In the words of his son Thomas:
“I was born on the 3rd of May 1949, at the Queen Elizabeth Nursing Home, on Malabar Hill, in Bombay, India.
My parents were Czech Jewish stateless immigrants to India. So how did I come to be born in such an exotic location? This story was told to me by my father, Frantisek (Frank) Mautner, on a long flight from London to Dallas, in December 1979.
My maternal grandparents, Karel (Charles) and Ruza (Rose) Stern (neé Frankl), left Prague for London in 1939. Their 2 daughters, Milena (then aged 14) and Hana (then aged 18), travelled with them.
My paternal grandparents, Bedrich (Frederick) and Ida Mautner (neé Herrmann), did not do what any sensible Jew in Central Europe did when Hitler was about to arrive and deport the local Jewish population of each country he invaded to the gas chambers of his concentration camps. They did not flee to the as-yet-unoccupied West.
The reason was quite simple. My grandfather had, before the 2nd World War, been one of Europe’s major industrialists. He had factories in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania and Russia, manufacturing clutch and brake linings for the burgeoning European car industry, from asbestos. He decided that he didn’t wish to become a penniless refugee like the vast majority of Jewish refugees from Hitler. He simply couldn’t bring himself to abandon his business empire to the Nazis, or to those who had worked for him. So he decided, instead, to travel east and, in each country where he had a factory, to sell the local business to his local General Manager. Sadly, my father either did not know, or simply didn’t tell me about the locations of these factories, or about the transactions between my grandfather and his local managers. I was told by my father that in each country, my grandfather sold the local business very quickly, for whatever his local manager could raise in negotiable currency, gold coins, jewellery, rare postage stamps, etc.
Once these transactions had been completed (the last being in Russia), my grandparents crossed Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and arrived at the port of Vladivostok. From there, they crossed the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea by boat, and eventually arrived in the Chinese port of Shanghai.
Shanghai before the 2nd World War was the most Europeanised and cosmopolitan of Chinese cities. There, my grandparents settled down and, by all accounts, were enjoying a comfortable lifestyle, when, in 1941, the Japanese entered the war, and the proximity of Shanghai to Japan, and the fact that Japan had already invaded China, and was now a hostile power allied with Nazi Germany, led my grandparents to the conclusion that Shanghai was not likely to remain safe for European Jewish refugees for much longer. They needed somewhere to move on to.
At this point, my grandmother remembered that her first cousin, Walter Kaufman, who was a professional musician, had, before the outbreak of war, been appointed Director of the All-India Radio Orchestra, based in Delhi, the capital of Imperial India. Because All-India Radio was an organ of the British government of India, his appointment, of course, made him a British civil servant, and it seemed to my grandparents that he would, therefore, have contacts in the Indian government who might be able to arrange visas for them to settle in India. In due course, cousin Walter obliged.
Fortunately for my grandparents (and the rest of us), India at that time had huge asbestos mining operations, but no manufacturing industry based on asbestos.
A deal was brokered, by which my grandfather would invest the still-considerable proceeds of the sale of his European factories, in partnership with a small consortium of Indian businessmen, to found a new company to manufacture car components from Indian asbestos.
However, there was a further complication. My grandfather had travelled from Czechoslovakia on his pre-war Czech Republic passport, but my grandmother did not have one, and so had arrived in Shanghai with travel documents issued by the Nazi administration in Prague.
So the story goes, my grandparents sought out a Chinese forger in Shanghai, who took a photograph of my grandmother, which he pasted into my grandfather’s passport in the space reserved for “spouse”, and then forged the official seal and rubber stamp to validate it. That passport still exists.
My grandparents then travelled by ship across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, on what must have been an epic voyage, eventually to arrive in Bombay. He duly founded his new company, which was called Asbestos, Magnesia and Friction Materials Ltd (AM & FM). Sadly, I can only remember the name of one of the Indian businessmen who invested in the new company. He was a Parsee named Rustom Nanavati, who remained a close family friend until the end of his life. I remember him very clearly, and I used to call him “Uncle Rustom”. He continued to maintain the friendship even after the family came to the UK, and I well remember him coming to visit us in London.
My grandparents settled in an apartment building called Gupta Mahal, on J Tata Road in the Churchgate Reclamation area of Bombay. After the end of the war, in 1946, it became evident that my grandfather was very seriously ill (unsurprisingly, it subsequently transpired that he had asbestosis).”
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Thomas continues:
My father had arrived in London in 1938, aged 19, to take up a place at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, to study engineering. His younger sister, Susan, then aged 16, arrived in London in 1939 on a “Kindertransport” train, arranged by Nicky Winton, and was cared for by Robert and Gertie Fox in Petts Wood in Kent, where she also went to school. When my father suddenly became a penniless refugee, it was no longer possible for him to go to Cambridge. He therefore enrolled as a student at the Chelsea College of Technology, to study automotive engineering.
