Casgliadau Arlein
Amgueddfa Cymru
Chwilio Uwch
Recordiad sain / Audio recording: William ("Bill") Pollock
Oral history recording with Bill Pollock collected as part of The Hineni Project, an insight into the life and stories of a Jewish community in all its diversity. Hineni was a collaborative project between Cardiff Reform Synagogue and Butetown History & Arts Centre.
I was born in Vienna in 1931, where my father ran a factory making leather gloves. My mother also worked, making hats, not really for a living but to supplement income. My family lived in a fairly affluent part of Vienna, but when I was six we ran away because the Nazis came in. We lived in Belgium for six months, and then we came to England after being sponsored by a distant relative in London. We arrived in 1939, living in London for a year, and moved to Cardiff because my father and his business partner from Vienna started a glove factory at the Treforest Trading Estate. But the government soon made us leave Cardiff; being Austrian, our native language was German and we were considered Nazis. My father was initially interned in the Isle of Wight, and my mother, brother and myself moved to Wiltshire, where I went to school. After the war I worked as an apprentice in the Midlands where I learnt to make high-quality small leather goods such as wallets and billfolds. Then I went to work for my father’s business. After the war my father was a partner in Monopol in Treforest, which made leather watch straps, and in 1954 he left to start his own company called Apollo, which also made watch straps, and I joined him to run the factory. We employed quite a substantial number of people - mainly women - the daughters and also the sons of miners. Eventually we bought watch strap manufacturing companies in Canada and in Holland, and employed about 600 people. We also diversified into watches, and had the franchise for Walt Disney watches. The business was sold in 2001 to a company based in London. I stayed with them for five years under contract, and my son remained as MD of the watch strap division, but he subsequently left and started his own business. My family were among the early members of the Cardiff Reform community. We joined in the late 1940s when the members were substantially refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. My late wife, Lilly, was from Czechoslovakia, and was very prominent in the synagogue in the charitable side of things. She was a very kind-hearted person and did a lot to help elderly people, with a huge reputation for looking after members of the whole Jewish community in Cardiff, alongside members of the United and Reform Shuls. I was on the synagogue council for thirty years and was Chairman for three years in the early 1980s. I have three children: Debbie and Julian, who now live in London, and Marilyn, who lives in Cardiff and is a member of the synagogue and also on the council. I left Cardiff in 2007 after Lilly passed away. I now live in London, and I’m a member of the Reform synagogue in Radlett where Debbie and Julian live. I do miss the people in Cardiff, and the community as a whole, but I occasionally go back and try to catch up . I get sent all the literature from the synagogue because I’m an honorary member and trustee, and I occasionally see people from the Cardiff Reform who now live in London. I would describe myself as Jewish and British, rather than Welsh, although I grew up in Wales. I wouldn’t consider myself Austrian as I haven’t been back since my family left in 1938 and have no wish to go back.