Eight decades have passed since a frightened five-year-old, torn from her home, her parents, and everything she knew, stepped off a train in London, tightly clutching her older sister’s hand.
Then, she was Vera Buchthal, one of 10,000 child refugees from Germany as Hitler stepped up his persecution of the Jews. She was safe, but facing an uncertain future.
Today, she is Dame Stephanie Shirley, a remarkable woman who has spent a lifetime fighting prejudice, breaking down barriers and inspiring others, while showing that success in business doesn’t need to be at the expense of kindness and compassion. Countless lives have been changed because of her.
As an entrepreneur who refused to pay by men’s rules, she became one of Britain’s richest women, championing women’s rights. Then she gave away her £70million fortune and dedicated her life to building a better future for those less well off, especially children and refugees.
Or, as she puts it herself: “I needed to make my life one that was worth saving”. Her extraordinary achievements have been recognised with a Daily Mirror Pride of Britain award, in association with TSB.
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The 90-year-old, who was made a Dame in 2000, says: “I really was thrilled to get it, because they made an exception for me, and I felt it is sort of testament to a long life.” But with her typical humility, she adds: “I’ve always surrounded myself with people who are much brighter and smarter than I am, so in a sense I think of it as a team accolade.”
Picture of Dame Stephanie as a teenage girl after she came to the UKThe upheaval and trauma that brought her to the UK are still seared into Dame Shirley’s mind. She arrived in July 1939 on the Kindertransport programme, which saved Jewish children from Nazi-occupied territories.
Her Jewish father, formerly a judge in Dortmund, had already fled the country, crossing mountains on food to neutral Switzerland. Her non-Jewish mother then made the heartbreaking decision to send her daughters to safety, and Dame Shirley remembers her and her grandmother waving her off at the train station.
She recalls: “My mother had given us very nicely-wrapped little presents, which we were only allowed to open once the train had started. So we were quite thoughtlessly anxious for the train to get moving. But it was a quite traumatic scene.”
On arrival in Britain, Shirley and her sister Renate were fostered by a Catholic couple, Guy and Ruby Smith, in Oswestry, Shropshire. Dame Shirley believes the beginning of her life made her the strong woman she became.
Dame Stephanie (left) with her foster parents, Guy and Ruby Smith, and her sister Renate in 1939Her breaking of convention started at school. She wanted to learn maths, which wasn’t taught at her girls’ high school – so she applied to a local boys’ school. “It was quite an interesting introduction to the sexism of the workplace,” she remembers.
Aged 18, Shirley started at the Post Office research station helping to build and programme computers, but left after being passed over for promotion in favour of less-qualified men. The expectation was that she would become a housewife after getting married to Derek in 1959.
Instead, aged 29, she set up her own software company. She focused on creating an environment where women could climb the career ladder without prejudice, and still look after their homes and families.
After realising that using her own name was holding her back, she started singing her letters touting for business as ‘Steve’. Of the 300 workers employed in her company, Freelance Programmers, 297 were women – at a time when a woman couldn’t even open a bank account without her husband’s permission. Dame Shirley was also ahead of the curve when it came to flexible working and working from home.
Dame Stephanie at the unveiling of a memorial to Kindertransport on the quayside at Harwich (PA)
Checking the randomness of the numbers for ERNIE at the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill (Not known)She says: “People really laughed at that, particularly the men, and I don’t like to be laughed at. They would say, ‘you just can’t do that’. There was a lot of ridicule, and jokes about ‘Steve and her birds’. So I just went ahead and did what I thought was sensible.” The business was eventually valued at over £2billion, with projects including programming Concorde’s black box flight recorder.
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Dame Shirley, who now lives in Henley, Oxfordshire, floated the company in 1993, which made her and 70 of her staff millionaires. But rather than pursue more and more wealth, she then donated almost all of her fortune to charity, making her the first person to drop out of the Sunday Times Rich List as a result of philanthropy.
One of the causes closet to her heart is autism. Her son Giles, who died in 1998 aged 35, lived with a severe form of the condition. The Shirley Foundation provides education and residential care for young people with complex autism, and also funds pioneering research into the condition.
Another passion is supporting child migrants. When, in 2019, Germany agreed to pay compensation to people who were evacuated during the Nazi regime, Dame Shirley gave the money to a charity which helps today’s child refugees find sanctuary. For her 90th birthday last September, she funded research which showed the positive impact migrants have on our country.
Dame Stephanie Shirley’s UK ID when she arrived as a childThe businesswoman, who published her memoir Let It Go in 2019, says: “People are so illogical about migrants. This country desperately needs young people, and migrants tend to be young and healthy. Britain has closed itself up into a little Britain at the moment. I don’t like what I see, and I don’t see any solution.”
She begins to tear up as she adds: “I love this country with a passion, and I want to give back to repay the kindness I received. I see no reason today’s refugees shouldn’t feel similarly.” After losing Derek aged 97 in 2021, Dame Shirley says she wants to be a “model of active old age”. What advice would she give a young girl wanting to pursue her dreams?
“The same advice I’d give to a young man,” she replies. “Find something you really like and enjoy then just go for it. Take a risk and make it happen. And what about the people telling you that you can’t? Oh, just ignore that. If you want to do it, make it happen.”
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