The Goldsmith famiy story

John Goldsmith

John November 1939 with a Welford dog

My parents fled from Nazi Germany to the UK at the beginning of 1937 and were initially resident in London. I came along in August 1938.  My father, Matt Goldschmidt [subsequently anglicised to Goldsmith] was an accomplished mechanical engineer and businessman and was able re-establish a new company, Metalastik, in Leicester in partnership with the John Bull Rubber company. Neither company exists today. My father’s company started a completely new process for bonding rubber to metal which was subsequently used in a wide variety of anti-vibration devices which came into their own in all the armed services during WWII.

My father was fairly sure war would break out sometime in autumn 1939 and, in anticipation of the Nazis bombing London, decided – probably around June or July 1939 – to move our family and another family of German Jewish refugees to the countryside. I suppose the Welford’s house was advertised for rental. My father continued to drive to Leicester and return to Boulderdyke at the weekends. All was fine until the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 when he was taken into custody by an embarrassed Sergeant Lord on orders from Banbury. Due to an administrative ‘cock-up’ he had been incorrectly classified as a high-risk ‘enemy alien’. He was initially incarcerated in Oxford prison where, 20 years later almost to the day, I looked onto the prison mound from my room in Worcester College Oxford. After a very difficult 10 weeks of internment my father was released in November 1939 and could return to Boulderdyke and Leicester. My parents kept up contact with Sergeant Lord who had been most kind to my mother after my father was interned. I remember visiting the Lords many years later after he retired, I believe to somewhere just outside Banbury.

My parents remained in Boulderdyke until the summer of 1940 when I was evacuated to America on 10 August for fear of a German invasion and was separated from my parents for just over four years. My passport photo was taken by Blinkhorn’s in Banbury which I believe still exists today. My father’s company grew very considerably during the war and particularly in the 1940s. My father always considered the granting of a Queen’s Award to Industry to Metalastik for their innovative components on the London underground trains, as the highlight of his professional career. By that time the company had been sold to Dunlop, he became a Freeman of the City of Leicester and was granted an honorary PhD from Leicester University.