My father, Tom Michel, who has died aged 96, was a chemical engineer who arrived in the UK from Germany at the age of 11, escaping from the Nazis, and made his life here.
He was born in Berlin to Jewish parents, Richard, an architect, and his wife, Gisela (nee Meisel). Anticipating the threat of nazism, the family relocated in 1934 to England, where his father established a button-making factory. Tom recalled that on arriving in London during a drought the buses were emblazoned with the message: Use Less Water. “Useless water? What a ridiculous thing to put on a bus!” was the boy’s reaction to his new country.
After attending University College school in Hampstead, Tom studied chemical engineering at Imperial College. As it was wartime, he was considered a potential enemy alien, and had to tell the police if he was ever going to be late home from a post-lecture do. Tom volunteered with a fire-watching group in London during the war, sitting up all night to watch for fires.
After graduating in 1944, he worked in an ambulance factory and a gas-heater company.
Just after the war, his father bought a farm near Hailsham, East Sussex. Tom did a course at Cirencester Agricultural College and spent several years working on the farm.
In 1957 he met Miriam Boas when she came to stay on the farm with her family. They married a few months later, and went on to have two daughters, me and my sister, Jane.
In the late 50s Tom went back into engineering with the refrigeration company Prestcold. When it opened a factory near Swansea in 1961, the family moved to Pontardulais and later to Theale, Berkshire. He was the company’s technical director when he retired in 1988.
In Berkshire he became politically active and was on the general committee of Reading Constituency Labour party. Our house served as the committee rooms for the 1966 general election, in which John Lee was elected Reading’s MP and Harold Wilson’s Labour won a handsome majority. Even in his final months, whenever medical personnel asked him if he was allergic to anything, he would reply “Tories!”
Tom travelled widely in Europe for work and leisure, and, with a facility for languages, was strongly internationalist in his outlook. He could easily pass as a posh English gent or as a continental European, because he was both.
Tom and Miriam divorced in 1983 and he married Anne Woodward (nee Bindloss), though everyone remained on good terms. After he retired he and Anne moved to east Devon, where he was a permanent and robust fixture on his allotment until his early 90s.
As well as being immensely knowledgable about science, Tom was also interested in history, literature and classical music.
Tom is survived by Anne, Jane and me, his stepchildren, Oliver and Lorna, and by four grandchildren and a step-grandchild.
