Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008
Jewish Families in England
What was his name again?
Whose name?
The architect.
Fritz Gross, Fritz Gross, yeah. When we're finished here you can have a look at some of his pictures. He's really a great architect. In fact, he became architect in charge of rebuilding Bedford after the war. He did the town plan for the whole rebuilding. He later on became the chief architect for Rolls Royce...all the facilities for Rolls Royce, all the, all the fairs that Rolls Royce participated in at Farnborough and so forth, he designed these stands and so forth. He was a very, very, very, very uh, competent and just very competent archi...in fact he developed...now come to remember...the G Plan, which was called after Gross...the G plan, which was in the 1930s before he came to England. He was actually brought to England by the British government because of him being a famous architect from Austria. And the G Plan was the scheme developed by him in which space is divided by furniture only and two or three steps...there are no walls. And it was adopted in California in the 30s and it became a very interesting scheme for layout of homes, especially bungalow type homes which had no two, two levels. So, if you look around here you'll find that I tried to do it to some extent...
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???, yes.
Why do you suppose there were no Jewish families...British Jewish families who took children in...at least very few?
Uh, it's a very difficult question to answer and most probably...I've, I've always wondered, I've always wondered...especially it already, already was we were in Bedford, a lot of Jewish families evac...who had their English children evacuated to Bedford would spend the weekends either at Bedford hotels or had an apartment in Bedford in which they would invite the children to spend the weekend with them. They were billeted with English people and during the time that, that the weekends when the parents came from work from London, they would uh, bring the children sort of from wherever they were billeted and spend the weekend. Now, among those were a number who would also invite us...the Czech boys and the Kinder...the German Kinder because we were mixed now...to spend...to have lunch with them on a Saturday. In the whole of Bedford, there was only one Bedfordian Jewish family, which was Mr. Rose who had a boutique in the, in the arcade off High Street and he was a very unique person for me because he was a World War I fighter pilot who flew in the Flying Corps...in the Royal whatever they called it...the Royal Flying Corps.
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