This beautiful tribute by his wife sums him up perfectly. He was a great man and will be hugely missed.
Ralph Innes obituary
Pat Parkin-Moore
Tuesday 17 January 2017
My husband, Ralph
Innes, who has died aged 97, was one of the influx of refugees from Nazi
oppression who have enriched the life of Britain so much.
He was born Rolf
Einzig, and brought up in Berlin in a secular Jewish family, the son of
Bernhard Einzig, the managing director of an overcoat manufacturer, and his
wife, Eugenia. When it became obvious that there was no future for young Jews
in Nazi Germany,
he came to Britain in early 1939 with the intention of completing his training
in knitting technology.
Ralph worked on the
night shift in a knitting factory in Manchester but then moved to
Leicestershire, where he worked in a factory and continued his textile
education at a college in Hinckley. When France was invaded during the second
world war, there were scare stories about German paratroopers being dropped
into the British countryside and many newspapers campaigned to intern German
refugees. Ralph was taken to the Isle of Man, where hotels in Douglas, the
capital, had been taken over as internment camps. Later the younger men were
allowed to volunteer for war work in Australia or Canada and Ralph was sent to
a hutted camp in Canada.
When Winston
Churchill became the prime minister it was decided that refugees who wished
could join the army. Ralph returned to Britain to sign up with theRoyal
Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.
He went with his unit to France after D-day (when he was advised to change his
name) and, at the end of the war, was promoted to a sergeant in the
Intelligence Corps because he spoke German and he interrogated some suspected
Nazis.
After the war he
worked in a knitting factory and then was employed as a lecturer in knitting
technology at Derby Technical College. During this period he married, and had
two daughters, Charlotte and Jennifer, but his wife, Bettie, died of pneumonia
when the children were four and two and he brought them up on his own.
He became a senior
lecturer at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) and was a
director of the Institute of Linguists, and the International Federation of Knitting Technologists. All his life he was a socialist, inspired by the
poverty he saw in Berlin when he was a boy, and was a long-standing member of
the Labour party. He and I married in 1989 and lived happily in the
Leicestershire village of Croft.
Ralph is survived
by me, his daughters, my four children, and his niece, Hetty. Ralph’s sister
was the painter and illustrator Susan Einzig,
who died in 2009.
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