Latest news with #Kindertransport
Times
6 days ago
- Business
- Times
Stephanie Shirley at 91: ‘I think I've got a couple more big trips left in me'
Dame Stephanie Shirley, 91, is a tech pioneer and philanthropist who came to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939. She built a £3 billion business, Freelance Programmers (later renamed F International), and 70 of her staff became millionaires due to its shared ownership structure. Since retiring in 1993 she has donated more than £70 million to charity. She was made a dame in 2000 and became one of the prestigious few members of the Order of Companions of Honour in 2017. I suppose the most significant trip I've ever taken was the two-and-a-half day rail and boat journey on the Kindertransport. In 1939, my older sister, Renate, and I travelled from Vienna to London alongside a thousand other tearful Jewish children, with our train tickets around our necks. My German Jewish father lost his job as a judge after Hitler took power, so we moved from Dortmund to Austria but had to get out fast after the Anschluss [the Nazi takeover of Austria]. So that trip to England, my first real travel experience, made a huge difference to my life. On arrival in England I was fostered by a wonderful couple in Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands, Guy and Ruby Smith, whom I called Uncle and Auntie. I spent the next few years with them. Yes, it was wartime, but we had a lovely bucket-and-spade-holiday in Blackpool when I was aged six. Some of my happiest holiday memories are of going camping in a punt on the Upper Thames with my late husband, Derek [who died in 2021, aged 97], during our courting days. We'd hire it for the weekend and use a great big pole to go down the Thames, stopping off along the route in places such as Maidenhead and Marlow. Each night we would pull up a canvas structure to give us privacy, sleeping with blankets over us in the punt. But we were so close to the water that I'd often wake up to see a water rat squinting at me. After marrying in 1959 we honeymooned at a rather swanky hotel, Great Fosters in Egham, Surrey, staying in a room with a four-poster bed. But we had to check out earlier than we'd planned to because we were short of money. Following the birth of our only son, Giles, we had a wonderful summer holiday in Tenby, in Wales, when he was little. But he was profoundly disabled and that made travelling with him difficult from the age of two or three [Giles died aged 35]. A day out was a major achievement — and the one holiday Derek and I took without him, a cruise around the Canary Islands, was a disaster because he was so upset at being left in the hands of carers. We never did that again. As my business grew bigger and more successful in the 1970s and 1980s and we opened subsidiaries overseas, I began to go on work trips to places like Amsterdam (such a beautiful city), and Lucerne in Switzerland, as well as further afield. Given Giles's health issues, and the fact that Derek was not a particularly keen overseas traveller, I started tacking mini-holidays on to those work trips. • 16 of the best hotels in Vienna At one point in the 1980s I was travelling to San Francisco four times a year for board meetings, though I'd fly out a day or two early so I could visit an art gallery and dine out. I had a favourite business class seat on the plane, as well as a favourite room — 215, a corner room with windows on two sides — at the Marriott on Union Square, which became a home from home. The holidays that were most memorable were the most unexpected. For instance, walking around the awe-inspiring Uluru in central Australia, snorkelling off the Great Barrier Reef (tourism was much less developed there when I first visited) and going on a safari in Zimbabwe. Those experiences were just so different to my everyday life. • Best hotels in San Francisco Have I been back to Germany and Austria? Being a judge and a German-speaker, my father — by then in the US Army — was called upon to assist the Allied authorities at the Nuremberg trials. So I visited him there in 1946, and got to see a few of the Nazi defendants in the dock, though it wasn't exactly a holiday. Both my birth parents thankfully survived the Second World War but I never really bonded with them again, so I stayed in England. I've also since returned to Vienna a couple of times, on work and leisure trips, and on one trip saw my old childhood home. It's quite a romantic city, particularly if you love classical music as I do (there's often music in the air), though I obviously felt mixed emotions my first time back there. Over the past half-dozen years I've used a buggy service to cover long distances in airports, and been joined by my long-time personal assistant, Lynn, a wonderful companion, on my travels. We've visited everywhere. In Edinburgh's airport departure lounge I got talking to the comedian Eddie Izzard, who was wearing a dress, on our return flight to Heathrow. He was great fun and we struck up quite a rapport. When I was younger, and even during middle age, I was never really conscious of getting jet lag, but it creeps up on you as you get older. These days I need to remember my medications when I travel too. I think I've got a couple more big trips left in me, however, and would love to revisit Japan because the only part I've seen is Tokyo. Just so long as I have a companion to keep me company. Let It Go by Dame Stephanie Shirley & Richard Askwith (Penguin £10.99). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members In our weekly My Hols interview, famous faces — from the worlds of film, sport, politics, and more — share their travel stories from childhood to the present day. Read more My Hols interviews here.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Thwarted Telegraph suitor Efune says 'British bid is best'
