Diversity is a thing these days. Not so much, though, when I was at my boys-only secondary school. In this hormone-rich environment the appointment of a female English teacher or a young laboratory assistant wearing a fashionably short skirt under her lab coat could generate disproportionate excitement.
Of 123 boys, one was of Asian descent, and 122 were white. One of these was Jewish: he was popular, friendly, hardworking and very clever. Sadly he had a heart condition and didn’t make it to 30. Another boy was widely assumed to be gay – correctly, it turned out – and he was much bullied for it. And that was the extent of diversity in our school year, as far as I knew.
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The dawn of the internet made it easier to reconnect with old school friends, and sometime in the 2000s I met up with Charles and Richard, neither of whom I’d seen since the 1970s. Of course there was much catching up, and comparison of the different careers we had chosen, which were still then in progress. Charles had always enjoyed tinkering with machines: he had become a railway engineer, with an occasional foray into crash forensics. Richard used to relish an argument on a point of detail: he had become a corporate lawyer. I had loved buying and selling things as a child, and was a broker and trader in the City. We raised a glass to square pegs in square holes.
Then Richard shared a piece of his family history that he had never mentioned at school. His father Hans was Jewish, and had grown up in Germany in the 1930s. In early 1939, when he was about seventeen, his parents encouraged him to take up an entry visa arranged by Marks and Spencer with one of their suppliers so that he could come to the UK to be an apprentice cotton weaver. He met a girl who became his wife, and eventually they settled near Watford and had a family.
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Marks and Spencer co-founder Michael Marks was a Polish Jew, and his son Simon inherited the business and grew it into a retail giant. In the 1930s Simon Marks and his fellow directors used the substantial influence of M&S in England to help the cause of Jewish refugees by raising money, obtaining the support of influential politicians, and making the American Jewish community aware of the persecution of German and other European Jews. Their management and staff worked tirelessly to help refugees escape from Europe in the years before the war, setting up a legal structure to bring people and at least some of their possessions out of countries where they faced persecution.
Richard’s paternal grandparents were sent to a the Łódź Ghetto in Poland. After they boarded a train to the east, they were never heard of again. Richard said he had hidden his Jewish identity while at school at his father’s insistence: his father’s bitter experience was that there was nothing to be gained, and perhaps much lost from being open about his religion. Richard had attended school assemblies containing Christian worship without complaint. I asked him whether his father was himself open about being Jewish. “He doesn’t have a choice” was the response. It is a sobering thought that he did not feel safe from anti-Semitism in 1960s England. I reflected on how we had known nothing in our schooldays of the trauma which had occurred in Richard’s family.
Marks and Spencer don’t make as much as they might of this very honourable part of their history. Their efforts to save refugees were entwined with early support for Zionism, an extremely controversial subject. And perhaps, like Hans, they see reasons for playing down that part of their heritage.
Many thanks to Richard for permitting me to tell his and his father’s story.
Ramblings 
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