi-finals. Bolt won his heat in 21.21 and Blake his in 21.43, both running into strong headwinds.

The Olympic 100m champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce sent a clear warning to rivals hoping to claim her crown, as the diminutive sprinter blew away the other competitors on the way to a new personal best of 10.70sec. Despite a slow start to season Fraser-Pryce's dismissal of a strong field, which included the world champion Carmelita Jeter, at a grand prix in New York, gave clear indication that she was rediscovering her best form. Fraser-Pryce seems to have improved the last part of her race. "The people that work hard are going to be the ones able to defend their title in London," she said.

Denis Walshe, an electrician from Beckenham, Kent, is on a mission – to track down a black cleaner he met in a Durban hotel room in 1971. She walked in on him and his mate, Pete Smith, while they were building a "leaflet bomb'' designed to discharge a confetti of thousands of African National Congress leaflets they had smuggled from London in a false-bottomed suitcase.

"We had identified all the places where the black workers catch buses back to the townships in the rush hour," said Walshe, now 63. "That was where we were going to place our buckets and have them explode simultaneously.

"It was the night before and we had 10,000 ANC leaflets spread all over the floor, timing devices, electric cables and small bits of explosives everywhere and in walks the maid!

"We were in despair. We had flown halfway around the world to carry out this operation and everything depended on what happened in the next few seconds.''

Walshe, who was in his early 20s, and Smith were among a remarkably diverse group of white activists – electricians, engineers, a telephonist, a seaman and several students from the London School of Economics – recruited to travel to South Africa on a range of short missions in the 60s and 70s. Armed with toy tarantulas, fireworks and plastic buckets, they aimed to send the message that the ANC was still alive. The mastermind of the operation was LSE student Ronnie Kasrils, who later served as a minister in the governments of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.

This motley group of men and women, all now in their 60s, have spent the last week in South Africa being feted by the ANC, and have emerged as unsung heroes of the struggle against apartheid. Whisked from Johannesburg airport to Mbeki's 70th birthday party, they were also photographed at an event with the party's centennial torch. They are on a book tour to promote The London Recruits, which charts their covert exploits between 1967 and 1971 to reinvigorate resistance to apartheid within South Africa at a time when the racist regime had jailed all the ANC's top leaders, including Mandela.

The apartheid regime thought it had stamped out resistance for good. Mandela was in jail for life, having been convicted along with the rest of the top leadership at the 1964 Rivonia trial. Other senior figures had gone into exile. Prime Minister John Vorster abolished the last four seats reserved for coloured (mixed race) MPs.

Kasrils said: "The late 1960s were the bleakest period of the struggle against apartheid. The underground networks had been crushed, we had ceased to exist and the masses were intimidated. We needed to get a message of hope to the remnants of the movement and to the South African people. The London recruits filled a void right up until 1972 when the underground was rebuilt again."

Ken Keable, a 67-year-old electrical engineer who edited The London Recruits, picks up the story: "I was studying at City University and was recruited by the London district secretary of the Young Communist League," he said. "I said I would be available after my finals in January 1968. I was introduced to Ronnie Kasrils and in April 1968 I was sent to Johannesburg on my first mission. I had 1,200 letters in a false-bottomed suitcase and had to go to the post office, buy 1,200 stamps and post them all round Johannesburg. They were letters of encouragement to the Indian community, which the apartheid government was trying to divert from the struggle.

"We were protected by our white skins. There was no reason for passport control to suspect we were working for the ANC," said Keable, who was deeply shocked at the racial injustices he found. "Some of us said we were on holiday or on honeymoon. Others, like me, looked like Englishmen looking for career opportunities. The regime welcomed people like us, they needed us. I remember thinking that if I lived here I would sacrifice a lot to bring about change. And then I thought, why only if I lived here?"

Keable's next assignment, in 1970, was to plant bucket bombs. He and a comrade were sent to Durban while other activists simultaneously carried out operations in East London, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and Johannesburg. The leaflets stated: "The ANC says to [John] Vorster and his gang: your days are coming to an end. We will take back our country."

As the buckets went off in strategic commuter sites, cassette recorders – placed in abandoned cars or bicycle baskets and wired to amplifiers – played messages from London, beginning "This is the voice of the ANC" and including songs by the ANC London choir.

"The London recruits set off leaflet distribution devices in five cities every year between 1967 and 1971," said Keable, who estimates that 1m leaflets were distributed. They were brought to South Africa in suitcases with false bottoms, two of which are known to have survived to this day, including Walshe's. It has been relieved of its normal duties as the home of the family's Christmas decorations and is touring South Africa with him.

Opening his battered blue suitcase, Walshe explained how it had been lined with white and black paper: "Ronnie Kasrils's [late] wife Eleanor had been all over London looking for the chequered paper which makes it difficult to see how deep the case is. The lining had a slit in the side which we would gently remove before cutting the fibreglass with a tin-opener."

The suitcases were the most professional aspect of the operation. Plenty of the operatives – 35 of whom have contributed to Keable's book – made mistakes. Keable accidentally detonated one of his buckets in his hotel room but by quick thinking and a fluke of the calendar he was able to tell the staff that a Diwali firecracker had been thrown through his window. AnotherOne activist flew to South Africa with a passport picture showing him wearing a Young Communist League badge.

Sean Hosey and Alex Moumbaris were both captured. In 1972 Hosey walked into a trap after attempting a rendezvous with an ANC activist who had turned informant. He spent eight months in solitary confinement in Pretoria followed by five years' jail. Moumbaris was given a 12-year sentence, but escaped after seven and a half years.

Some of the London recruits were active into the 1980s, including the owners of Africa Hinterland, a tourist company whose owners, over several years, carried an estimated 40 tonnes of weapons for the ANC in the floor of an overland vehicle. The story has been made into a film, Secret Safari.

Keable decided to write his story in 2005. "I was coming up to my 60th birthday and I asked myself what I would regret not doing, the day I felt death approaching. It took me three days to write my story, and when I had finished I realised mine was one among many stories, so I began tracking down other recruits." Keable is "on the tail" of several others but has not found them all. He added that some recruits have refused to give their stories while others have written under a pseudonym.

The book is also a call for greater international solidarity. "All the London Recruits could have said apartheid is wrong but it's not my problem, but none of them did. With every passing day the world is more interconnected but this also makes it increasingly untenable to think that a problem faraway is not my problem. International solidarity is something we need more and more of now, for the people of Palestine or for the people of Saudi Arabia."

Walshe echoes his call but has not forgotten his other priority during his upcoming four-week holiday – finding the hotel maid. "She was about our age and black. Pete and I were so shocked when she came across us in the hotel room that all we could think to do was the ANC salute. We were supposed to be as white as can be. We were not supposed even to talk to any black people during our visit. Instead we told her everything and our operation grew from two people to three. We said goodbye with a kiss, which was about as illegal as you could get in those days. I would love to meet her again."

Saturday, 30 June 2012