In 1942, Dr. Dora Kulka had a lot on her mind.

She was struggling to establish herself in Britain having been forced to flee Nazi-controlled Vienna because she was Jewish. She was caring for her mother, Martha, whilst mourning her father Viktor. And she was desperately trying to help her sister Helen escape occupied Prague, knowing that every day brought disaster a step closer.

This would be enough to crush most people, you might think, but Dora, a biochemist who turned 43 that year, couldn’t afford to dwell on her problems. She had an important wartime job that required all of her considerable mental capacity.

Dora was in charge of VI-Products, a company set up to create vitamin-enriched food from brewers’ yeast, based at the Hope Brewery in Sheffield, at the time Britain’s newest brewery, but obsolete and closed by 1994. It was to be included in a variety of ersatz items—‘cheese substitute paste’ and ‘marmalade-like material’ are among the unappealing examples listed on the patent—intended to bolster meagre wartime diets.

Noble work, but it was something else Dora did during three years working on the green-tinged, north-western edge of Sheffield that really fired the imagination of her colleagues. As part of the project, Dora experimented with vitamin-enriched beers: a pale ale, a stout and—for the first time at the Hope Brewery, which opened days before war broke out in 1939—a lager.

Dora probably thought little of it—lager was standard in her native Mitteleuropa, even if it was a niche taste in ale-loving England—but those around her, like head brewer Eric Bird and director Tom Carter, were impressed. They hadn’t realised lager was so easy to make or that Sheffield’s soft water was so suited to it. Perhaps they thought lager would be something to pursue after the War, when the British economy was back on its feet. It would complement their flagship beer, Jubilee, a milk stout, nicely—although it was unlikely, surely, to ever be as popular.

The arrival of mass-market lager in Britain is a well-worn tale. Eddie Taylor, a charismatic, wildly successful Canadian businessman brought Carling Black Label to the UK in the 1950s. He made deals and greased wheels and before you knew it Britain had fallen in love with lager.

As with many simple stories, though, there’s more to it. The role of Dora Kulka in bringing lager to Britain has been forgotten—or, more likely, most people never knew. She was, by all accounts, an unassuming woman, but her life had an epic quality, and it casts light on more than just the evolution of British beer since the War.

***

The final years of the 19th century were a golden age for Troppau’s Jewish population. When Dora was born in May 1899, the Austrian Silesian capital (now Opava in Czechia) was home to a community of just over 1000, out of a total of 26,000. They made up a significant part of the town’s economic and cultural elite, from spirits manufacturer Jakob Lichtwitz, whose herbal liquor Jungbrunnen was served at the Austro-Hungarian imperial court in Vienna, to painter Rudolf Quittner and lawyer Moritz Ernst.

Then there was Hermann Kulka, Dora’s grandfather. By the turn of the 20th century this 61-year-old entrepreneur had built a huge quarrying company, with sites across Silesia and neighbouring Galicia. All of his quarries fell within the boundaries of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, excavating granite, dolomite, sandstone and more. He was a big man in Troppau, serving, for example, on the committee of the poor relief board—although an increasingly strident brand of German nationalism (the town was 90 percent German-speaking, according to the 1910 Austrian census) prevented him from taking a role in local politics.

The confidence of Troppau’s Jewish community found expression in a magnificent new Synagogue, opened in 1896. Designed by Viennese architect Jakob Gardner, it was a visual feast, with elements of Romanesque and Moorish revival style, capped by a dome and two onion-topped towers above the facade. Hermann’s company, naturally enough, provided stone for the building, and he attended its inauguration on the eighth of December, when a ceremony in the Synagogue was followed by a lavish banquet at the town’s Promenade Restaurant and an evening of dancing.

It was a stable and happy life, but the First World War changed everything. As author Philippe Sands writes in East West Street, the 1914-18 conflict, “collapsed the great Mansion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, unleashing forces that caused scores to be settled and much blood to be spilt.” Nationalism surged, and the empire’s Jewish population discovered the home they had built was not a home at all.

