Organised sporting activities came to Bohemia and Moravia in the early part of the second half of the 19th century, as a small part of the bitter lessons learned in 1866 at the hands of von Moltke’s three Prussian armies, who were fitter, faster and far more focussed in everything they did on the battlefield.

My great grandfather died as an indirect result of one of those lessons; the Empire of the 1860’s was beset with idiocies, more so amongst the military than most other places – poor staff work, poor communications and even worse policy, with no insight or strategy to speak the name. After the fervour and revolutionary actions for independence of many of the Satrapies of the Empire which had characterised the previous two decades it had become standard Imperial Military policy that conscripts should be called up to their posting from the furthest point on the other side of the Empire: that way regiments and armies billeted in any given area could not easily be swayed or co-opted into revolution by local activists. Bohemian troops were mustered to camps in southern Hungary, Hungarians went to Bohemia, Galicians to Slovenia and Venetia, Slovakians to Galicia. This was musical chairs with a very real vengeance. If this idiocy wasn’t sufficient, once they arrived and received their six or eight weeks of basic training most were then sent home again to await any active call-up, but were often not permitted to return to their former occupations for the duration of their national service. In the event of a military call-up the troop movements backwards and forwards across the Empire, mostly on foot, caused massive logistical and timing problems. Mustering just one of the Empire’s armies at the northern borders with the German Congress could take 6 weeks, whilst von Moltke could muster and move all three of his armies south to the same border in less than 2 weeks. Partly this was due to von Moltke’s innovative use of the many railways built throughout the German Congress during the previous two decades, but more importantly it was due to better logistics and organisation. The Prussians had planning, a functional collegiate general staff, and far far better field intelligence.

Great Grandfather was a conscript who, having received his original training two years earlier in Hungary, had received no further training since then. Forced to the front as cannon fodder, with different and unfamiliar weapons, he fought in his Bohemian unit at one of the most southern points of the Empire, whilst other units from the far south and southeast of the Empire in turn crossed the Empire to the northwest in order to fight and lose the far more important and decisive battles of the war on the borders of Bohemia and Moravia, only a few kilometres from his home. The Battle of Custozza, on 24th of June 1866, in which he lost his life, was a pointless and entirely pyrrhic victory for Austria, a victory that led very rapidly to the loss of Venezia and the Trento region and thereafter to the gradual dissolution of Austrian hegemony south of the Alps.

When he died at the age of 27, my great-grandfather left behind him a relatively young wife and three sons, of whom my six year old grandfather was the youngest. He also left a younger brother, with whom he had started the family engineering business; they had gained a reputation amongst the local farming community for their ability to repair almost anything mechanical at the family farm’s small forge. Moving from the farm, the two of them had set up a small workshop on the outskirts of Aussig in 1859, repairing farm and domestic machinery. Although doing relatively well, the business still needed two full time workers to keep it profitable; there was no way that one brother alone could support the burden of his unproductive sister in law as well as her three young children. For a short time it seemed as if my great grandmother and her children might become a small part of the army of helpless poor, with no home and no income. As is so often the case where necessity forces action, great grandmother must have been a woman with iron of a very different sort in her soul. With no training and only a little formal education she took on the administration of the business and its sales function and, from her war widow’s tiny pension, somehow paid the necessary costs for an engineering apprentice to work with her brother-in-law. Within a year the business was once again profitable. By 1870 her two oldest sons had joined their uncle in the business as apprentices and the works had moved to larger premises; my grandfather was not to join them immediately; in 1875 at the age of 15 he was sent to Prague to study the rudiments of engineering. The business was beginning to grow and diversify: from repairing the products of others it had moved on and began to manufacture equipment of its own. Some were adaptations of tooling they’d built in the workshop to help them repair the works of others, such as specialist jigs to hold farm machinery stable whilst under repair, but mostly they started to design and build specialist machine tools for other manufacturers. By the early 1880’s – shortly after my grandfather’s return from Prague – the firm had outgrown its farming and domestic roots and begun to specialise in the manufacture of machine tools for the high precision finishing of metal and glass; as their reputation grew, so did their order books – both domestically within Bohemia and Moravia – which were the industrial heartlands of the Empire – but also abroad: soon they were exporting their machine tools – first to the burgeoning optical manufacturers across Germany – and then by the end of the 1880’s – to manufacturers in the UK, France, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands, and even a few sales to the USA.

Life was looking quite good for the family after my grandfather joined the business: By 1890 his uncle and his mother and two brothers had made a business that employed some thirty people in specially constructed premises in Aussig, and had entered into partnerships with other businesses throughout Bohemia that tied them tightly into the growth of industrial capacity. As Bohemia throve, so too did they. The partnerships and alliances were not entirely business based; in 1882, at the age of 18, my grandfather married into another burgeoning industrial family; in this case it was also – allegedly – a love match. His new wife’s family manufactured cloth in the southern Bohemian town of Brunn – mostly high quality damasks and decorative table linens, but also for clothing. In 1892 they thought they were going to have their first child, but Rachel miscarried after 5 months and was extremely ill for over a year. Finally, in 1884 she gave birth to a boy, my uncle, and shortly after that at approximately yearly intervals, to two more sons. My father was the middle son.

In 1885 my grandfather’s uncle, who had never married, fell ill following an accident at work, and thereafter took a back seat in the company’s affairs, leaving the administration still in the hands of my great grandmother and the day to day running in the hands of her three sons. My grandfather and my two great uncles.