Loxley Park resident Charles Stone explains why he had to flee from Czechoslovakia when he was seven years old

Charles Stone had another identity when he was born almost a century ago — Karl Siegfried Otto Klappholz. But family and political turmoil soon would see him whisked from his birthplace in Czechoslovakia to England, where he has lived ever since. When Charles was two, his parents divorced, and not long afterwards, an Englishman called Harry Stone arrived in Czechoslovakia, working as a rep for a British steel company. He married Charles’s mother, Hertha. But then came ominous sounds from Germany — the tramp-tramp of Nazi jackboots. Adolf Hitler declared that he planned to annex the region where Charles lived. This happened in 1938-39, which was particularly worrying in view of the fact that Charles’s birth father was Jewish.

“My step-father decided we should move to England,” he says, “where I arrived in April of 1939, only four months before Britain and Germany went to war.” Charles’s early years were spent in the south of England, but in 1948 his family moved to Sheffield, where he attended Nether Edge Grammar School. Later, he studied architecture at the University of Sheffield, then did his National Service as a 2nd lieutenant with the Royal Engineers. Charles liked military life and eventually became a reservist with the Territorial Army, serving as a squadron commander of field engineers until retiring with the rank of major in 1970.

He worked as an architect for eight years, until his stepfather died and bequeathed him a small steel company, based in Attercliffe. Charles ran the business until 1988, when it was sold in a management buy-out. By that time, the company was based in the Midlands, which was where Charles retired and became a Church of England lay reader, supervising funerals and communions, as well as morning prayers at school assemblies. This turned into full-time work that lasted until Charles’s second retirement in 2009. He and his wife, Janet, returned to Sheffield, where they lived in Fulwood.

She passed away in 2014, after which Charles moved to Dore with his eldest son, Peter. But he died in 2022, which was when Charles decided to take a one-bedroomed apartment at Loxley Park — though only after he and his other son, James, had visited various care homes and assessed them. Charles also has two daughters, Caroline and Elizabeth, who live in Cheshire, 12 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

“I’ve been at Loxley Park for just over two-and-a-half years,” says Charles. “The staff and other residents are very nice, and the food is good.” He has loved music all his life and played the cello in various amateur orchestras, as well as singing in church choirs. Charles is now 93 but has not forgotten his other self… Karl Siegfried Otto Klappholz.