For the Kulkas, the War meant both personal tragedy—Dora’s brother died fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army—and the end of their life in Troppau, which became part of the new Czechoslovak Republic in 1918. The quarrying business appears to have been divided up into Czech and Polish parcels and sold, and by 1920 Viktor and family had joined a Jewish exodus to Vienna, taking up the option of Austrian rather than Czech citizenship.

Life soon settled down again, after a fashion. Dora studied chemistry and physics at the University of Vienna—one of a handful of women, disproportionately from Jewish families, to do so in that era—graduating in 1924 and taking a job working as an assistant for a Professor Jalowetz at the Institut für Garungsindistrie. The following years brought gradual progress for Dora, but financially things were going backwards. By 1929—perhaps as a result of the worldwide economic crisis caused by the Wall Street Crash—she was supporting her parents on her slim paypacket.

Nevertheless, she was in demand. When the same crisis forced Jalowetz to let her go (“Dr Kulka’s resignation has been, to my great regret, necessitated by the present industrial crisis,” he wrote; “She has been a valuable and reliable collaborator whose personal qualities were highly appreciated by me,”) she did a short stint at the Carlsberg Brewery in Copenhagen before, in 1933, taking up a role at Professor Ernst Pribram’s Microbiology Institute, a world-renowned institution.

Her specialisms were wide—biochemistry, bacteriology, fermentation and food analysis—and she was well respected. She cultivated the institute’s microbiological collection (left by Professor Pribram when he emigrated to the USA in 1926,) which included the remnants of Franz Kral’s pioneering culture collection; she undertook medical analysis of clinical material and food; and she did fermentation-based research; all, according to a testimonial from the company, “with ideal exactness and reliability.”

This ended abruptly in March 1938. On the 12th, the Nazis crossed the border into Austria; on the 15th the Institute, which had many Jewish employees, was liquidated.

““The role of Dora Kulka in bringing lager to Britain has been forgotten—or, more likely, most people never knew.””

Dora had a clear choice: find scientific work abroad or become a domestic servant in Austria, with much worse to follow. In May, she wrote to the International Federation of University Women’s (IFUW) London office, seeking help to get work in Britain. The British brand of the Federation (BFUW) moved quickly. She was interviewed by Ethel Houghton, a Vienna-based Quaker, and given a glowing report: “an exceedingly pleasant and capable woman… would adapt herself to new circumstances even if they were difficult ones.”

By August, the BFUW had decided that Dora would be among the first women to be brought out of Austria by the new Sub-Committee for Refugees (“I am more happy of this opportunity [than] I am able to tell you,” she wrote in reply,) and in September a visa was granted. She arrived in London on September 24th, the same day Adolf Hitler presented Neville Chamberlain with his plans for the Sudetenland, the chunk of Czechoslovakia which included Troppau.

A new life was beginning as her old one crumbled. Less than two months later, Troppau’s Synagogue burnt to the ground during Kristallnacht. Local people, who had cheered as German troops rolled into the Sudetenland in October following the Munich Agreement, stood and watched. “The remains of the burned synagogue, built in the typical Jewish oriental style in a beautiful location in the middle of our city and which disfigured the image of our city, will soon be razed… and soon a building worthy of the city will be erected in its place,” reported the Deutsche Post für das Sudetenland.

***

Dora’s arrival in the UK was followed by months of frustration. Guinness, Younger’s, Heriot-Watt, the Lister Institute in London; none could offer paid work, despite her having skills and knowledge way beyond most, if not all of her British contemporaries. In early November, the BFUW received a letter from The University of Birmingham, home to Britain’s most important brewing school, which set out the problem in blunt terms: she was too foreign, and too female.

