No Martin Blake – No Winton Kindertransport!
History had somewhat forgotten the historical Kindertransport hero Martin Blake. However, Mike Levy, author of Get the Children Out!, has unearthed new details of his extraordinary life and cast light on an, until now, elusive historical figure.
Martin Blake was a significant but hirtherto elusive figure in the history of the Kindertransport. A very close friend of Sir Nicholas Winton, Blake summoned him to Prague in the winter of 1938/39. Blake and Winton had been planning to go on a skiing holiday in Switzerland. Shocked by the conditions of the Jewish refugees in Prague, Blake said he had cancelled the trip and that Winton should come out and see for himself. Winton did so and with the help of Blake, Trevor Chadwick, Doreen Warriner and others, set up the children’s department of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC). Winton famously helped save the lives of 669 mostly Jewish children who were got out of Nazi-controlled Prague and to safety in Britain. Back in London, Blake and his wife helped Nicholas Winton and his mother to find homes and raise funds to help the 669 Jewish children from Prague.
But who was Martin Blake? Thanks to the research done by Mike Levy, we now know more about this important figure in the story of the Kindertransport. A teacher at Westminster School in 1938, Martin Blake was a committed left-winger who had close friends in the BCRC. He was chair of the local League of Nations Union (LNU) and a Labour councillor. He was committed to helping the Czech people and wrote fervently about their plight in the LNU journal.
Blake’s fellow LNU committee member was the war reporter Clare Hollingworth who was also a member of the BRC (she was the first to report the invasion of Poland by Germany in September 1939). She, Blake, Warriner and others worked to rescue opponents of Hitler – Social Democrats, Communists and Jews.
During and after the war Martin Blake worked as a senior representative of the British Council and served in Prague until 1949 when he was expelled from Czechoslovakia for being a potential British spy! Later he was the British Council’s man in Jamaica and Portugal.
In his youth he was a county tennis player and was an official at the Wimbledon tournament. He retired to Lavenham in Suffolk and died there at the age of 81 in 1984.
He is portrayed in older age by Jonathan Pryce in the film 'One Life' (2024). In the film, he meets Winton to advise him on what to do with the list of 669 Kindertransport children. This meeting never took place in real life. The Winton family lost touch with Blake and he seems to have dropped out of the history books. The man who summoned Nicholas Winton to Prague had been forgotten. Until now.
Martin Blake