Alf Dubs, Baron Dubs
Alf Dubs, Baron Dubs
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Alf Dubs, Baron Dubs

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Alf Dubs, Baron Dubs

Alfred Dubs, Baron Dubs (born 5 December 1932) is a British Labour Party politician and former Member of Parliament. On 27 September 1994, he was appointed as a Labour life peer with the title of Baron Dubs, of Battersea in the London Borough of Wandsworth.

Alfred Dubs was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to a Jewish father, Hubert, whose family was from Northern Bohemia, and a mother, Bedriska (or Frida) née Ortner, from Austria. Hubert worked in the cotton industry, while Frida was a dietitian.

Dubs lived in Prague as a child. His father left for London when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939. His mother applied for permission to leave the country but this was refused at Gestapo Headquarters.

Dubs travelled on the Kindertransport in June 1939 at the age of six. He was one of 669 Czech-resident, mainly Jewish, children saved by British stockbroker Nicholas Winton, and others, from the Nazis on the Kindertransport between March and September 1939. He later said that he clearly remembered leaving Prague station and not touching the food pack given to him by his mother for the next two days. Discussing his experience on a series of special broadcasts organised by Humanists UK for Prison Radio during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Dubs said:

‘I remember the German invasion. I remember how German soldiers were everywhere. We had to tear a picture of the Czech President out of our school books when I was six years old and stick in a picture of Hitler. My Mother put me on a train. There were anxious parents everywhere, not knowing whether they'd ever see their children again. There were German soldiers in the background with swastikas. The older ones knew what was going on. As I said, I was six years old, so I don't think I really understood, except it all seemed rather dramatic. It was a long train journey on hardwood seats but you don't mind if you're a six year old. I didn't know anybody on the train. There were a couple of 100 of us, I think. And so we proceeded on the train to the Dutch border. The older ones cheered because they were out of reach of the Nazis. We reached the Hook of Holland, then Harwich, and then to Liverpool Street, London, where we were met with our dog tags and were allocated to relatives, family or people who would foster us. So that was the story of my journey. If it hadn't been for the Kindertransport, I don't think I'd have survived the Holocaust, because I'm half Jewish myself.’

Hubert had fled to England when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia and met young Alf at Liverpool Street station. His mother was initially denied a visa but was able to join him and his father in London on 31 August. The family moved to Cookstown in Northern Ireland but within a year Dubs' father died of a heart attack. His mother found work at a British Restaurant in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, at first scrubbing floors.

From 1943 Dubs attended a boarding school run by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in Llanwrtyd Wells. Dubs was later educated at Cheadle Hulme School and the London School of Economics. He worked as a local government officer and for Ogilvy and Mather as an account executive before entering politics.

Before being elected for Battersea South, Dubs stood three times. In 1970 he stood for Cities of London and Westminster and was defeated by the Conservative candidate Christopher Tugendhat. In South Hertfordshire in the February and October 1974 general elections, he was beaten by the incumbent Conservative MP Cecil Parkinson.

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