“The prospects of permanent employment in the fermentation industries for Dr Kulka are poor,” wrote Professor R. Hopkins, chair of malting and brewing at Birmingham. “If she were British and more especially if she were a man, there would be no difficulty in obtaining quite a good position after a little time. In the brewing trades women are rarely employed, even as laboratory assistants, and non-aryans and non-British employees are even more rare.”

But Hopkins did find work for Dora—albeit of an unpaid kind. In January, 1939, she started working at the University, organising and expanding the microbiological collection, whilst also doing some paid work for companies in the US and Denmark, also arranged by Hopkins. “Life here is rather new and strange,” Dora said in a letter to a friend. “But believe me I am very glad.”

As one problem was resolved—to a degree—another loomed ever larger. Dora’s sister Helen had been working in Prague for Klatscher & Lorenz, a malting company, but when Hitler arrived in March 1939 she was fired. Helen, who spoke excellent English having worked as an au pair in Britain in the early 1930s, was able to quickly get a British visa, but was left waiting for a promised exit pass—and she was desperately trying to get her parents out, too. They had returned to Troppau after the annexation of Austria, moving onto Brno, leaving behind their possessions, when Nazi troops entered the Sudetenland. Now they were trapped and penniless.

Once again the BFUW, which had supported Dora with monthly grants since she arrived in the UK, stepped in. Led by the refugee committee’s head, Dr Erna Hollitscher, herself a refugee from Vienna, it agreed to sponsor Dora’s parents’ journey to Britain. By early August, they were in the UK, “in a bad state,” according to Dora, but at least they were out: “We are feeling very happy here.”

Helen, though, was still stuck in Prague, with Dora’s other sister Hedi barely better off in Casablanca. Helen’s visa ran out before the exit pass arrived—but Dora didn’t give up, even after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 finally drew Britain into the War. She explored every avenue, raising money to facilitate a route to the USA, which worked for Hedi but not Helen, and then trying to get Helen to Sweden. To no avail. In May 1942 Helen was arrested in Prague and taken to Theresienstadt, a ghetto in northern Bohemia established by the Nazis as a waystation to the extermination camps.

***

“A pinkish, soft mess,” is how Jack Drummond, wartime scientific adviser to the Ministry of Food, described Dora’s vitamin-bearing substance. Made from a blend of debittered pressed yeast and soya bean flour, it clearly found him in sceptical mood: “Obviously perishable”; “Yeast not killed; I advised against putting the product on the market in this form. Claims for vitamin potency are made, but solely on the basis of textbook figures.”

It was April 1941 and a select group of brewing companies, encouraged by the government, were experimenting with food products made from brewer’s yeast, which is rich in Vitamin B. Unlike the other companies involved, Carter, Milner and Bird was small—but it always aimed to punch above its weight, driven on by Tom Carter, the brewery’s force-of-nature sales director.

““Dr Kulka got us brewing a lager. She noticed Sheffield water was similar to that of Pilsen in Czechoslovakia, where her family came from, and suggested we make one.””

— Mike Bird, The Hope & Anchor Brewery

It’s unclear how Dora became involved, but it probably had something to do with Professor Hopkins. He had seen her ability first-hand at the university, and they shared an interest in the vitamin content of beer. As one of the most important men in British brewing, it seems eminently possible that he suggested her for the role.

However it came about, by early 1941 she was working in Claywheels Lane, living with her mother in Hathersage, a picture-postcard village just outside the city in the Peak District. (Viktor had recently died). Her creation was being used for two spreads designed to be used with bread, Vi-Min-Ta and a fish paste substitute, both containing fish liver oil. They had been approved for public sale despite Drummond’s earlier reservations—although a similar, less perishable powder had more trouble getting accreditation.

The product’s patent, filed in April 1941, names Dora alongside Ella Gasking, the remarkable managing director of Batchelors—based nearby and apparently involved in the production—and Carter. In 1942, he was almost as busy as Dora. An amalgamation with another brewery, Tomlinson’s, created a new firm, Hope & Anchor; the yeast products were on sale; and a new project, to create vitamin-enriched beers, was underway, with Dora once again at the helm.

