Admin History | Sina Kallas was born in Munich in 1916 to Estonian parents and grew up in Bavaria. She attended the foreign student course at the University College of the South West, Exeter in the year 1936 to 1937. Whilst studying in Exeter, Sina Kallas lived at Lopez Hall. According to her daughter, she enjoyed her time there 'immensely', and would often talk about the beautiful gardens, her walking trips to Cornwall and the Lake District, her tutor Mr. Littler (whom she visited again at the end of the sixties) and above all about her friends.
After her year at Exeter, Sina Kallas went to the University of Heidelberg and completed an interpreters' course there. She wished to return to the UK and managed to do so in the autumn of 1938, when she started a job at an office in Liverpool. When war was declared she took what she said was the very last ferry back to the continent. After the war she contacted some of her friends again and her daughter spent her very first summer holidays in England at the age of 12 with a grammar school teacher, a friend of Sina Kallas' whom she had met at Exeter.
Sina Kallas married August Mautner-Markhof in 1944. She died in Salzburg, Austria in 2005. |