The British-born newspaper-owner whose takeover of The Daily Telegraph appears to have been thwarted by a £500m deal with RedBird Capital Partners has called on the title's stakeholders to rally behind his bid instead. In an opinion piece to be published later on Friday, Dovid Efune, publisher of The New York Sun, will say that his offer is "now within sight of the finish line, with the bulk of the needed funding committed". Mr Efune has been assembling a bid for the right-leaning newspapers for months, with a series of funding options having been explored. Money latest: He now has backing from Nadhim Zahawi, the former Conservative Cabinet minister whose interest in the Telegraph was revealed last year by Sky News, and Jeremy Hosking, a prominent and wealthy City investor. In his opinion piece, Mr Efune described the Telegraph as a "crown jewel", adding that British journalism was the envy of the world. "It is no coincidence that a meaningful portion of America's largest newsrooms are run by British journalists," he wrote in a piece shared exclusively with Sky News. "These include the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and CNN. "You might say that journalists, editors and journalism writ large are among Britain's greatest exports." Referring to the Barclay family, which owned the Telegraph for about two decades, Mr Efune said the newspapers had "functioned as something of a piggy bank for its previous owners, and as a useful form of real estate collateral". "The Telegraph's achievements and advancements despite these handicaps are impressive. But it deserves better," he wrote. Mr Efune said the £500m RedBird takeover - which is likely to involve minority ownership stakes for Abu Dhabi state-backed IMI and Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail proprietor - had "significant hurdles to overcome". "Since The Telegraph first came on the market I've dedicated much time and resources to finding a solution," he said. "Some details of these efforts have become public. Much has not. "In particular, I've sought to recruit the best-suited investor group to step into the fray. "That means fully aligned partners, committed to the work of unlocking The Telegraph's significant potential." He described the process as "a turbulent undertaking" which had "faced unwelcome interference along the way". "Our group is unique in that, firstly, it is distinctly British, with, as of this moment, the leadership and vast majority of funders being British citizens. "I, for one, was born in Manchester and raised in Brighton. "My family owes a great debt of gratitude to this country. "My grandmother was saved by Britain's grace and welcome at the age of nine, fleeing Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport." Read more from Sky News:Energy price cap to fall by 7%Taxpayer loss on RBS bailout revealed Mr Efune said his family had made a significant contribution to the UK, with his grandfather, Peter Kalms, helping to build the electrical goods retailer Dixons into a household name. "My great uncle Michael was killed as a tail-gunner in a Lancaster Bomber over Germany. Mr Efune described his backers as "accomplished British patriots who care deeply about The Telegraph's future". "Our acquisition group is also distinctly devoted to journalism," he wrote. "We don't come with a team of financial engineers or restructuring gurus. "We're seasoned and committed newspaper builders, and have a detailed and clear vision for The Telegraph's growth. We will pursue it vigorously. "This includes specific and in some cases significant improvement strategies on the nuts and bolts of each of the primary revenue pillars of the business. "In our view, the oft-heard moniker "Torygraph" far undersells this opportunity. "In its soul, the paper that braved the Blitz and trumpeted the wartime speeches of Churchill bears a far higher calling. "It is independent, pugnacious, meticulous, unapologetic and free. "It is the journalistic bulwark of Western civilisation and a living reminder of Britain's great gifts to humanity. Mr Efune added that in a world characterised by turbulent geopolitics, "the need for The Telegraph's elevation couldn't be greater". "Many beacons of the Western press have dimmed, and we are all poorer as a result. "The Telegraph's time is now. Its horizons are endless. "We're confident our British group represents the best custodianship of this national treasure by some distance."
