Mary Manning

And he walked into the room and he just came over and just hugged the two of us.

And he was interviewed at the time and he told Ben Dunne, you should be proud of the action that we're taking.

Here was a black man, a black man of the church, saying that what we were doing was the right thing to do.

So the people who were arguing was that, you know, we're going to hurt the black people of South Africa and this is not what they want.

They couldn't say that anymore.

Or they tried, they tried.

At least we had an argument back now for that.

So that was one of the biggest turning points.

People started to support us more.

And we started to get more people on the picket line.

British Airways initially came over and said that we weren't going to be allowed to board the flight.

We said, why?

And they said, well, because you need a visa to go to South Africa.

Now, people on an Irish passport at the time didn't need a visa.

Then they came over and they wanted us to take, to identify our luggage, to take it off the flight.

To them, what they did was they got a representative of the South African embassy, a man called Leo Evans, came to the airport to us to tell us that we weren't going to get into South Africa, that we hadn't got visas.

I went and phoned my next door neighbour to say to my mother and father, we're not going to be allowed on the flight, so we'll be home tomorrow.

And then the next thing, British Airways came over and said, literally just said, run, run, you're going on the flight.

So we literally had to get up and literally run down to get onto the flight.

We landed in Johannesburg, and we know it was when we landed that there was a lot of soldiers around, but we just kind of didn't really think too much.