Sir Frank Lampl’s career in the British construction industry was a remarkable example of the tenacity and enterprise of the immigrant. He arrived in Britain from his native Czechoslovakia as a refugee in 1968, already in his forties. He brought scarcely more than the clothes he was wearing and he spoke very little English. Yet after beginning work on building sites he rose rapidly in the construction industry with Bovis, as that company moved from a modest operation to a global giant. He was chairman of the Bovis Construction Group from 1985 to 1999, and president of Bovis Lend Lease Holding from 2000. He was knighted in 1990 and served as Chancellor of Kingston University.
And yet this impressive rise from 1968 recorded in his Who’s Who entry omitted the far more remarkable story of personal survival in the first decades of Lampl’s life, in which he lived through the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau, and then three years working in a uranium mine as a political prisoner under the Czechoslovak Communist regime.
Understandably, he did not wish to dwell on those experiences when making a new life in Britain. But they gave him nonetheless both a determination in pursuing his career once he had escaped Czechoslovakia and also a detachment from the more superficial side of life in the upper echelons of corporate Britain.
Lampl was born in 1926 near the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria. His family was part of the cultured Central European Jewish milieu, at home in both the German and Czech languages. He recalled studying Schiller as a child, and revering the traditions of German Kultur — a reverence which, he admitted, made his family fail to see the danger approaching as Nazi influence over Germany increased. After the Nazis occupied Bohemia and Moravia in 1939 Lampl’s family was deported first to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, and then on to Auschwitz, where his mother was among those murdered. He recalled the anonymity of life as a number rather than a person, and the brutal simplicity of efforts to survive a death camp — “We used to have a saying: Anything that doesn’t kill you, benefits you.”
From Auschwitz he was moved to the concentration camp at Dachau in Germany, where he was liberated by American forces in 1945. He then returned to his family’s farm in Czechoslovakia, and began agricultural studies at the nearby city of Brno. At first he had considerable sympathy with the Soviet forces occupying his country and admired postwar ideas of socialist change. But he remembered becoming disturbed by the regimentation and aloofness of the occupiers. And when the Czechoslovak Communists took power in 1948 with Soviet backing, Lampl’s life was once more to become that of the persecuted “enemy of the State”.
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He was dismissed from his studies for being insufficiently working-class in origin — in fact, he joked later, none of his fellow students, all farmers’ sons, displayed sufficient proletarian authenticity to continue studying. And Lampl’s family farm was confiscated as part of agricultural collectivisation. Then in 1950 Lampl was arrested, interrogated over a period of nine months, and sentenced to five years’ hard labour for “sabotage” — in particular, assisting Czechs in escaping to the West.
Lampl served his time in the notorious uranium mines at Jachymov in western Bohemia, which provided the raw materials for the Russians to make their first nuclear weapons. In conditions reminiscent of the Siberian gulag, the prisoners were kept in harsh camps amid forests, freezing in winter, surrounded by arc lights and trigger- happy guards. They were marched through barbed-wire corridors down into the mines, where they worked with little or no protection against radiation.
The various camps around Jachymov were, Lampl once remarked, “an extraordinary square mile”, as they contained a bizarre mix of all those whom the Russians deemed to be their enemies. Lampl, the Auschwitz survivor, had to work side by side with Nazis imprisoned at the end of the war.
His closest workmate down the mine was a Nazi official who had spent the war organising the confiscation and disposal of property belonging to Czech Jews sent to the death camps. And then, in a further bitter irony, the Stalinist purges which raged across Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s led to many of those Communist officials who had interrogated Lampl being sent to Jachymov as prisoners themselves, so they too became his fellow workers.
Lampl was finally released in the mid-1950s in an amnesty which followed Stalin’s death. He was told by the Communist authorities that he could work either in mining or construction. Having “had enough of mining”, he chose construction, but was kept in lowly jobs because of his refusal to join the Communist Party, until the gradual political thaw in mid-1960s Czechoslovakia made promotion possible. However, the Soviet invasion to snuff out the Prague Spring in 1968 ended all that, and Lampl decided he could not risk a third round of persecution.
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Pretending to go on a holiday visit to their son, who was studying in England, Lampl and his wife left Czechoslovakia with almost none of their possessions, and began life as refugees in Britain. They rented a small flat in London, and Lampl found work on building sites. His career blossomed when he joined Bovis in the early 1970s, and he came to play a central role in its international expansion.
Initially working conditions were hardly glamorous — there were long flights in economy class to destinations such as Nigeria, where breaking into the local construction market was an arduous business. But in the end Lampl presided over a truly global empire, with thousands of employees and projects in places ranging from Sri Lanka to the Algarve to the Euro Disney park near Paris. He was also a director of Bovis’s parent company, P&O.
In semi-retirement in the 1990s Lampl derived great satisfaction from being able to visit his Czech homeland again, after the collapse of the communist regime. He retook possession of the restituted family farm, and was involved in the development of a new business park in Brno.
Lampl became a British citizen in the 1970s. He also played an important role in the development of relations between Britain and the new Czechoslovak state under President Vaclav Havel.
One of the most moving moments for Lampl was at a dinner at 10 Downing Street attended by Havel in which the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, formally expressed Britain’s regret for the Munich agreement of 1938, which had done so much to determine Czechoslovakia’s fate at the hands of the Nazis. Lampl had more reason than most of those present to know what that fate had meant in human terms and why it was so important to remember the history.
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Lampl’s first wife Blanka, née Kratochvilova, died in 2001. He is survived by his wife Wenda, née Scarborough, and the son of his first marriage.
Sir Frank Lampl, chairman, Bovis Construction Group, 1985-99, was born on April 6, 1926. He died on March 24, 2011, aged 84