My friend and sometime colleague Gery Bramall, who has died aged 103, was a musical and legal translator who served for a number of years as a Labour councillor in London.
I inherited Gery as my German translator when I joined the classical division of EMI Records (later EMI Classics) as literary editor in 1987; before that she had worked as classical co-ordinator at Decca Records and as a professional translator, into German and from German, French and Latin. In our 20-year collaboration, she furnished me with translations rather above the general muster, saved me from numerous howlers, and got me hooked on sushi.
The younger daughter of Helene and Viktor Bloch, Gery was born into a prosperous assimilated Jewish family in Vienna, where her father was a banker and art collector. As a student she saw Hitler speak (“mesmerising”) and encountered Hans Keller, the musical young man about town.
In March 1939, her family were fortunate to be able to emigrate to Britain under a negotiated safe conduct. During the second war, Gery volunteered in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (the women’s branch of the British army). In the postwar years, she sang as a soprano in the London Philharmonic Choir, most memorably at Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s 1951 UK debut (the Mass of Life under Thomas Beecham).
She also took a degree at the London School of Economics, where she joined the Labour Society and was a contemporary of Bernard Levin. Thereafter, she entered public service, elected as a Westminster city councillor for Alderney ward in 1959, and then for a further four years for Churchill ward in 1964.
At Decca she started out in the translation unit, working on sleeve notes and sung texts, before moving in the mid-1970s to head up the co-ordination unit, liaising between the recording side of things and editorial/packaging. A Decca colleague, John Kehoe, recalls: “Gery had a fine mind and a generous spirit, and she brooked no nonsense from recording producers … she was an integral part of a team that would have graced a decent university department.” After her official retirement in 1980, Gery continued to work on a freelance basis.
In 1950 she married the Labour politician Sir Ashley Bramall. It was a nice token of marriage that, in 1976, Ashley and Gery had the distinction of appearing as husband-and-wife contenders on Mastermind.
Ashley died in 1999, and Gery’s later years were spent at Mary Feilding Guild, the care home in Highgate, and then, after the guild’s precipitate closure, Nightingale House, the Jewish care home in Wandsworth.
She is survived by her son, Anthony, who is principal guest conductor at the Gärtnerplatztheater, Munich.
