At 81 years old, Garden Village resident Beth Harris has lived the kind of life most people only read about.
Born in Chingola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), she has navigated loss, love, career reinvention, and elephant relocations, all with the warmth and sharp wit that make her impossible not to like.

Beth lost her mother to breast cancer when she was just four years old, leaving her father to raise three young children on the Copperbelt. He eventually remarried the very doctor who had treated Beth’s mother, a woman who already knew the family well. Together, they built a blended household of six children, though Beth is quick to correct anyone who dares to use the word ‘half-sister.’ “We were sisters,” she said firmly. “Full stop.”

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Her romantic life began with a line bold enough to belong in a film. She met her husband, Willie Harris, a journalist with credits spanning the Sunday Times, the Rand Daily Mail, and the Daily Express in London, at a press club function she very nearly did not attend. “He said, if I could, I’d marry you tomorrow,” she recalled with a smile. “And so we got married two years later, tomorrow.” They were together for 52 years.

Before their PR business, Beth had built an impressive career of her own, first as an account executive for Guerlain, the French perfume and cosmetics house, and later at PPC Cement, where she rose to group PR manager and stayed for 22 years. “You think, from French cosmetics to bloody old cement,” she laughed. “But it was a huge company, and such interesting work.”

Through her work, she encountered extraordinary challenges. PPC sponsored the translocation of elephant bulls to reserves, including Addo Elephant Park and Pilanesberg, to stabilise herds that had grown unruly in the absence of mature males. “These young males were behaving very badly, like teenage boys who need a club. There was no bull in charge, and they were even attacking a rhino.” Beth was not watching from the sidelines either. She was in the helicopter with the vets, present for the darting and the careful process of loading sedated elephants into massive transport trailers. She also oversaw the PPC Young Concrete Sculptor Awards, a competition that helped launch the careers of now-celebrated artists such as Angus Taylor and Marieke Prinsloo.

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Few people know that before all of this, Beth spent several years as a model. She worked the fashion ramps for importers selling to buyers from chains such as Stuttafords and Truworths, and once appeared on the front page of the Sunday Express supplement. Ramp work suited her perfectly. Photographs, less so. “I used to get so embarrassed,” she said, pulling out a striking portrait from her younger years. “I was fine walking up and down. But turn this way, turn that way, no thank you.”

Beth moved to Garden Village in 2017, together with Willie, who was 85 at the time. The decision required some persuasion. “He said he didn’t think he was ready to live with a bunch of old farts,” she recalled, laughing. “And I said, I hate to tell you, but we are a bunch of old farts.” The move from a large Blairgowrie home to a smaller flat took some adjustment, but within a fortnight Willie had revised his opinion entirely. “He said, it’s not cramped. It’s cosy.”

With her daughter visiting from the Netherlands and her son nearby in Hermanus, Beth Harris is a woman who has embraced every chapter of her life with curiosity and humour. She will tell you she is boring. She is anything but.

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