Herta Groves, who became a hatmaker for the Queen, arrived in Britain as a teenage Jewish refugee fleeing Nazi Austria. She had just 17 shillings — 85p in today’s money — in her pocket, and a track record for bravery.
Weeks earlier in Vienna, inside her family’s spacious flat, Groves offered crash courses to scores of terrified Jewish women about how to obtain work visas abroad. The daughter of a dentist, she was long aware of the suffering of the Orthodox, who were obliged to clean streets with toothbrushes. The Nazi grip was tightening even for liberal Jews such as Groves’s father, Wilhelm, who only appeared at synagogue on high holy days, or Amelia, her non-observant mother, who encouraged her daughter to make Gentile friends.
“It wasn’t that much help in the end,” Groves, an elegantly coiffed blonde woman with blue eyes, recalled in an interview that she gave about the Holocaust in 1997. Her father died in 1942 of pneumonia after being forced to sweep snow. Her mother and sister also perished, in a camp in Latvia.
By the age of 22, Grove had lost all her immediate family, but with a poise that characterised her life, she began to build a career in millinery. She founded the London Hat Company, exporting her chic couture hats all over Europe. So elegant were her designs that, by the 1950s, she was selling to the Queen’s milliner. “The British gave us a chance to restart our lives. We could rebuild everything here,” Groves later explained.
Herta Georgette Herman was born in April 1920 in Vienna. Her mother Amelia (nee Lobisch), the daughter of a hatter, managed a family millinery. Known since childhood as Georgette, Groves left school at 14 and became an apprentice to her uncle’s millinery. As a schoolgirl, she suffered antisemitism. Children would shout at her in the street. “I was Jewish looking,” she explained. When Groves joined a Zionist youth organisation, her parents were horrified. Her father took pride in having fought for Austria in the First World War. Owing to his military service, which left him with a weak lung, he was allowed by the Nazis to continue working as a dentist, albeit with a plaque on his surgery door declaring him “a dentist to the Jews”.
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After his death in 1942, Groves tried to raise £50 to pay a friend in Portugal to marry her mother by proxy. The Nazis refused to give Amelia Herman her husband’s death certificate and she was deported to Latvia.
Earlier, the intrepid Groves had also tried to find a family in England to take in her sister, Alice. Her first British employer, the owner of a large house in Gloucestershire, had placed an advertisement in the Birmingham Post seeking a family for Alice. A manufacturer in Edgbaston was found who promised to educate her at the same grammar school as his two daughters. The plan failed though because the Home Office blocked further entry by refugees.
Given no choice but to focus on the future, Groves found work in Bath as a salesgirl until she was arrested by the police and taken to Holloway prison after a judge reclassified her status as a refugee. By day, she was sent to the sewing room to stitch uniforms. “It was a terrible emotional shock,” Groves said. “I was flabbergasted.”
Eventually, she was freed, and began hat-making, selling her wares to West End shops. In 1943, she married a fellow Austrian, Otto Reichl, but within three years they had divorced. Nine years later, she met her second husband, Adam Groves, in a social club. By then, she was a successful milliner, having launched her own label, “Georgette”, in the West End. A natural entrepreneur, she made links with manufacturers in Luton, which was then the centre of the hatmaking industry.
Few travelled in the Fifties to keep abreast of European trends, but Groves did. In Paris, fashion was thriving. She obtained introductions to Dior and other major French fashion houses. Initially, she was hesitant about doing business in Germany, but encouraged by a German Jewish friend once active in the resistance, she set up an office there and began exporting her exquisitely crafted hats to Norway and Sweden — even Paris.
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For 50 years, she never spoke of the Holocaust. Aged 77, she gave an interview to the USC Shoah Foundation: “When I gave speeches, it was mostly about hats,” she explained. “The message is the Holocaust can’t be forgotten — it needs to be remembered for future generations.”
She died after being knocked down by a lorry after a concert at the Wigmore Hall in London. When she first came to Britain, she took work as charwoman. By the time of her death, she was living in a flat worth about £2 million in St John’s Wood.
Herta Groves, milliner, was born on April 1, 1920. She died on April 27, 2016, aged 96