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jane Gardam obituary
The prolific novelist, short-story writer and children's author Jane Gardam, who has died aged 96, had a taste for the absurd and an extraordinary facility for characterisation and social comedy. Accused once of being a 'muslin and tea party writer', she shot back: 'I'm more hair-cloth and gin.' It was a remark that deftly summarised two features of her work: religion and the more subversive side of middle-class life. Gardam's commitment to literary experimentation was evident from early on. She hated the idea of writing as a genteel occupation, and set out to challenge both herself and her readers. She did this partly in terms of form: Crusoe's Daughter (1985) ends with a playlet; The Queen of the Tambourine (1991) is epistolary; the denouement of Faith Fox (1996) features the prayers muttered in church by various characters. Her much praised short-story collection Missing the Midnight (1997) explores the many permutations of the ghost story. Changing perspective was another of her interests: The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009) is a sympathetic retelling of the earlier Old Filth (2004) from the point of view of Betty, a judge's frustrated wife, while the final work in the series, Last Friends (2013) , picks up the story of Filth's rival in law, Terry Veneering. These experiments were not always convincing, and there is a sense, even in some of Gardam's most enjoyable works, that too much is going on. Thus the exhilarating God on the Rocks (1978), which was nominated for the Booker prize, features a Christian sect, a psychiatric facility, a tyrannical mother, a thwarted love affair, a husband falling into sin and a wife joyously rushing towards it. The equally vibrant Faith Fox includes various abandoned children, a charismatic vicar, a grieving mother, a disillusioned wife, some disregarded grandparents, a former lover with Alzheimer's disease and a troupe of Tibetans. The tangle of stories in The Flight of the Maidens (2000) risks distracting the reader from Gardam's sensitive recounting of the case of Lieselotte, a Kindertransport refugee. But if her narrative can be overcrowded, Gardam met the other challenge of her writing – to recreate the melodrama and passion of domestic and suburban life – with finesse. 'There's no point in writing anything if it doesn't disturb you in some way,' she said. 'A novel must be about what everyone is thinking, but nobody dares say.' One of her most unsettling books, The Queen of the Tambourine, took its inspiration from life. Gardam had seen a perfectly dressed and made-up woman running down Wimbledon High Street screaming. No one stopped to help her. 'I wanted to show how a suburban street has tentacles that go out into the world and how a woman who seems to be civilised is as totally alone in a savage environment as someone in the jungle,' she explained. Her portrait of the mental disintegration of a fervent do-gooder, Eliza Peabody, won her the Whitbread best novel award. Born Jean Pearson in Coatham, North Yorkshire, Gardam grew up in the North Riding and in Cumbria, where she spent summers on her grandfather's farm. It was a background of which she was proud and which informs much of her work. Yorkshire and its coast are the setting for many of her novels and she uses its dialect in the Whitbread children's book award-winning The Hollow Land (1981), for the blowsy maid Lydia in God on the Rocks, and for the Smikes, the good-hearted but terrifying ex-burglars of Faith Fox. In fact, she attributed her career to her forebears, explaining: 'Cumbrians can't tell anything without making a story out of it. I suppose that's where I learned most.' Her parents were another influence. Her father, William Pearson, a mathematician turned headmaster, was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as her lack of academic prowess, and Gardam's response is reflected in the alienated, underappreciated young women of her early fiction. Her mother, Kathleen (nee Helm), was a more positive force. Gardam said that she learned her love of language, and her strong sense of religion, from her mother. Crusoe's Daughter is her most politically astute novel and she described this, her own favourite, as partly about her mother. The sense of frustration at women's lot is clear in her heroine Polly Flint's letter to her aunt: 'Because I am a girl … I was to be stood in a vacuum … left in the bell-jar … Nothing in the world is ever to happen to me.' Jane was educated at Saltburn high school for girls and Bedford College, London (now part of Royal Holloway London), where she read English and caught up on the artistic delights of the capital (she had only visited the theatre once before, and often went hungry as a student to finance her craving for drama). She hoped to become a literary scholar, and began a doctorate on the 18th-century essayist and literary figure Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Lack of funds, and perhaps temperament, led her to stop after a year. 'I longed to be an academic,' she said, 'but that time working in the British Museum was the closest I've ever come to going mad myself.' Her first job was as a travelling librarian for the Red Cross, visiting military, naval and mental hospital libraries. She moved into journalism, working first as a sub-editor on Weldon's Ladies' Journal and then as assistant literary editor of Time and Tide, where she met TS Eliot and John Betjeman. Her marriage to the high-ranking lawyer David Gardam in 1954, and the birth of their first child, Tim, in 1956, meant the end of that career. The next 15 years of Gardam's life were taken up with child-rearing. She had started to write as a child, but stopped when she became a mother. 