Nick Spencer talks to Baroness Neuberger DBE

Can you tell me a little about your upbringing? Who or what were the greatest intellectual and moral influences on you?

The main original influences on me were my family. I grew up in a household in which there was a lot of political debate, and some religious debate. My father was a very committed non-Orthodox Jew. His father had come here from Germany in 1906 to work for his great-uncle, who founded a branch of the family bank here – they were very middle-class. My mother was a refugee, an agnostic-to-atheist who didn’t know anything about Judaism in Germany before the war. She was a communist (we always said it was careless, really, to be a communist and Jewish). So, lots of argument.

And then my grandmother on my father’s side was a very powerful influence. She was an Orthodox Jewess and just believed, as I do, that you are put on this earth for a purpose and you bloody well get on with it. As a young mother in the 1920s, she was very involved in what was then Stepney Jewish Girls’ Club in the East End, which was very much about giving opportunities to people who didn’t have any; and then from 1933 onwards she was involved in getting refugees out of Germany.

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