My husband, Ralph Innes, who has died aged 97, was one of the influx of refugees from Nazi oppression who have enriched the life of tBritain so much.
He was born Rolf Einzig, and brought up in Berlin in a secular Jewish family, the son of Bernhard Einzig, the managing director of an overcoat manufacturer, and his wife, Eugenia. When it became obvious that there was no future for young Jews in Nazi Germany, he came to Britain in early 1939 with the intention of completing his training in knitting technology.
Ralph worked on the night shift in a knitting factory in Manchester but then moved to Leicestershire, where he worked in a factory and continued his textile education at a college in Hinckley. When France was invaded during the second world war, there were scare stories about German paratroopers being dropped into the British countryside and many newspapers campaigned to intern German refugees. Ralph was taken to the Isle of Man, where hotels in Douglas, the capital, had been taken over as internment camps. Later the younger men were allowed to volunteer for war work in Australia or Canada and Ralph was sent to a hutted camp in Canada.
When Winston Churchill became the prime minister it was decided that refugees who wished could join the army. Ralph returned to Britain to sign up with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He went with his unit to France after D-day (when he was advised to change his name) and, at the end of the war, was promoted to a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps because he spoke German and he interrogated some suspected Nazis.
After the war he worked in a knitting factory and then was employed as a lecturer in knitting technology at Derby Technical College. During this period he married, and had two daughters, Charlotte and Jennifer, but his wife, Bettie, died of pneumonia when the children were four and two and he brought them up on his own.
He became a senior lecturer at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) and was a director of the Institute of Linguists, and the International Federation of Knitting Technologists. All his life he was a socialist, inspired by the poverty he saw in Berlin when he was a boy, and was a long-standing member of the Labour party. He and I married in 1989 and lived happily in the Leicestershire village of Croft.
Ralph is survived by me, his daughters, my four children, and his niece, Hetty. Ralph’s sister was the painter and illustrator Susan Einzig, who died in 2009.