In 1942, when he completed his studies, he was drafted into the Czech Free Army in Britain. In 1943, he was asked to “look after” a new recruit to the regiment, a certain Franz Weiss. Franz Weiss, also Jewish, had been born in Vienna in 1925, to a Czech father and a Hungarian mother, and had also arrived in Britain on a “Kindertransport”. He went to school in Wales, and was subsequently apprenticed to an engineering company. When he turned 18, he was faced with a choice. Having been born in, and arrived from Austria, he could have opted to be an Austrian, in which case he would have been interned as an “enemy alien”. Instead, he opted for his father’s nationality – Czech – and was therefore drafted into the Czech Free Army. The only problem was that he spoke no Czech!! So, he was placed in the care of another member of the regiment, who spoke both German and Czech – my father.
The two Franzes became very close friends, and seem to have got into all kinds of scrapes and adventures together, including, apparently, being involved in a mutiny against the appalling living conditions of the regiment, aided an abetted by one of my father’s relatives, Sergeant Kurt Bodanski – who became Kurt Barker after the war……
Franz Weiss, of course, later became Frank White – my wife Karen’s father.
After the war, they remained close friends, and went “courting” together, and my mother (Milena) and Karen’s mother (Enid) met, and got to know each other well.
In 1946, when they were demobbed from the army, my father got the news that his father was very seriously ill, and his mother asked him to come to Bombay, to run the family business while my grandfather went to London for treatment. Pausing only to get engaged to my mother, my father immediately travelled to India by ship.
My grandfather travelled to London on the same ship which had brought my father to Bombay, but died shortly after reaching London.
My father, then aged 27, found himself in charge of a large and thriving business about which he knew absolutely nothing. In due course, and with the co-operation of his Indian partners, he sold the business to Turner & Newall Ltd, a British company and at that time the world’s largest manufacturer of car brake and clutch linings. AM & FM was renamed Hindustan Ferodo (T&N’s principal brand). The British parent company asked my father to remain in charge, which he did.
In 1947, my mother travelled to India to marry my father. He met her ship at The Gateway of India (the magnificent triumphal arch built at the entrance to Bombay’s docks to celebrate the visit of George V to Bombay in 1913) and they drove straight to the local Registrar of Marriages (Hari Vaman Kulkarni) and they were married the same day.
My parents moved in to the flat in which my grandmother was living, in Gupta Mahal. Eventually, the company purchased a huge and truly magnificent flat (No. A10) in a new residential development called Mayfair Gardens, on Malabar Hill, for the use of its chief executive. The flat is still there, and still belongs to the company my grandfather founded more than 60 years ago.
In 1955, my father built a completely new factory for the company, in a suburb of Bombay called Ghatkopar, including apartments for the workers, shops, entertainment facilities etc.
My sister Irene and I attended Sunnyside School, also on Malabar Hill. However, although the primary education for European children in Bombay was apparently quite good, the same could not be said of the secondary education, and so a majority of the children of European expatriates were sent to boarding school in the UK, and only saw their parents during the summer holidays each year. My parents decided that they did not wish to be parted from their children and so they decided to move to the UK.
In 1957, my father travelled to the Head Office of Turner & Newall, to try to arrange a transfer to the UK with the company. After several days of apparently incomprehensible prevarication, my father decided that enough was enough. He invited the company’s Personnel Director to dinner, and this individual became very drunk as the evening wore on. Eventually, my father challenged him about why the company were not being responsive to his request for a move to the UK. In his drunken state, the Personnel Director finally told my father the true reason. He said (according to my father) “Look, you’ve been the chief executive of one of our foreign subsidiaries, and you’ve done a fine job. So that would normally mean that you would come to the UK at Director level in the company – and frankly, old chap, it’s just unthinkable that a Jew-boy could ever be on the Board of this company”.
My father told me that he then punched the Personnel Director on the nose, and wrote a letter of resignation, which he left pinned to the prone body of that gentleman.
He returned to Bombay, where the family began to prepare itself for a move to London. We moved into what seemed to me to be a tiny flat in Hampstead (Greenhill), in the same block where my maternal grandmother lived, and in the next block to my mother’s sister, Hana, her husband Josef (Uncle Pepik) and two children (Bob and Caroline).
It must have been truly extraordinary for my parents, who had spent the previous 11 years living in the lap of luxury. At our flat in Mayfair Gardens, which occupied one whole floor of the building, we had 4 resident servants – a Cook-Bearer (a sort of cook/butler), a houseboy (cleaner and general factotum), a chauffeur and an Ayah (nanny). I remember very well an evening when my parents once hosted a charity ball for more than 300 people in our living room, with 2 bars and a dance band. When they arrived in London, my mother had never cooked or cleaned and had led a life of absolute luxury from the age of 22. We moved directly from this charmed existence in Bombay to a small, dark flat in Hampstead, with no help, and knowing nobody except my grandmother and my aunt and uncle. My father, who spent his whole life completely besotted with cars, went overnight from a brand-new, chauffeur-driven executive Jaguar Mark 7 to driving himself in an elderly, second-hand Ford Anglia.
He went into business (Industria London Ltd) with my Uncle Pepik (his brother-in-law, Josef Schuck), originally importing bicycles from Germany and Czechoslovakia. This led eventually to the import of motorcycles and scooters from Czechoslovakia and Germany, and ultimately to cars. They established Skoda (Great Britain) Ltd, and also imported (via Industria) Wartburg cars from East Germany and Mazda from Japan. That business was sold in 1975.
Franta passed away in 1993.
