Obituary: Death of Paul Yogi Mayer - teacher, author, and friend and mentor to a generation of refugee boys

PAUL Yogi Mayer, athlete, teacher, author, mentor and friend to a generation of refugee boys, died on Friday. He would have been 99 in September.

He leaves a remarkable legacy that has been commemorated in Martin Gilbert’s book The Boys. It is a story of salvation and hope. Mr Yogi Mayer, in Britain having fled the Nazis in his native Berlin, was asked by the Jewish Refugee Committee to work as an instructor at Brady Street Boys’ Club in the East End. It was 1946, and hundreds of damaged and disoriented boys who had been rescued from concentration camps were arriving in London. A centre was set up for them in two old houses in Belsize Park; they called it the Primrose Club, after their telephone exchange. 

It was here that Mr Yogi Mayer became their father figure. He played football with them, he taught them cricket on Hampstead Heath, he found a Viennese pastry cook to serve them cakes at a coffee bar, he taught them to dance so that they could meet girls. He taught them cricket, he used to say, because he wanted them to be part of the community they were now living in.

Mr Yogi Mayer taught his boys (one of them became the much-loved Rabbi Hugo Gryn) to look forward, rather than back upon the terrible things they had seen and suffered. The Primrose Club had to close eventually for lack of funds, but Mr Yogi Mayer carried on his work at the Brady Club where he became youth leader then area youth leader for Islington. He was awarded the MBE for his services to youth in 1997.

It was when he was 90 that he published the English version of his book, Jews and the Olympic Games. All his life he had tried to demolish the old stereotype of the Jew who is strong on intellect but weak on physical prowess. 

It would amuse him to ask people how many Jewish Olympic medalists there had been in the last 100 years. They could just manage Harold Abrahams if they had seen the film Chariots of Fire. There were, he would say triumphantly, some 400 Jewish Olympic medalists. Their story is there in his book.

His life was devoted to the breaking down of prejudice. Born in 1912 in Kreuznach, he was educated in Berlin and Frankfurt, and as a crack athlete was invited in 1935 to join an Olympic training squad for Jewish athletes, a ploy that fooled no one. 

He was not asked to take part in the Berlin Olympics, but his real anger was directed at the way Jewish sports men and women were being expelled from clubs as “non-Aryans”. 

Life in general became intolerable for Jews in Germany, and in May, 1939, Mr Yogi Mayer, his wife Ilse and their baby arrived in England. They had left  Berlin with a handsome white pram, a set of cutlery, and £20. Mr Yogi Mayer solved the immediate problem of penury by joining the British army. After the war he was able to carry on his work in sport and with young people, and unlike many German Jews of his generation, continued to go back to his native country – not only as a visitor but as an ambassador for mutual understanding.

He and his wife brought up their three children and lived much of their lives in West Hampstead, and their daughter Monica is a well-loved presence with her fashion shop in South End Road – a street where a benign Mr Yogi Mayer, sitting in a café, would pass the time of day. If there is one regret, says his son Tom, it is that Mr Yogi Mayer did not live to see the 2012 Olympic Games.

The funeral will be tomorrow (Friday), at 1pm, at Golders Green Crematorium.

Published: 14 July 2011
by RUTH GORB