Dora produced a stout (“Your vitamin stout is good,” Erna Hollitscher, to whom she sent a bottle, told her; “In spite of the protest of some English people I still don’t think it is so very different from beer!”), a pale ale and, most significantly, a lager. She probably thought little of it, but for the powers-that-be at The Hope Brewery it was like a lightbulb flickering on. Just a few years later, Claywheels Lane became the first British home of Carling Black Label, the beer that started the British lager revolution, and that has been the nation’s favourite since the early 1980s.

It started with Dora. “That was our first lager,” Mike Bird told me down the phone in his broad South Yorkshire accent in early 2022. Mike, who was 91 then and who died in early 2024, was probably the last person to remember Hope & Anchor in the 1940s: his father Eric was head brewer, and he began working there as an apprentice in 1946.

“It wasn’t Carling [that we brewed in 1942] but, funny as it may seem, it wasn’t far off,” he said, adding that Hope & Anchor began making their own lager—Anchor Lager—very soon after the War ended. “Dr Kulka got us brewing a lager. She noticed Sheffield water was similar to that of Pilsen in Czechoslovakia, where her family came from, and suggested we make one. That’s what set us going.”

“I think the only reason permission was granted was because VI-Lager, as it was called, was mainly going to be supplied to NAAFI [the organisation which provided food and drink to the armed forces],” he added.

By 1944 it may have been refreshing the British Army—or at least, parts of it—on the long, tough march east after D-Day. It could even have been with the soldiers of the 11th Armoured Division who liberated Belsen on the 12th of April 1945, where they found a middle-aged woman who spoke such perfect English she was quickly taken on as a secretary by the British military authorities.

It was Helen Kulka. “It seems like a dream,” she wrote in her diary a week later. “We are actually rescued after three years! What a moment it was when we heard the announcement: ‘Here the Allied military government is speaking, you are free’.”

Those three years had taken her from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in December 1943, Neuengamme in June 1944, and finally Belsen in March 1945. In December, she came to England to be reunited with Dora and her mother. “I never dreamed this rare chance of rescue would come to us,” Dora wrote to Erna Hollitscher. “Splendid indeed.”

***

For students at the University of Birmingham, Dora was ‘Auntie’. You can understand why by looking at an image of the brewing department in 1957, with Dora (who taught practical microbiology at the University from 1948 to 1964) on the end of the front row. She is wearing a bowl-shaped hat, thick-rimmed glasses, woollen stockings, sensible leather shoes and a heavy coat (no-one else is wearing a coat). A large handbag sits on her lap.

She looks ill at ease, and perhaps she felt it. Despite having lived in the UK since 1938, she never got to grips with English as she had with French and Italian, and her regular verbal faux pas amused her students. On one occasion, according to former student Malcolm Watts, Dora told them: “Gentlemen, please put your tools on the bench for inspection!” You can easily imagine the reaction of the predominantly male class.

““Dora told us of one brewery she cleaned up where-upon beer sales plummeted; predictably the brewery demanded its old problems be returned.””

— Dr. Michael Lewis, University of Davis, California

It must have been very unusual at the time to have a female brewing instructor (it’s not exactly typical now,) but the tectonic plates were shifting radically under British brewing. Nowhere was that more obvious than 60-odd miles to the north-east, at Dora’s former brewery in Sheffield.

Hope & Anchor was perhaps the most forward-looking brewery in a largely backward looking age. This expressed itself in huge neon adverts at Blackpool beach, a bar at the Festival of Britain, sending a flat-pack pub across the Atlantic to be reassembled at a Canadian trade fair—and entreaties to Edward Plunket Taylor, Canada’s beer emperor, over plans to sell beer in his domain.

