John Whitmore

John Whitmore (30 March 1929 to 24 December 2001) pioneered the sport of surfing in South Africa. Working first as an abalone and crayfish diver, he spent his days close to the ocean, and after reading about surfing in Hawaii in the late 1950s he became so taken with the idea that he built his own surfboards. That work led to the introduction of surfing in South Africa, at Muizenberg and at Sea Point in Cape Town. Capetonians knew him affectionately as die oom, Afrikaans for the uncle, because he gave daily surf reports from the bathroom window of his sea-front home, a habit that features in the surf film The Endless Summer II. His life is the subject of the biography The Oom by Miles Masterson.