Family History
Grandfather Salli Michaelis was born on 16th June 1844 in Pommern (a province in north east Germany). He moved to Berlin and he had one daughter and 5 sons. Three of the sons died in action in the World War One - the others were Hariett, Siegmund and my father Walther. Salli Michaelis died in 1922 - 4 years before I was born.
Grandfather Alfred Pincus was born in Schwerin, Meklenburg on 28th December 1853. It was a farming area and people from Meklenburg were considered to be particularly keen on producing and consuming good food. He had 3 brothers, Emil, Hugo and Paul and one sister Lidia, who all moved to Berlin.
I can remember them all - Emil and Lidia were still alive when I left Germany.
Grandfather Alfred Pincus earned his living marketing tassels which up 1914 were widely used for decorating the bottom edges of pelmets, curtains, armchairs and sofas, bedcovers, tablecloths and even scarves. He died on 22nd September 1934.
Alfred Pincus married Lina Alexander, who was born in Berlin on the 7th January 1867. They had one son, Martin who became an actor, and a daughter Teresina (Resi) who became my mother. Martin Pincus was always described to me as having been full of life and fun. He was killed in the Balkans in World War One.
Grandmother Lina Pincus had a brother who was Traute Howard's father. Traute emigrated with her husband to England and moved back to Germany in the 1970s.
The people of my grandparent' s generation were, from the time that I can remember, all retired. Grandfather Alfred Pincus's business would not have been viable in the 1920s. They were all lucky to have enough to live on considering the financial losses they must have suffered in the great hyperinflation in Germany during the first 6 or 7 years after World War One.
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My father's brother Siegmund had a sun Kurt and a daughter Gerda. When Siegmund died his wife seemed to lose interest in her children, who were in their mid teens at the time. Kurt was very enterprising and tried different ways to earn some money. One method was to cycle around with illuminated advertisements on his bicycle. Because Kurt was quite tall for his age my father realised that he would be in particular danger and arranged his emigration to Shanghai in China. At this time China was one of the few countries that would let refugees of his age in. He earned his fare by working (it was said, as stoker) on the trans-Siberian 'express'. When he got to Shanghai he wrote to us from time to time. He earned a living initially by boxing! I do not know what happened to him after 1939. (His name was not in the Shanghai telephone directory when we were there in 1992).'
My father's sister Harriet was married to an engineer, Max Bloch, and they had two children, Hans and Ursel. Max made some inventions in die-casting, which were patented. He died in the second half of the 1920s. Hariet emigrated to England in 1938 or 39 where she died in 1949.
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Harriet's son, Hans, trained to be an engineer and then emigrated to Israel where he married an Arab girl. He was a hopeless letter writer and all contact with him was lost.
My mother's first cousin Werner Vogel was related through grandmother Pincus nee Alexander. His brother Max had been a soldier in world war one and was disabled as a result. He perished in the holocaust. Werner Vogel with his wife Kaethe managed to emigrate to America where he became a professor of engineering. One of his special fields of research was the mathematics of the involute - and he named his daughter after the curve. We are still in contact with Involut.
Kaethe Vogel with Ann and Vicky on a visit to the UK in the 1960s
Harriet's daughter, Ursel, was a quite exceptional person from an early age. It is perhaps an indication of her personality that, when she came to visit us in Berlin when she was only 15 years old, my mother thought it right to use the occasion to take the antique Meissen china out of the glass case where it was normally kept and to use it to have tea with Ursel. It was the only occasion on which it was used in all the time that my parents had it.
Her interests, enthusiasms and knowledge even at that age covered a very wide field. She had the greatest concern for all forms of social disadvantage, poverty, etc resulting in her being in real danger already at the age of 14 or 15 in Nazi Germany because of her political views. My father realised that Ursel's involvement with progressive political ideas put her in great danger and therefore arranged for her to go to a boarding college in Switzerland that trained "lady gardeners". The college used the girls largely as cheap labour so that in spite of very limited financial resources it was not too difficult to arrange this.
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At the end of her 3 year course she had to come back to Germany but, shortly after this, the Nazis passed a law that any Jew who had lived outside Germany for a certain length of time had to get out permanently within 24 hours or be sent to a concentration camp. Ursel was at that time a very good looking 18 year old and they told her that if she went to concentration camp they would let her look after the commandant's garden! My father managed to arrange for her to get to England although once she got here she initially had nowhere to go to and no money.
She was a great lover of the arts, and a keen (trained and knowledgeable) gardener. She acquired a wide knowledge in many fields particularly large areas of special education, boarding school operation and management (from practical cooking and plumbing upwards) and also in business management.
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Eventually she met and married Fred Lennhoff. Appreciations of some of their achievements in helping maladjusted children are available elsewhere. She played the major role in putting his methods into practice with him at Shotton Hall School.
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Ursel died in 1986
Harriet and Ursel