My mother, Pat McCubbin, who has died aged 95, was born into a Jewish family in Bremen, in north-western Germany, and recalled Adolf Hitler’s election victory in 1933. She had chilling memories of how she and her fellow Jewish classmates had to give the Nazi salute to the Führer’s portrait and listen to antisemitic songs.
Her parents, Albert Rosenberg and Kaethe Ehrenstein, split up when she was young. In order to find a place of safety, Kaethe took her mother and daughter to Palestine, then under the British mandate. Pat was only 12, but she was soon helping her mother run a boarding house in Tel Aviv. Albert, a British citizen, had managed to esape from Germany too. A metallurgist, he worked in munitions in Oxford during the second world war and later ran a hotel in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire.
Pat joined the British Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in the early 1940s and served in Cairo, where she met Glasgow-born Lieutenant Hugh McCubbin. Romance blossomed as he serenaded her on the banks of the Nile. They were married in 1946 and the wedding reception was held at her father’s hotel.
The couple had three sons, Norman, Richard and me. In 1958 the family moved to Africa, where Hugh became finance director with the Kenya Farmers’ Association. Then he took up a post with the UN’s World Food Programme, settling first in Lesotho and then Taiwan, where Hugh died, aged only 60.
Widowed relatively young after such a happy marriage, Pat had to rebuild her life. She moved, with Kaethe, to Oxford, where Norman and Richard were at university. There she devoted herself to family life. Everyone loved her warmth, her hospitality, her sage advice, her humour and her celebrated apple cake.
After Kaethe died in 1990, Pat worked for more than 20 years in the Oxfam shop in Summertown, north Oxford, and helped the Liberal Democrats in many election campaigns. She was keen on politics and loved discussing current affairs.
She is survived by Norman, Richard and me, and by two granddaughters and two grandsons.
