Alice Anson was born into a Jewish family in Vienna; forced to flee Austria on a Kindertransport in 1938, following the Anschluss, she became a photographer for the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) before working as an agency and society photographer in London. Unable to continue her profession due to lack of opportunities for women, she subsequently volunteered with women's charities, including the Working Association of Mothers, Gingerbread, Women's Aid and Rape Crisis.
Photographer Alice Anson was born Alice Gross into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1924. Following the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938, Anson was able to flee Vienna for England, owing to her grandfather's business contacts in Europe, travelling alone on a Kindertransport in 1938, as one of 10,000 Jewish refugee children who found safety in England before the outbreak of the Second World War. She was offered shelter by a family with eight children in Coulsdon in Surrey, before being reunited with her parents after they managed to secure their own passage to England. They rented a house in Finchley in north London - an area nicknamed 'Finchleystrasse' because of the high proportion of German-speaking refugees, and Alice became an apprentice dressmaker, working in various large London stores.
In 1942, at the age of 17, she volunteered for the Women's Auxiliary Airforce (WAAF) and was called up the following year, detailed to work as a clerk and posted to an Observer aircrew training station in Hertfordshire. There she organised transport before requesting the chance to train as a photographer. After a three-month course at No 1 School of Photography, RAF Farnborough, she became an Aircraftwoman 1st Class. By the summer of 1944, she was working in the photo section at HQ Bomber Command in High Wycombe, where she and her colleagues helped to pinpoint traces of rails leading underground to Hitler’s VI flying bomb launch site. She later served at the bomber airfield RAF Sturgate, where she had to develop and print rolls of five-inch film taken by the bombers’ aerial cameras. Post-war, she volunteered to serve in Europe but was posted to Egypt, where she served at Ismailia, Kasfareet and Deversoir air bases before being demobbed on 1 January 1947.
After returning home to Finchley, she initially found work as a photographic printer and then as an agency photographer, covering events in the 'rag' trade for Drapers Record magazine. She later worked for a society photographer, covering a wide range of events, and had a number of photographs published in Tatler magazine. As her job was temporary, however, her career was unfortunately curtailed due to the lack of opportunities for woman photographers and she never worked again as a photographer. Instead, she took on general administrative work until a later career change, after marriage and having children. Anson met her husband Colin (born Claus Leopold Octavio Ascher), a fellow émigré and commando veteran from Hamburg, Germany, in a London cafe in 1949. The couple married two years later. After the births of their three children, they returned to Finchley and Anson became a launderette manager. Her life changed completely, however, in 1969 when she read about psychotherapist Diana Priestley who had established the Working Association of Mothers, a charity organising holiday activities for one-parent and working families. She met with Priestley who encouraged her to establish this same organisation in her own community. She worked with the organisation for four years, catering for over 150 children every holiday. The charity later joined with the organisation now known as Gingerbread, with whom she worked for a decade before becoming involved with Women’s Aid, setting up a Women’s Centre in Harrow and training as a Rape Crisis counsellor. Anson continued to support the Women’s Centre until she was into her 90s and also became involved with the Vintage Gliding Club, along with her husband who was president of the London Gliding Club. Both Colin and Alice felt completely British and at home in England and very rarely spoke German after leaving their homelands. Alice Anson died in Watford in 2016 just 11 days before her husband's death. In 2020, her work was included in the exhibition Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933, held at the Four Corners Gallery.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Alice Anson]
Publications related to [Alice Anson] in the Ben Uri Library