Our father, Peter Hahlo, who has died aged 90, arrived in the UK as a refugee from the Nazis in 1938. With a label round his neck, a little money and few possessions, he boarded a kindertransport train in Berlin on his own, bound for a country where he knew no one and could not speak a word of the language.
Peter was born in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. Until the Nazis came calling, he did not know the family had Jewish roots. His father, Georg, a lawyer, had converted to Christianity in order to marry his mother, Ellie. When Peter arrived in London, he was fortunate to be fostered by a kind family in Crystal Palace.
His memories of that time were of domestic safety, boredom and long solo bus rides across the capital. He attended Penge grammar school, where he recalled being pushed forward by other boys to speak to German POWs in carriages that had paused on the railway line at the edge of the playing field.
His parents and his older sister also fled Germany; his father ended up in Bolivia and eventually, in the 1950s, returned to Germany. Peter was reunited with his mother in London at the end of the war. He mixed with other émigrés, who had a huge influence on his lifelong passions for theatre and politics – principally Otto Tausig, who went on to be an actor and director in German theatre and film.
Peter was also drawn to a medical career, training first as a chiropodist and then as an osteopath. He started his own practice in south London in the 50s, when osteopathy was considered very alternative – not helped by the role of Stephen Ward in the Profumo scandal of 1963. Undeterred, he built a strong reputation and went on to teach at the College of Osteopaths and to run a teaching clinic at Neal’s Yard in Covent Garden.
His defining passion was theatre. He was highly active as an actor and, increasingly, as a director with amateur and professional theatre groups. His many productions of Shakespeare at Polesden Lacey open-air theatre in Surrey were widely admired. He was the driving force behind the Sutton Theatres Trust, which led to the creation in 1984 of the Secombe theatre.
Peter married Fay Foley in 1951 and she survives him, as do we, his three sons, and his six grandchildren. Despite his disrupted and partly stolen childhood, he generated an aura of warmth, kindness and great humour, with an inclusive and generous spirit forged from his remarkable experiences.
