As the Nazis plundered their murderous way through Europe, the Frischmanns were deported to Auschwitz, where his parents Lajos and Nelly, as well as his younger sister Bosyi, were killed. Somehow, Frischmann survived both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and came to Britain as one of “The Boys”, the group of young people accepted by this country as child refugees. He arrived with a group which flew from Prague to Belfast in Northern Ireland.
At first Frischmann was sent to Millisle School in County Down, but then he, together with a number of others in his cohort, was sent to England where he attended Bunce Court, a school in Kent devoted to helping Jewish refugees integrate into British society.
Frischmann showed early creative talent, and studied at the Hammersmith College of Art and Building, followed by an engineering degree at imperial College London, and a Ph.D from the Northampton Institute in London, now known as City St George’s.
Almost a decade after his arrival in the UK, Frischmann joined the company with which he was associated for the rest of his life. It was CJ Pell and Partners when he first joined in 1958, and ten years later, in 1968, he became chairman of the newly renamed Pell Frischmann.
Centre Point tower In LondonGetty Images
Frischmann expanded the company from just engineering, to a whole range of offerings across the industry, from building services to traffic and transportation, from highways and bridges to railways, water, sewage and power.
He specialised in finding innovative solutions to seemingly intractable problems. An early example was Centre Point, at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street in London. The site was due to have a 34-storey tower block built there – but as well as London clay, there was a massive network of Victorian sewers and Tube tunnels underground, and no-one knew how to stabilise the building so that it did not collapse on top of this infrastructure.
Frischmann had an elegant solution – large-diameter load-bearing piles, filled with concrete, to support the building. He famously went to the site to ensure that the piles were properly constructed on the night before the concrete was due to be poured – and got stuck in one of the holes, forcing him to spend the night there before being rescued in the morning. He later mused drily that he didn’t want to become a permanent feature of his engineering answer to the Centre Point problem.
Centre Point was – eventually – a huge success and Frischmann went on to work with its architect, Richard Seifert, on more than 50 tall buildings in London.
Even in the early years of his career, precisely because he was working on so many high-rise towers, Frischmann was aware of the dangers of short-cut structures which could easily lead to collapse.
One such building which sadly fulfilled Frischmann’s warnings was Ronan Point, a building in Newham in east London which collapsed in 1968 after a gas explosion on the 18th floor. Ronan Point became a byword for the dangers of non-continuous prefabricated buildings.
The Treasury turned to Frischmann to write a report on how and why Ronan Point had collapsed – and he was able to explain his findings to presenter David Frost on TV, making him, briefly, nationally famous.
Not all Frischmann’s work and predictions came true, however.
He was very keen to link Britain to Western Europe – but he was an early advocate of a bridge across the English Channel, rather than a tunnel. He hoped to create a deep sea port for container vessels by extending the existing French islands of Varne and Le Colbert. But this dream was never realised, not least because of intense opposition from the ferry companies.
Frischmann married the Jewish Glasgow-born Sylvia Elvey, whose parents were refugees from Russian pogroms. The couple had two children – Richard, who became a solicitor and then the managing director of Pell Frischmann, stepping down in 2018 – and Justine, co-founder of the music group Suede and the Britpop band Elastica. She now lives in San Francisco and works as an artist.
Frischmann was appointed CBE in 1990 for his services to engineering and is said to have left his “footprint” on hundreds of buildings across the world, from Shanghai to the Middle East.
Perhaps the last word should go to an appreciation by his old company, Pell Frischmann, which, in 2015, was called in to oversee the transformation of Centre Point from offices to a residential development. Decades after Wilem Frischmann had somehow become stuck in a load-bearing pile, on the eve of its being filled with concrete, Pell Frischmann’s newest generation of engineers inspected the building – and found it in great shape.
Wilem Frischmann, born January 27, 1931, Czechoslovakia. Died: August 20, 2026, London
