Page 134 - WHO'S WHO OF DUDLEY ROTARY

District Achievement Award. It was also on Ray’s initiative, following an encounter on holiday
in France, that in 1976 the club twinned with the Rotary Club Brest Côte des Légendes in
Brittany. Ray has been an active member of the club’s International Service committee more-
or-less continuously from the start of his Rotary career and was District International Chairman
1979-80. He served as a Dudley magistrate from 1983. He is a keen golfer and avid bridge
player.

449 Kenneth (‘Ken’) Gordon WEED (1924-2010) (Inducted 31.7.1972; left 24.9.1979.) Meat
products, manufacturing. Manager of Dudley Co-operative Society Butchery Department, Nith
Place, Dudley from 1968. He left the club on moving home from Nith Place to Wombourne, but
finally retired to a bungalow in Brierley Hill. He was born in Dudley and spent most of his life in
the town.

450 Dennis ROBINSON ( - ) (Inducted 29.1.1973; left during 1973/74.) Restaurants. He was Catering
Manager for Dudley Zoo, in charge of the Queen Mary Ballroom, The Fellows Club and other on-
site catering, employed by Scotia Investments, owners of Dudley Zoological Society Limited at
the time. He was possibly Dennis Robinson born in 1926 in Aston, Birmingham and died 2002 in
York.

451 Ernest Dieter RUPPEL (1933- ) (Inducted 29.1.1973; left in 1993/94.)
Fireplace manufacturing. Managing Director of James Smellie Limited of
Stafford Street, Dudley, manufacturers of fire surrounds, canopies,
hearths, and a wide range of other fireplace products in pressed steel, brass
and copper. (The firm was founded by James Smellie, second president of
the Rotary club - see member #21.) He was also a director of the family
firms E W Stockham (Holdings) Limited, E W Stockham Limited, and Edwin
Taylor Stamping Works Limited.
Ernest, originally ‘Ernst’, was born in the town of Gotha in Thuringia,
central Germany, into a Jewish family. His father, Dr Ernst Ludwig Ruppel, was head of two large
companies manufacturing machine tools and domestic metal goods: ‘Ruppelwerke’ in Gotha
(founded by Ernest’s great grandfather Emanuel and brother Abraham in 1870) and ‘Auerbach
& Schiebe’ in Saalfeld. However life for the family became increasingly difficult after the Nazi
regime came to power in 1933. In Gotha a newspaper denounced the family as Jewish in 1935.
In Saalfeld, where the family’s engineering company was one of the largest employers of the
region, it was not until 1938 when the plant manager started a public campaign of denunciation.
Ernest senior tried to transfer the business to his children Ernest and Robert but they were
declared ‘half breeds of 1st degree’, so not sufficiently pure Germans. Ernest senior agreed to
sell the Saalfeld company to a friend - a director of the Singer sewing machine company - for
975,000 Reichmarks of which 95,000 had to be paid as ‘Arayanisation’ charges. However on 10
November 1938, Ernest’s father, with thousands of other Jews, was taken into ‘protective
custody’ at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Two days later the state governor stipulated
that the takeover price for the entire assets of the Ruppel family would be only 470,000 marks,
less 60,000 ‘Arayanisation’ charge.
It was only by remarkable good chance that Ernst managed to escape to England with his
family. His wife Annemarie went to the police chief and begged for her husband’s release. This
was agreed on condition that he could provide a valid exit visa. Through acquaintances,
Annemarie came by coincidence into contact with Frank Foley, head of the passport department
of the British embassy in Berlin who was, at the same time, working as an agent of the British
secret service. He supplied the whole Ruppel family with entrance visas to the United Kingdom,
as he did for thousands of other Jewish families. So after two weeks in Buchenwald Ernst was
released and fled with the family to settle in Stourbridge. (Frank Foley also moved to
Stourbridge after the War and he and Ernst became great friends.)