Ben Cyril Goffman

Ben was unforgettable. People either loved or hated him. Tone deaf and colour blind, he surrounded himself with musicians, music lovers, artists, and art lovers - people who were passionate. He was a man full of contradictions, and in many ways a child.

In the winter of 1932, he was born in the dockland slums of East London, to a Russian Jewish father and an English Jewish mother.  After giving birth to her sixth child, his mother deserted the family when he was two. He never saw her again. His father placed the older children in Lamorbey Children's Home but kept the baby.

During the Blitz, the children in the Home would spend the nights huddled in bomb shelters, and he described walking to school the next day and picking up shiny pieces of shrapnel to hide in his cap that they traded. Eventually they were shipped out on trains to be fostered by families in Cornwall. Food was always scarce in the Home, and he’d grown up hungry, but in Cornwall the couple who took him and his best friend in had a pig, there was enough to eat, and he thrived.

Ben did better than most at school, and loved to read. He began writing a long detective story, and was packed off to grammar school. During his Army years he decided the best place to work was in the kitchens, and became a deft hand at peeling potatoes. Later, as a clerk in a bank, he barely earned enough to feed himself and pay for heating, so his solution on weekends was to stay in bed. For his first holiday, he took his bike across the Channel and cycled around Europe.

When he learned that he could transfer from London to a sister bank in Wellington NZ, he took the plunge, moved to New Zealand, quit and started university. He worked many jobs, the shortest as a milkman, the last one with the Evening Post as a reporter. He bought a motorcycle, learned to skin dive, went to parties and made lifelong friends.

Ben met my mother Mary on a boat to Australia, found a job in Melbourne, and they married in Sydney one year later. After working at the University of Sydney’s printing office he found a job as an editor with the South Pacific Commission, and in 1968 they bought a house on Vista Street in Mosman and worked on pulling out weeds, planting a garden, and raising a family.

Ben loved Australia and the beaches. On weekends after taking us shopping at Paddy's Markets he'd be on the phone organising all his friends (most of them jazz musicians, artists, actors, and New Zealanders) and their kids for trips to the beach, or long lazy BBQs and picnics at Balls Head and up near the Hawkesbury. He also loved his dogs.

He left Australia and sold the only house he ever owned in 1972, and gave away our dog. Mary and his youngest child Emma had been kidnapped from the house and murdered, and the bank account emptied, but the bodies weren’t discovered until the end of that terrible year. He moved Sarah and I into a share house in London with a couple of New Zealanders, lived on the dole for the rest of that year, and bought a campervan to travel around Europe, picking up hitchhikers.

Thanks to one of his many expat NZ friends, Carl, he found a job with the ISO in Geneva in 1973. From there he moved to the UN in NY in 1974 as a proofreader, and to UNIDO in Vienna in 1977. There he met a brilliant Russian translator, Enid, and her two small children Becky and Aleister. We all moved in together in 1978, they had a daughter in 1979, and named her Jenny.

Ben and Enid lived the high life together in Vienna, New York and Geneva. Courtesy of the UN, they rented a beautiful home on the top of the Kahlenberg, a two storey penthouse in Greenwich Village, and one of only three timber framed houses remaining in downtown Manhattan.

When Ben was in his fifties, an extraordinary thing happened. Having approached his life as if it was him pitted against the world, there was a shift. His oldest sister Maggie, who'd been separated from him in the Home when they were young, had married a Canadian and emigrated. After having nine children of her own, moving to Vancouver Island and re-marrying, she set out to find her lost brothers. Re-uniting with her in Vancouver and meeting his nieces and nephews transformed his outlook. It mellowed him.

Sadly, tragedy struck again in 1999 when Enid's son Aleister died in an accident at university in the UK. Losing another child was incredibly hard for them both. After Enid retired from WHO in 2003, they moved from France to Ealing with their dog Jessie.

Ben and Enid joined BAFUNCS, stayed in touch with friends, looked after Enid’s mother Eleanor until she died, and travelled.

In early 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic, their flat flooded and Ben had a stroke. One week later, Enid died of lung cancer. Ben's last six months were in a nursing home in Wembley.

Ben loved the English language, and his crosswords. I remember that when I started 4th grade he gave me The Little Red Schoolbook to read, so when a teacher first shouted I walked out of school in protest. At Christmases he fed me Penguins, for my tenth birthday he flew me to London to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and at sixteen he gave me my first Nikon. When we lived in New York, he took out a subscription for the three of us sitting at the very back of the Metropolitan Opera and I can still remember seeing Madama Butterfly. He bought a boat, and moored it on the Hudson River. He'd organised for my best friend from Geneva to come over for a ten day trip up the Hudson. The day before we were due to head off, there was a hurricane. Most of the boats at the marina sank, and ours ended up with a gaping hole at the front. Undeterred, Ben got a plastic tarp and his staple gun, patched it up, and set off with three little girls to go camping. He loved his family and his friends with all his heart, and didn't give a damn what anyone thought of him.

Ben and Enid will be greatly missed by their four daughters – two in England and two in Australia - and nine grandchildren.