Nobody Said it Would be Easy

Lisl Klein’s life story has taken her from childhood in the Sudeten-German region of Czechoslovakia during the 1930s, through life as a refugee in England to a successful and fascinating career as a social scientist specialising in the world of work. The personal and family story is an entry point to the cultural and political conditions in which it is played out – from central Europe in the 1930s, through evacuation and a range of ‘billets’ in war-time England, to the adjustments that peace time demanded and the political and professional context of the years since then.

Born in Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), Lisl came to England with her parents in 1938, where they faced the contradictions of life as refugees: finding safety for themselves, but constantly worrying about the family left behind. Lisl’s father died during the war, and Lisl and her mother stayed on, after discovering that most of the family had died in the Holocaust. As Britain rebuilt in the 1940s, Lisl had to decide how to earn a living. She studied languages and tried library work. But it was not until she took a temporary factory job that she discovered what would become a life-long interest in the nature and meaning of work, how it affects people and how it is designed.

Industry proved to be her forte.Lisl trained and worked as a personnel officer, moved into research, and became an expert in industrial organisation and a distinguished social scientist with a central concern about the practical use and application of the social sciences. Five years pioneering the role of social sciences adviser to Esso Petroleum were followed by nearly twenty as a prominent member of the Tavistock Institute, during which time she was also a consultant in the German government’s programme ‘Humanising Life at Work’.

In 1990 she founded the Bayswater Institute and was its first Director. She still works there part-time. Her work has brought her into contact with many different organisations, and in recent years with various parts of the National Health Service. She has consistently brought to it basic values imbibed from home and family, scientific values from respected teachers, and her own experience.

Lisl Klein’s perceptive abilities and honest self-awareness provide illuminating and at times hilarious anecdotes as well as poignant insights in both professional and personal matters. The discovery in recent years of family letters and papers enhanced Lisl’s knowledge of her family’s history, and extracts from these are featured in the book, maintaining throughout the strength of her connection with family and roots. The synthesis of background and work came full circle when Lisl was unexpectedly re-connected with her home town. The restitution of the Hotel Richmond, which had belonged to an uncle, became the arena in which threads of her professional life and personal background came rather cheerfully together.