If Gandhi was a sympathetic observer of the affairs of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in South Africa, seeing them as a group of people who, like Indians, were being victimised for no fault of their own, there were others, coming from a more privileged background no doubt, who became his closest friends and on whom he depended for his social and political work both in Johannesburg and London. In fact he needed lieutenants who could help organise public opinion in favour of the Indian cause in both places and who could travel to and fro. Similarly he needed people who could be core members of the experiments in community life which he conducted, providing an element of continuity when he himself could not be in residence and undertaking day-to-day running of the household for the families of the satyagrahis when the latter had a spell in jail. What follows is largely a narrative account about some of the dramatis personae in a heroic story which started almost a hundred years ago.¹