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UPDATED EVERY FRIDAY
Last Update:
Friday 28th January, 2005
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All content ©
New Journal Enterprises, 2004.
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Tributes to ‘red cliffs’ Sabine
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Sabine Loeffler in the library
of the Morning Star |
SABINE Loeffler, who spearheaded the campaign to save Parliament
Hill Mansions from the hands of a private developer, has died aged
85.
Immortalised by former resident John Betjeman as ‘red cliffs’
in his poem NW5 & NW6, the buildings in Lissenden Gardens, Gospel
Oak, were bought by Camden Council in 1972 after lobbying by Sabine
Loeffler and her newly-formed Lissenden Gardens Tenants Association.
The campaign included a public meeting with Frank Dobson, then council
leader, in the Parliament Hill tennis courts.
She was born Sabine Kuczynski on December 2 1919 in Berlin. In 1933,
after an ominous visit from the Nazis, her father Robert, an academic,
fled that night to London via Prague.
Sabine followed with her mother Bertha and her younger sister Renate
the following year, and the family settled in Upper Park Road, Gospel
Oak.
She and Renate attended a private girls school in Hampstead while
her father lectured at the LSE. Her elder sister Ruth (known as
Sonia to the KGB) was already beginning her career in espionage,
while her brother was making his reputation as an eminent Marxist
scholar at Humboldt University in Germany. In 1940, Sabine met and
fell in love with Frank Loeffler, then secretary of the Refugee
Council, a semi-political group which supported young German exiles.
They married a year later, both aged 21, at the Paddington registry
office, moving into a basement flat in Belsize Grove. Their eldest
daughter, Brenda Harriett, was born there in 1944, her cot kept
under the kitchen table for fear of being hit by a stray doodlebug
intended for a nearby power station. After the war – during
which Sabine assembled radio parts – the family moved
to Aberdare Gardens, Swiss Cottage.
She was by now an active member of what became the Camden Communist
Party, and dabbled in journalism. She volunteered as a translator
in the late 1960s for the World Peace Council, attending conferences
in Helsinki and Sri Lanka.
This led to a two-decade stint as the archivist at the Morning Star
newspaper. The family moved to Lissenden Gardens in 1965, then privately
owned. After she established the Lissenden Gardens Tenants Association
in 1972 and secured their future in the hands of Camden Council,
modernisation of the blocks, including the installation of central
heating, swiftly followed.
She organised a tribute concert at Camden Town Hall in 1976 shortly
after the death of Paul Robeson, the American singer, actor and
champion of racial equality whom she greatly admired.
After retiring from the Morning Star in 1989, aged 70, she spent
some time as a volunteer at the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell.
She died on January 8 at Ash Court nursing home in Ascham Street,
Kentish Town. Her funeral was held last Tuesday at Golders Green
Crematorium.
JONATHAN ALLEN
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