The Jewish entrepreneurs who helped revive post-war Wales

The skies were a leaden grey on the day in 1938 when Joachim Koppel, dressed in a dapper three-piece suit and fedora hat, set his pristine leather Oxford shoes on the rough terrain of the Taff valley. As he got out of the car, he must have gazed round at the smudgy landscape through wire rimmed spectacles, sniffing the air of the coalfield for the first time. However unlikely it sounds, something made him think this was the promised land, the perfect new home for his successful zip factory. 

It must have seemed a long way from the sophisticated delights of his native Berlin with its salons, cafés and bridge parties. But mysteriously, my step-grandfather Joachim and many others of his background chose what must have seemed like a bleak provincial backwater as a new home for their companies. They had been forced to move to avoid the threat of certain death at the hands of the Nazis, but the choice of this particular location must have seemed both an odd decision, and a tremendous risk.

It could have easily been a complete clash of cultures, reflects my cousin Dennis Backer. “Pontypridd (the nearest town) probably didn't see that many people from outside a 15 mile radius in those days and then all of a sudden this group of people arrives, many of whom had German accents. At a time not that long after the First World War and when troubles were brewing with Germany again, I wonder what the response was of the of the local population – but maybe they were just delighted to have the work.”

Workers at the factory[Missing Credit]

Whatever the chemistry was, the gamble paid off. Over the next decades, refugee-founded enterprises of which Joachim’s was just one, contributed to the revival of the economy of a South Wales that had been laid low by the Depression. The injection of energy and ingenuity, the employment opportunities, the innovative technologies and new industries they brought with them as they fled Europe helped to breathe a degree of new life into an area crippled by the collapse of the coal and steel industries which had dominated the economy of the region for nearly two hundred years.

As a child growing up in Cardiff of the 1960s, I remember the glee we felt at seeing a certain maroon liveried delivery van sweep past us in the street. The deep red paintwork was adorned by a distinctive cream logo of a zipper-man with one hand held aloft triumphantly, bearing a flag inscribed with the name: Aero.

Aero Zipp Fasteners Limited was the family firm that had been brought over from Germany via Czechoslovakia by Joachim, along with skilled staff. My father eventually became chief engineer, Uncle Kurt the managing director, other uncles and cousins worked in management and on the shop floor. In some ways, Aero is emblematic of so many other companies that arrived here at the same time. The owners’ hard work was rewarded, and at its peak time the company occupied a commanding position in the UK and world zip market.

But why did a tribe of people used to hanging out in the coffee houses of Mittel Europe opt to lay down new industrial roots 160 miles away from the nearest piece of decent apple strudel?

Aero was one of many refugee-led companies to set up business on the Treforest Industrial Estate, located on the Taff valley about ten miles north of Cardiff. By 1940, 55 of the companies on the estate were under émigré ownership.

Now the recent publication of an archive is helping to shed light on that moment in history. Twenty-one copies of the Aero Zipp in-house magazine dating from 1945 onwards have been put online by the Jewish History Association of South Wales, donated by my cousin Dennis whose father Joe, a lifelong Aero employee, was one of the editors. The title Punch & Die sounds strangely aggressive nowadays says Dennis, but it’s a shopfloor pun. “in a light engineering context, both a punch and a die are tools.”

Admin staff at the factory[Missing Credit]

Whatever the name, the magazine’s pages offer a peek into the mindset of the era: a mix of serious reports about switching production from war work to civilian markets and heartfelt missives from employees in the services, it also contained poems, plays and recipes. If the aim of ‘Punch & Die’ was to confer a sense of group identity and indeed Britishness on the workforce, it did that with gusto. Dennis describes it as “a mix of toolroom and working men’s club humour, a bit laddish in places” with a plethora of quirky satirical articles about anything from corduroy trousers to grinding machines. The only clue about the company’s origins is the names – beside Jenkins, Evans and Roberts are Samolewitz, Meitner and Engel.

Historian Cai Parry Jones describes them as a  “unique and rare” insight into the history of manufacturing and business in Wales.

But why did a tribe of people used to hanging out in the coffee houses of Mittel Europe opt to lay down new industrial roots 160 miles away from the nearest piece of decent apple strudel?

The answer to the puzzle is in the economics. The 1930s was a time of mass unemployment in depression-struck Britain, with two million out of work. The Government’s response was to pass the 1934 Special Areas Act that attempted to create jobs in the worst hit parts of the country by setting up industrial estates.

Treforest was one of those, officially opened in 1936. As Parry-Jones relates in The Jews of Wales, in 1935 the Commissioner for the Special Areas wrote to 5,000 British firms inviting them to consider setting up in the newly designated zones. Of the 200 that replied, only 12  were interested.

But fast forward to 1938 when the German Reich’s interior ministry started to compel the knock-down sale of Jewish-owned companies, and a trickle of applications to move businesses to the UK became a flood. It must have seemed like divine providence to the struggling commissioner when out of the blue he encounters a whole new category of entrepreneur willing to consider any remote outpost of the UK, because their lives depended on it.

Though the Government lacked powers to force new arrivals to settle in any particular location, it found ways of steering them towards these provincial estates by giving them the clear impression that their admission to the UK was conditional on compliance, the options being Glasgow, Newcastle or Treforest. Michael Pruchnie who became Managing Director of Pearl Paints, recounts how company founder Willi Stern took a lace out of his shoe to measure the relative distances from London and declared Treforest the winner, as it was closest.

 On Sunday mornings some of the owners would gather to talk shop over strong coffee and cigars in a smoked-filled lounge in one of the smarter Cardiff suburbs

The same reasoning attracted many others. Though the internment of key staff as enemy aliens during the war caused at least one to go bust, for most that proved a blip on the way to success. Rizla cigarette papers, Blossom Ltd artificial flowers, P Messinger music strings and Metal Alloys were among dozens of thriving businesses. On Sunday mornings some of the owners would gather to talk shop over strong coffee and cigars in a smoked-filled lounge in one of the smarter Cardiff suburbs.

In the 1970s, Aero Zipp was bought by the American multination Textron, which closed it down some ten years later. Today only a few of the original companies still exist, but arguably the resilience, adaptability and innovation refugee entrepreneurs needed to escape their fates and reinvent themselves on foreign shores helped to change industrial South Wales for ever.