Ludwik was born, in Lvov, in 1929. The only son of a wealthy family, he was marked out to run the family’s iron and steel firm. A future as a business man beckoned, and the likelihood of following his father as an identifying but unobservant Jew, and a leader of Lvov’s civic life.

 

Then came the war, and it turned his life upside down. The Russians and the Nazis arrived simultaneously outside his town in 1939, and the community had to choose whom to surrender to. With so many Jews in Lvov, they chose to surrender to the Soviet forces. The Polish military officers — including many Finkelstein family friends — were promptly shot in the woods in Katyn. Ludwik’s father, Adolf Finkelstein, an officer of the Polish Army Reserve and a town councillor, vanished into a labour camp, while he and his mother were deported to a remote settlement on the borders of Siberia.

 

Many neighbours died of disease and hunger, and Ludwik and his mother would surely have also succumbed, in time, had not Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. Adolf Finkelstein was released from prison and his family was released from deportation. After nearly two years the family were reunited and, joining the staff of General Anders, Adolf took his family to the Middle East with the Polish Army Corps, the so-called Anders Army.

 

There was, however, to be no fairy tale ending. After Yalta the family realized that they would never be able to go home again. Adolf died shortly after being demobilized in Britain, and his family, once so prosperous, were left alone in London, impoverished, reliant on national assistance, and part of a small Polish community robbed of its history by the Polish communists, of its homeland and of professional standing.

 

Ludwik was forced to start again. And a man who was to become an acclaimed teacher and academic, embarked on his professional life having the benefit of just six weeks’ formal secondary schooling, at the Trans-Siberian Railway School. The rest of his qualifications — the envelopes he received at the end of his life featured two full lines of letters after his name — he gained by teaching himself. His mother taught him English under the blankets in the freezing Siberian winter, and he eventually mastered nine languages, speaking most of them without a hint of a foreign accent.

 

For all his mastery, gained from books, of history, culture, and language, he determined on a degree in physics and a career as an engineer. He later said that it was his wartime experiences that led him down this path: “I became convinced that the basic needs of humanity for food, water, and shelter, were of paramount importance, and it is through technical means that it must be provided.”

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It was not long before his calling led him down the coalmines. Within a year of

gaining his first degree from the Northern Polytechnic, Ludwik had joined the Mining Research Establishment of the National Coal Board. Mining was then one of the country’s core industrial activities, and, after the war, talented scientists were keen to use the technical knowledge they had gained to solve the industry’s problems. Spending much of his time underground, Ludwik helped to design and test instruments that could, for instance, measure the hardness of British coal, thus assessing its suitability for new methods of extraction.

 

He loved the work, and until the end of his life had a mining lamp hanging in his study at home. But he became convinced, partly through careful study of transducers, that the design of instruments could be less haphazard, more a scientific discipline. And so he took the biggest step of his professional life. He accepted a position as a lecturer in Instrument and control engineering at Northampton College of Advanced Technology. Thus began his most important intellectual work. He bridged the gulf that separated practitioners from theorists, by making it possible to consider measurement problems

systematically and by treating scientific instruments as machines that process

information.

 

A notable area of his work, with colleagues, was mathematical modelling of

instruments, a technique that he applied to a wide range of problems in industry and medicine. His distinction as a measurement scientist — he was the author of some two hundred papers and four books — resulted in his appointment as a professor and, later, his election to the Royal Academy of Engineering and president of the Institute of Measurement and Control.This had another consequence: he became a devoted teacher and university manager.

 

The expansion of higher education in the mid-1960s that followed the Robbins Report, saw Northampton become City University, and Ludwik became one of its mainstays, becoming the first Dean of its School of Engineering and later serving as its pro-vice-chancellor. He took pride as its reputation grew. Even in retirement he remained a much-loved figure at City, where an engineering laboratory was recently named after him.

 

In parallel with his work at his university he joined the Civil Defence Corps in 1952 and rose to become the chief regional adviser for Greater London. Occasionally he would joke about preparations for nuclear war (noting that he had used an emergency number on an exercise and been told by a housewife in Sheffield: “You’re the fifth one I’ve spoken to today love, it’s the wrong number”). But he was devoted to the work, took it seriously, and eventually was awarded the Civil  Defence Medal, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal and, in 1990, was appointed OBE for his contribution. As his career blossomed, so did his family life.

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In 1957 he married Mirjam Wiener, a graduate scientist, daughter of the well-known historian of Nazism Alfred Wiener, and, like her husband, a refugee (in her case, as a survivor of Belsen concentration camp). With her, he enjoyed an extremely happy marriage and home. A highlight of this was the weekly Friday evening family dinners to celebrate the ushering in of the Sabbath. Although his parents had not been observant Jews, Ludwik became committed to his own brand of Reform Judaism. And, building up a vast library of books, he became a noted authority, able to debate on equal terms with leading scholars and rabbis. Upon retirement he became a Fellow of the Rabbinical college for progressive Jews, the Leo Baeck College, and earned a PhD for his work on the development of the reform movement and the Rabbinical School of Warsaw in the 19th century. He did this while continuing his scientific work. His last paper on measurement was being read in Germany at the same hour that his funeral was being held in London.

 

Despite a turbulent childhood and reversals that might have made some people bitter and wary, Ludwik was neither of those things. He was devoted to Britain, and optimistic about it. He was characterized by a warmth, generosity and gentle humour that made him as much loved by those who encountered him as he was admired. It is perhaps his greatest achievement that, having succeeded in many fields where jealousies can often thrive, almost nobody had a bad word to say about him. In 1950

 

Ludwik was a penniless refugee, the only son of a widowed mother. He died a

celebrated man, leaving a wife and three children integrated into the professional life of his adopted country, and eight grandchildren.

 

Professor Ludwik Finkelstein, OBE, died on 27 August 011, aged 81 years.

 

 

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Copyright: Finkelstein family

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