Obit. - Ottilie Luternauer, known to her friends and family as "Tilly", was born in Frankfurt in 1908. Her mother was a musician and her father was an eye surgeon and was decorated for his work by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Her father died when she was very young and she and her mother and two brothers survived the first World War when they nearly starved to death. Tilly could remember when she was still a little girl having to come downstairs from the attic of their house to light the stove every morning before her mother and brothers got up (she was only 8 at the time).

After the war Tilly went to work as a Secretary in a medical centre in Frankfurt. She later married Fritz Kahn, a banker, who was a widower with one son, and the marriage took place in the Guildhall in London in 1933. Katie, her first daughter was born in Paris in April 1934 and the family lived happily in Frankfurt until 1939 just before the second World War when Tilly's husband was shot by the Nazis and many of the Jewish members of Mr Kahn's family perished in concentration camps.

Tilly escaped with her little daughter of 4 years old and fled with Fritz Kahn's ashes to bury them in the family plot in Strasbourg. The French relations persuaded Tilly and the child not to return to Frankfurt, but to go to East Africa where her stepson lived in Tanganyika.

During the second World War he fought in the French Foreign Legion in North Africa and Europe. Tilly had her young daughter to support so she went to work in Tanganyika, but she found that as soon as she arrived in the country she was regarded as an alien and would have to go with other German nationals into a POW camp. This was a terrible blow to her, but she had luckily been introduced to a French man whom she believed was about 15 years older than herself (it turned out years later when Lucie was trying to find his birth certificate that he was, in fact over 20 years older than her). He was a lonely man so Tilly set about capturing his attentions (so she told Lucie) by cooking extra special dishes for him and it was not long before he proposed marriage to her. Unfortunately as she was signing the register at the District Commissioner's Office on her wedding day, the DC whispered in her ear that it took 5 years for a divorce in that country.

Saved from the POW camp Tilly soon realised that she needed saving from Mr Ungerer her second husband. Fate intervened at that time when she learnt that the Manager of the Kibo Hotel, Emil Luternauer (in the mountain village of Marango on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro) needed a housekeeper. Tilly applied, and it was not long before she moved up the mountain. Lucie was born on 12 July 1941 and of course it took 5 years for Tilly to get her divorce. There was a court case where Mr Ungerer tried to contest the fact that Lucie was not Emil Luternauer's daughter. A blood test apparently established that she was, but when Lucie asked Tilly for the papers, they had long vanished! However, it was said that there were newspaper reports about it at the time.

Emil Luternauer and Tilly spent the next 23 years in hotel life around East Africa. They managed hotels in Nairobi and Mombasa in Kenya. Moshi, Tanganyika, and Kampala, Uganda. They were well known and appreciated for their first class menus, their efficiency and the warmth of their hospitality. Whilst they were in Uganda they catered for the Queen's visit to Entebbe in 1953 and transported the food 22 miles from Kampala to Entebbe where the festivities were held. Tilly was a stern but just employer and was so popular with her African employees that when they returned to Nairobi to run a hotel in the latter part of the 1950's, a huge crowd of Africans gathered to apply for work with them and the police had to be called to disperse them.

She loved life and was a wonderful person to have at a party as she used to regale everyone with her stories of Africa and the life she led there. One of the stories was about the time when she and Emil had to cater for a special banquet and they told the new chef who was to serve a whole roast suckling pig not to forget the final touch of an apple in the mouth. The chef emerged with the splendid roast on a platter with the apple in HIS mouth!! The two girls grew up and went to University in Dublin and later when Tilly was with Emil in Tanzania when there was a military uprising against President Nyerere in 1963, she showed once again her marvellous fighting spirit. All the women and children were evacuated, but she refused to leave because, as she herself put it, "she had lost one husband to oppression, but she was not going to lose her third husband, she would go down fighting with him"!

She was in the local District Commissioner's Office in town when fighting broke out in the streets and she was marched off at gun point. Fortunately, one of the soldiers recognised her and helped her to escape through the bush to the Hotel where Emil was. The military soldiers had gone to the Hotel where he had bravely gone out to face them. When they opened fire (fortunately the bullets went to the left and right of him) he could not believe that their own people would shoot that he suffered his first heart attack from the shock. Later, when the incident was reported in the newspapers who commented on Tilly's bravery, she was annoyed because she was described as the "elderly hotelier" - I'm not elderly at all, she indignantly remarked. They were finally rescued by British paratroopers from their base in Aden, called in by President Nyerere.

Tilly took Emil back to Switzerland, but they couldn't settle there, so her two daughters persuaded them to live near them in Dublin, Ireland. Tilly nursed Emil until he was returned to Switzerland where he died on 5 November 1970. She then came to live in England where her younger daughter, Lucie was living with her 3 children in Bagshot. Tilly loved Bagshot and Lightwater and the local people there came to think of her as a more than colourful character. She was a fighter and a survivor, and right up to the end, when she was very ill she impressed everyone around her with her indomitable spirit. She never complained, in fact her daughters had no idea she was so ill until the last week when it was discovered she had a serious gastric ulcer. She survived a critical operation and seemed to be progressing well, when her strength waned. She fought bravely till the end and died peacefully in her sleep early Friday morning, 5 November, 1993 at Frimley Park Hospital.'  Source: Mrs Lucie Walker