The initial contact with Taylor, whose Canadian Breweries owned Carling, came in 1949 and was rebuffed. He suggested they try the USA instead. That came to nothing, and a subsequent suggestion—that they brew each other’s beers—was agreed. By 1953 Carling was being made in Sheffield, and in 1959 Taylor used the brewery as a launchpad to create Northern Breweries, which—after a series of further amalgamations and takeovers—would go on to become Bass Charrington, once the UK’s largest brewing group, in 1967.

The Victorian foundations of the British brewing industry were crumbling, and Dora was playing a part. In the 1950s, she had a business—a side hustle, if you like—tackling microbiological problems in small northern breweries. According to Dr. Michael Lewis, a former student of Dora’s who went on to establish University of California Davis’ brewing programme in 1964, it didn’t always go to plan.

“Most breweries sold their beer locally through the tied house system of pubs… to a significant degree, the brewery that owned the most pubs defined the local taste in beers. Dora told us of one brewery she cleaned up where-upon beer sales plummeted; predictably the brewery demanded its old problems be returned.”

Much of Dora’s published work focused on beer spoilage, and the acetic and lactic acid responsible. This attention to detail had an impact on Lewis. “She did [influence me],” he told me via email. “She was meticulous in her microbiology technique and that I have passed on to my own students. Indeed, I complained (once upon a time) that after one or two micro classes they still came to my senior brewing classes with unacceptable lab techniques.”

As Dr. Lewis was establishing UC Davis’ brewing programme, Dora was retiring from Birmingham’s. By then, both her sisters were in the USA—Helen after having worked for the BBC for half a decade—so you might imagine she was lonely, having never married nor, as far as we know, had any sort of romantic relationship in the UK.

That wasn’t the case, according to Dr Paul Minton, who acquired Dora’s archive in the 1980s from a Telford auctioneer (and who has kindly allowed me to use his interviews with some of her former students here). Given what sort of person she evidently was, it’s no surprise she had many friends. “From the amount of correspondence in the [archive], I know this to be true,” Dr Minton says.

Dora died on 29 January 1983, aged 83, at her home in Kings Norton, Birmingham, leaving much of her estate to Helen and the BFUW. According to Dr. Lewis, her funeral was well attended.

“Many people showed up indicating a wide scope of friends and acquaintances, which surprised us,” he says. “She seemed shy, but I don’t think she was. Two things might have warped our undergraduate perception: she spoke English quite poorly, and we bullied her quite mercilessly. She was not popular in any ordinary way to us, but I think we knew she was a special person of talent [to have been] rescued from the Nazis in that way.”

***

On a pleasant day in late April, Claywheels Lane feels like Spring. Off-white blossom adorns trees on the south side of the road; a woman, out for a jog, runs past with a Cockapoo attached by a lead to her waist; and a gentle breeze carries the tinny sound of commercial radio from a nearby car repair shop.

The shop is on the ground floor of Jubilee House, built in 1956 as an extension to the Hope Brewery. It’s all that remains now of this once ground-breaking business. The main brewery, where Dora worked, is long gone, closed in 1994 by Bass and subsequently demolished. Most people have forgotten the company was even here, even those who work in its remnants, as I discovered when I collared a young mechanic from the car repair shop, JMC Automotive.

“Did you know this was a brewery once,” I ask. “Stones, wasn’t it?” he replies, genially, referring to another departed Sheffield brewery. I explain about Hope and Anchor, and Carling. He smiles, I suspect largely out of a desire to move me along. “Really? Bit of history for us, isn’t it?” Are there any relics inside? “No,” he says. I leave him to his work.

The past fades away more quickly than you’d imagine. Most of the physical structures that marked out Dora's life have gone: the Hope Brewery, the institutes she worked for in Vienna, the brewing school at Birmingham.

The Synagogue in Opava is gone, too, of course, although no Nazi edifice stands in its place. The plot lies empty except for a memorial, built from granite, installed in 2013. ‘Lze Snad Odpustit, Ne Vsak Zapomenout,’ it reads in Czech: one can forgive, but not forget.