'I just couldn't separate myself completely … There didn't seem much choice,' she said. 'I did have quite exhausting children and their father was working abroad in the far east a lot.' After her second child, Kitty, started school, she wrote a novel in Wimbledon library. It was rejected by Oxford University Press as 'improper' (the protagonist was a gay curate) but her next project, begun the day her youngest child, Tom, first went to school, was successful. A Long Way from Verona, a novel for teenagers, was published in 1971. After this, Gardam became unstoppable. A book of linked short stories for older children, A Few Fair Days, appeared in the same year, and a vivid work for teenagers, The Summer After the Funeral, two years later. In 1975 her first work for adults was published: the short-story collection Black Faces, White Faces, inspired by a trip to Jamaica where her husband was working on a case. The age distinction is questionable for Gardam, however. Long before the teenage/adult crossover fiction of Philip Pullman and Mark Haddon, The Summer After the Funeral's struggling adolescent heroine Athene, feeling her way through vastly strange adult worlds of depressed aunts, lesbian couples and lascivious artists, was straining at the boundaries of teenage fiction. The Summer After the Funeral and the later Bilgewater (1977) are now published as works for adults. Comedy and sympathy are the marks of Gardam's talent. God on the Rocks offers a tender portrait of the struggle of a mother, Elinor, to maintain her close relationship with her eight-year-old daughter, Margaret, following the birth of her new baby, alongside the comic delights of Margaret's misunderstandings of the adult world and the billowing figure of no-better-than-she-should-be Lydia. Faith Fox recounts the bereaved Thomasina's almost violent love for her dead daughter, Holly, amidst the wild social satire of the clash between north and south. The much-celebrated Old Filth trilogy offers a compassionate exploration of the ravages of old age, and its myriad embarrassments. It is for this emotional and social understanding, as well as her ear for comic dialogue, that this joyous and challenging writer will be remembered. Muslin and tea never had much of a place in her work. Gardam was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and OBE in 2009. David died in 2010, and their daughter, Kitty, also predeceased her. She is survived by Tim, Tom, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Jane Mary Gardam, writer, born 11 July 1928; died 28 April 2025
BBC News
08-04-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Network Rail submits new Liverpool Street Station plans
Revised plans to redevelop Liverpool Street Station have been submitted to the City of London Corporation, Network Rail has Rail previously worked with Shard developers Sellar on a £1.5bn scheme that proposed to partially demolish the Victorian station and build a new multi-storey tower cantilevered above a neighbouring Grade II* listed former original planning application was filed in May 2023, but fresh plans were unveiled last November after it received more than 2,000 objections from the public, Westminster Council and Historic Rail said the project aimed to future-proof the station for the more than 200 million passengers using it each year. The revised scheme features amendments including reducing the size of the office block above the station, realigning the building to avoid interfering with the site of the Great Eastern Hotel, redesigning station entrances, and landscaping and benches around the Kindertransport Rail has replaced lead architect Herzog & de Meuron with ACME and dropped its development partner Sellar, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said. A range of other works have also been proposed, from increasing the size of the concourse, improving routes through the building and providing family rooms and quiet Rail said out of almost 2,000 comments received in a public consultation, three-quarters supported the top three priorities for the public were step-free access to the station, new lifts and escalators, and new toilet facilities, it added. Heritage groups including The Victorian Society have, however, retained their opposition to the updated plans. Of particular concern for the charity is the proposed demolition of the existing station concourse, with its president, comedian Griff Rhys Jones, previously saying they "cannot accept that this is the best way forward". Robin Dobson, group property director for Network Rail Property, said the scheme "is a truly accessible and inclusive space, can support the forecasted annual passenger rise to over 200 million and deliver vital improvements to the everyday experience of passengers while respecting and celebrating the station's historic character"."Investing in transport infrastructure is essential to unlocking future economic growth for London and beyond," he continued. "Following extensive consultation and engagement with a wide range of stakeholders, our plans put passengers first whilst respecting and retaining the station's Victorian features, including the iconic trainshed and the Great Eastern Hotel."
