Obituary of Frank Austin

Born London, January 26 1906, Died London 8th August, 1996, aged 90.
Frank Austin, founder-chairman of a successful furniture company was a poor London boy who made good and spent his life working for the good of young people. He never forgot what it was like to be picked out at school because he wore charity clothing. Shrewd and kindly, he was a mainstay of Brady Boys’ Club and the Children’s Country Holiday Fund. The third of seven children who were bought up in the East End, he was only eight when his Polish-born father died but his father had already charged him with responsibility for the family.
Frank joined the Brady club - which had had been founded in 1896 – gaining enormously from its sporting, educational and recreational facilities, aswell as from its meals and showers. He was always conscious of his debt to the club, which he supported through many later crises. When he left the Jews’ Free School at 14 for a four-year apprenticeship in cabinet-making, Mr Austin started up in a Shoreditch workshop business with his four brothers.
The business eventually moved to Leyton, East London, embracing new factory methods of furniture manufacture. After the war, its brandname, Austinsuite, became a household name. With a reputation for being a progressive employer, he became master of the Furniture Makers’ Company in 1974-75 and president of the National Trades’ Benevolent Association.
On the communal front, he was member of the Board of Deputies and spoke out against Oswald Mosely’s blackshirt Fascists in Hyde Park in the 1930s.
As chairman of Brady from 1941, he helped purchase Skeet Hill House in Kent in 1945, to provide country weekends in the fresh air for inner city children. In 1967, he helped to save the club from closure through lack of funds. He was appointed O.B.E. for his social work in 1968. When he stepped down at the end of 1971, becoming life president, the club put on a variety show in his honour and a hall was named after him. The event was attended by Labour ministers Arthur Bottomley and George Brown, who unveiled a plaque in the hall. It was an apposite tribute for a lifelong Labour Party supporter and staunch trade unionist.
Mr Austin’s concern for children was evidenced by his presidency of the Jewish branch of the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, which into the 1970’s provided an annual seaside break for 150 children. When the United Nations “year of the child” was announced for 1979, he chaired the Anglo-Jewish co-ordinating committee. For him, this was a welcome opportunity to bring children’s problems to the forefront of public attention.
The same concerns attracted him to becoming a J.P. (Justice of the Peace) in 1951, sitting on the juvenile court in Stratford. He then went on to the bench in the City of London, and was the first chair-man of the Waltham Forest magistrates’ court until he retired in 1976.
Ever energetic, he loved sport and later took up dairy farming. As the farm was near Glyndebourne, he combined this hobby with a love of opera. In his youth, he sang in an amateur chorus in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Yeomen of the Guard”. His future wife, Jeanne, sang the lead role. She died in 1995.
He is survived by a son, two daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchilden.