By Wendy Burrows
Frank was an evacuee from Germany on the Kindertransport but did not arrive in Deddington until 1986.
He was born in Vienna in 1922 into a Catholic family with Jewish ancestors. His father was a High Court Judge and his mother was a linguist.
Frank and his brother went to a school in Vienna which was founded by Benedictine Irish monks, but always known as Schottengymnasium (Scottish Grammar School). The school’s alumni included the last Emperor of Austria and the founder of the Austrian Socialist Party.
Nazis closed the school in 1938. Frank’s elder brother left to study law in England. His parents moved to Budapest. In Autumn 1938, Frank was rescued by the Kindertransport. The train left Vienna in December 1938 and Frank, aged 16 years, arrived in England at Harwich. His parents were arrested by the Nazis and were taken to Auschwitz. They did not survive.
The head of the Benedictine School in Belmont Abbey School, near Hereford, had offered two places for refugees. Frank got one of these places and after 5 terms at the school, took Matric., by which time war had broken out. Being in the phase between schoolboy and student, he was interned in the Isle of Man for 15 months. The Isle of Man was used as internment camps for about 70,000 refugees who were not enemy aliens, but who had more reason to hate the Nazis than even the British. Around 10,000 finished up in the British forces. Frank was released after volunteering for army service, but was found to be medically unfit.
He went to London, joined his brother in digs and enrolled for a part-time course as an external student of London University, where he took a B.Sc. (Econ.), the final examination of which was interrupted by a bomb. He became a fire watcher in 1941 and was trained as a fire-fighter. In 2010 he still sleeps with his face under his pillow, a habit acquired when, during air raids, even in houses not hit by bombs, one’s face and eyes might get scarred from flying glass from blasts anywhere in the neighbourhood. He also got a job in food distribution as part of the war effort and in 1945 volunteered again for army service. He was not accepted as he failed the physical and was drafted in to the Civil Service instead. He ended up in the Board of Trade. Because of his ability to speak fluently in several languages he was seconded to the British Delegation OEEC in 1948. This was an intergovernmental body to administer the Marshall Plan.
After leaving the OEEC he worked in the oil industry for 9 years, but when the company went bust, he landed a job in the City with what eventually became the largest stock-broking firm in London and in due course rose to becoming a partner.
Frank finally arrive in Deddington because he married Rosemary Oldham, who was from an old Warwickshire farming family. Rosemary's aunt Vida Stanley (neé Oldham) had lived in Deddington for many years on the corner of Chapmans Lane and the main road. After her husband’s death in 1954 Vida sold her house but kept part of the property on which she built a smaller house further down Chapman’s Lane. Rosemary inherited this property in 1975. Twenty five years later, after Rosemary died, Frank converted the garage and an extension into his flat and his daughter and family now live in the main house.
Since 1955 Frank had been a part-time journalist as UK correspondent of an Austrian press agency and for over twenty years a member of the Parliamentary and Public Affairs Committee of the Catholic Union of Great Britain. For the former work he received the Austrian Insignia of Honour in Gold, roughly equivalent to an OBE and for the latter he was made a knight of the Papal Order of St.Gregory.
In 1987 he retired from the City and in 2007 he retired from all voluntary and other functions outside ‘the village’ and retained only two activities based locally. He was one of the committee which took over producing the Deddington News when Norman and Angela Stone handed this over, and early in 2010 he received the long service medal as a Volunteer with the Thames Valley Police.