Boston Globe
19-03-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
As children, they fled the Nazis alone. Newly found papers tell their story.
As her short legs took her up the steep steps of the train, she wanted to take one more look at her parents. 'I turned around and I saw that they were crying,' Miley said. 'It must have been awful for them.' Advertisement In that moment, she realized that this was not, in fact, a nice trip. She never saw her parents again. Miley, 93, now living in Phoenix, is one of almost 10,000 Jewish children who were part of the Kindertransport, a rescue mission that helped minors flee Nazi Germany to Britain, via the Netherlands, between December 1938 and September 1939. Over time, many details have been lost about this part of Holocaust history. But in the fall of 2024, Amy Williams, a researcher, unearthed a trove of information about the mission: lists of names and other identifying information about most of the children and chaperones who made the journey to Britain, tucked away in the vast archives at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. For Miley and many descendants of people who were part of the Kindertransport, the emergence of the lists has helped shed light on a murky period in their family history and offered a sense of connection to others who were affected. For researchers, the findings provide a key puzzle piece, offering new information about the families and rescue organizations involved in the mission. 'I was always told, from when I started my work, 'These lists don't exist, they were destroyed,'' said Williams, who was doing research for her third book about the Kindertransport when she discovered the documents. 'And they're not.' The lists she found were used by Dutch border guards to determine which children from other European countries should be let through to Britain and which should be sent elsewhere. Advertisement A majority of the children on the Kindertransport, which was funded largely by Jewish communities in Germany and Britain, arrived by boat, traveling from Hook of Holland to Harwich, England. From there, they boarded trains to Liverpool Street Station in East London. Refugee organizations helped to match them with foster families. The Kindertransport has long been taught as a feel-good story, researchers said, but the mission itself was a complicated affair. The British government, for example, only allowed children to come into the country without their parents, deeply traumatizing many of them. The children had to be healthy, and they had to be from Nazi Germany (which included Austria and parts of the Czech Republic) rather than from other parts of Eastern Europe. Williams also found documents that helped reinforce the story of how the Kindertransport ended. While many have suggested that it was the start of World War II in September 1939 that ended the mission, the British refugee organizations operating the Kindertransport actually had decided that no more than 10,000 children could come to the country because of the difficulty of housing them. 'The story is much more complex than the way we want to portray it,' said Laura Hobson Faure, a professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University-Paris 1 who wrote a book about Jewish children who fled to France during the Holocaust. 'It's not a feel-good story,' Hobson Faure said. 'It's a story, though, that did save lives.' While thousands of children were rescued from the Nazis, many of them were traumatized by the experience and never saw their family members again. At the same time, several children of Kindertransport survivors said that their parents always felt a deep loyalty to Britain for the role it played in their survival. Advertisement Miley had long known that thousands of other German children had also been on the Kindertransport, but she said that seeing her name in black and white on an official list gave her a sense of belonging. 'Suddenly, it wasn't me alone,' she said. Through Williams's research, Miley has connected with the descendants of other children on the Kindertransport. Among them is Richard Aronowitz, 55. His mother — Doris Aronowitz, who died in 1992 — was on the same train as Miley in July 1939. For Aronowitz and other descendants of the Kindertransport children, the lists of names, dates, and numbers have led to complicated emotions. 'It gave me much more of a profound context,' Aronowitz said in an interview last month. But, he added, 'I don't think there's ever any closure.' Some learned information about their parents or grandparents for the first time through the lists. For others, the documentation serves as a harrowing piece of evidence of the atrocities their parents survived, and an explanation of why so many of them grew up without grandparents or extended family. 'It's that last, final parting document,' Williams said. 'It really sealed people's fates.' More than eight decades on, the lists have brought Miley a renewed sense of grief. 'One of the big losses when you're taken away from your family so suddenly,' she said, 'is that you don't know the personality of your parents.' On the other hand, she said, she feels gratitude. The discovery has helped give her 'a deeper thankfulness for the gift of life,' Miley said. 'My name and details on that list were the means of my escape.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
