Never knew this. Like to think I personally kept them in business as a teenager. "The challenge of turning hundreds of tiny plastic pieces into a spitfire, tank or classic car model has captivated children for decades. And the man they have to thank is German-born Ralph Mr Ehrmann, who took Airfix from a tiny struggling firm to one of the biggest in the British toy industry. Mr Ehrmann, who died earlier this month aged 97, was the firm's boss from the late 1950s until the 1970s, after training as a navigator in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. According to an obituary in The Times, Mr Ehrmann, a German Jew, was born in 1925 in Leipzig. His father was a fur trader and his mother had a PhD in German medieval literature. The family moved to London in 1933 - the year Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany - and became British citizens in 1939. Mr Ehrmann then volunteered to join the RAF at the age of 18 in 1943 and trained as a bomb aimer and navigator. He joined a training unit in the RAF's bomber command, but crashed his plane on his last training flight in 1944. After being demobbed in 1946, he worked for Town and Country magazine and spent six months in Scandinavia before he returned to Britain. Mr Ehrmann then worked as a trainee at a plastics firm in Essex whilst studying business at the London School of Economics." www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11692211/Entrepreneur-helped-turn-Airfix-global-hit-dies-aged-97.html
