On 25th March, Danny Kleinman reached a milestone birthday of 100. When asked when he expects to receive his letter from the queen, he replies: “I think she has more important things to do than worry about my birthday.”
Born in Headingley in 1901, Danny has been married to his wife Gilda from Walthamstow in London for over 70 years. The couple went under the chuppah in The New Synagogue on Chapeltown Road (now the Northern School of Contemporary Dance) in 1950. For Danny, the secret to a happy marriage is you can’t expect to be happy all the time: “There’s a good deal of give and take in a marriage. Sometimes you don’t always see things in the same light, but you just have to keep at it.”
Although he confesses he is not a devout Jew, he still considers himself part of the community and remains a member of UHC, though he has struggled to attend for many years, conceding: “any scale of movement is out of my grasp.”
However, his sense of humour is still firing on all cylinders: “If you lose your sense of humour you might as well give up altogether. It’s one of the most important aspects of living, to realise that not everything is grim, and things can be looked at in a different way.”
Danny’s mental fortitude is no doubt due in part to his brave service through the horrors of the Second World War. Danny proudly joined the West Yorkshire Regiment at the outbreak of war in 1939 and was later commissioned for the Royal Pioneer Corps, soon rising to the rank of captain: “It was very much a war of movement compared to the trench warfare of the First World War. We were sent from one country to another – one day you were in Belgium, the next in France, the day after that in Denmark. “
Danny admits his memories of his wartime years are beginning to fade: “It was a long time ago. At nearly 100, I can’t always remember things as I’d like!” But his recollections of Operation Goldflake remain crystal clear. The covert mission saw 60,000 troops transported across Europe in the spring of 1945 as the allied forces made their final push into German territory: “The operation was remarkable, and I was more or less in charge of it at one stage. The idea was, we gave the French and thereby the Germans a cover plan, to make them think we were reinforcing the British troops in southern France when in fact, we were taking troops up north from Naples ready to cross the Rhine.”
Fighting as a British Jew, Danny knew full-well the additional dangers he faced in the crucible of war: “When my unit was preparing to go overseas to Normandy, my colonel said: ‘Dan, I want you to change your name’. When I asked why, he said: ‘if they capture you and find out you’re Jewish, your life won’t be worth living’. But I flatly refused, and the other officers in the mess appreciated my pride and encouraged me to keep my name – and so I did.”
Danny left the army after his father passed away, as his thoughts turned to looking after the family business, which grew to become a successful Yorkshire-wide textiles chain: “Eventually I built my own textiles business and had a number of shops stretching from Hull to Todmorden.”
35 years ago, Danny and Gilda retired to a quiet cul-de-sac in Alwoodley, enjoying their twilight years tending to their garden: “The brook runs through our garden and it’s a nice quiet place to be. I’m a very keen gardener; we have an enormous number of species in a very small space. But I’m getting too old for that now.”
Asked if the past year had been a challenging time, he admits coronavirus seems of little consequence in comparison to the war: “The government’s mantra of ‘stay home and shut up’ is in fact a very useful one!” he jokes. But on a more serious note, he believes the restrictive measures, much like wartime curfews, are the right thing for the country: “While being kept in your own home feels rather draconian, it really is the very best advice in a time of crisis.”
While Gilda has received her full course of coronavirus vaccine, as of the end of March, Danny is still awaiting his second jab. The couple have two daughters, one of whom lives in Leeds and suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, while the other subsists on a smallholding in northern Florida. Although they are perhaps too proud to admit, it’s hard not to feel as if the couple have struggled, like many of us, with the isolation of lockdown: “My daughter in Leeds needs a lot of bed rest and my other daughter has been in America for many years now, and we haven’t been able to see her for quite some time. We haven’t any grandchildren – we just keep on.”
Publicity does not come naturally to the couple, who have lived out their years in quiet dignity, yet as fans of the magazine, they kindly made an exception to speak to us: “I read JLife regularly,” Danny readily declares, “it’s quite a good one!” We have much to learn from older generations that live on the fringes of community life, and the lessons they impart and years of service they give, should not go forgotten.
“Learning is a strange thing,” comments Danny. “People must have a willingness to learn, which is not always the case.” Asked (perhaps somewhat glibly) to leave readers with some wise words from his vast experience, he is admirably reluctant to “spout platitudes”: “I don’t want to commit myself to some idiotic remark. Too many of us readily give our opinions, not founded on any factual practice. One has to think carefully before one speaks. I think that’s very good advice in itself.”