Axel Landmann dies
22/03/2018
He was born in Germany in 1929 and lived with his family in the town of Finow in Brandenburg. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, when the shop his parents ran was ransacked, Axel Landmann boarded a train for England as part of the Kindertransport programme and arrived to live with a family in Northampton. After World War II, he learned that his parents had taken their own lives in 1940 upon finding out that they were to be sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
On finishing his studies, he joined Northampton’s traditional industry and worked for many years as a leather chemist, notably at the British Leather Manufacturers Research Association. He served as president of the UK’s Society of Leather Technologists and Chemists (SLTC) in the early 1990s and was still a regular speaker at the society’s conferences for many years to follow.
The society went on to create the ‘Axel Landmann Award’, given each year in recognition of an individual’s significant contribution to the industry.
He contributed to World Leather for many years, compiling a series of features under the name of The Scientific Detective. In one of his last columns in 2006, he poked wry fun at “excessive testing” of leather, saying that it was entirely possible for leather buyers to insist on an extensive enough battery of tests for the cost of testing to exceed the cost of the leather.
Mr Landmann had broken a bone in his shoulder and had spent some time in a nursing home. On March 20, he complained of stomach pain and was taken to hospital and died there after a heart attack. On passing on the news, SLTC membership secretary, Pat Potter, said she was very sad to inform members of Axel Landmann’s death. “We thought him immortal,” she added.
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