Paul ‘Yogi’ Mayer

The Central British Fund (CBF) put together a large team of people to look after the Boys.

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

The British government offered 1,000 visas to bring the Boys to the UK but the caveat was that the CBF were responsible for their care and would pay all the expenses.

Mayer was born in 1913 in Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany into a Jewish family. His mother died when he was six years old and his father, who was a seed merchant, died when he was 12.

Mayer studied at Berlin and Frankfurt universities, however, once the Nazis came into power they prevented Jews from attending higher education and Mayer was forced to halt his studies and take up a job as a PE teacher.

An extremely talented and natural athlete, he hoped to be included in the German Olympic team in 1936. However, Germany excluded Jewish athletes from competing in the Olympic team. Mayer, however, was able to attend as a sports journalist.

Mayer married his wife Isle in 1938 and had a son a year later. In 1939, the family fled Germany to escape the persecution of Jews under the Nazi government.

Once Mayer and his family arrived in England, he enrolled in the British Army and was first assigned to the Pioneer Corps and then to the Special Operations Executive. In 1946, he was discharged from the army and settled in Hampstead with his family.

After the war, Mayer was asked to lead the Primrose Youth Club, which was set up in 1947 to support the Boys. Mayer saw the club as a way to allow other Jewish refugees to meet and form relationships with each other, whilst also encouraging them to use their survival skills to thrive in post-war British society.

In 1949, Mayer became an art and PE teacher at Hasmonean Grammar School in Hendon and worked as a sports instructor at the Brady Boys’ Club in the evenings. As club leader, motivated hundreds of poor boys from the East End of London.

He left Brady Boys’ Club in 1965 and was appointed as youth officer for Islington, where he established the Islington Youth Theatre and developed the playing grounds by introducing floodlights and AstroTurf.

After his retirement in 1980, he supported the youth and community studies programme at North London College in addition to becoming a governor of Islington College. He also returned to Germany to talk to young people about Jewish life in Germany before and after the Nazi’s rise to power.

In 1997, Mayer was awarded an MBE for his services to the community, and was granted an honorary degree by Potsdam University a year later.

Mayer died in 2011.