Richard Dajczak (1956-2026)

Richard Dajczak’s life led him from the Midlands, to the scrapyards of the post-Soviet Union. His Polish father had vowed that, if he survived the Soviet death camps, his first son would become a priest. Instead, Richard became a talented and imaginative metallurgist and metals trader.

Richard, as his surname ‘Dajczak’ suggests, was born in 1956 of Polish stock, and brought up in the metal-bashing area of Dudley in Birmingham. His father and mother came from the much-contested area of Lwów/Lviv/Lemberg; his father the only escapee when parents and relatives were murdered by the invading Nazis. Falling into Russian hands, his father (still a teenager) was transported to Siberia. It ultimately proved to be his route to liberation when, under pressure from the allies, Stalin in 1942 agreed to the creation of what became known as the ‘Anders’ Army’, made up of 100,000 Polish soldiers whose purpose was to push back the Germans from the East. His father faked his age and became a sniper in the Polish 2^nd Corps, the unit which, with the British 8^th Army, liberated Monte Cassino in 1944 – the impregnable cliff-top monastery occupied by an elite German parachute regiment barring the allies on their ascent through Italy. Richard’s mother, also sent to Siberia from the Lwów area, had made her own way to the UK via Persia and South Africa where she met his father after the war and became a nurse, latterly ministering to the dying.

Richard’s early life was overshadowed by the trauma of war; something that was indelible to his character. It was to fulfil his father’s promise that the young Richard, aged eight, was sent away to a Dickensian Polish Catholic boarding school – an experience from which he never entirely recovered. Despite this, Richard secured a place at the University of Birmingham’s School of Metallurgy and Materials, then joined HL Thorne & Co in Oldbury in Birmingham. Formed in 1955, the company is still a force in the world of metals recycling. In the 1970s Birmingham hosted the IMI Secondary Copper Smelter in Walsall as well as hundreds of yards - especially around Wolverhampton – dedicated to fabricating, melting, or recycling metals. In Richard’s case, his metallurgical knowledge led him to purchase IMI drosses, drippings, and fines for a recoverable precious metals content that others often neglected.

In the 1990s Richard swapped the scrapyards of Birmingham for those in the Soviet Union - a legacy of giant crumbling factories and outdated military equipment expressed in mountains of scrap metals. It was not surprising that Richard was drawn to these territories which had been so deep a part of his family’s story. It was also where Richard and I met, ultimately mitigating the risks of buying from the Russians by sharing mutual knowledge; in his case establishing the quality and potential application of metals, and in mine finding markets. It was during this time that Richard met his future wife, Katharina, who became his business partner and shared with him the adventure of trade in the post-Soviet world. As Katharina has said ‘we had a lot of fun and a lot of risk dealing with the Russians in those days.’ In due course Katharina and Richard married, with Katharina continuing to work for the business.

Left to Right: Graham Mee, Richard Dajczak and Anthony Lipmann. Metal hunting in Russia in 1995. By the Neva River, next to the battleship Aurora that famously turned its guns on The Winter Palace, so igniting the October Revolution of 1917

By 1995 Richard teamed up with his lifelong friend, Graham Mee, following the sale of the Mee family’s secondary aluminium smelter. Together they formed Metals & Alloys Titanium Products, working from the Blackburn Road in Sheffield. Another key person of this period was Richard Matthewman who was later to form another Ferro Titanium works called TiVac. Together the three developed Ferro Titanium production, originally to capitalise on the influx of multiple forms of Titanium scrap feed coming out of the former Soviet Union. Not content with technology on a plate, Richard would customise his furnaces, turning induction furnaces to a lower frequency which had the effect of stirring and homologising the titanium with the iron in the melt. He then added an argon shield percolating upwards through the melt to reduce oxides for higher grades. Later he and Mee rented works in Welshpool and with Nick, their works manager, they applied new techniques to roasting turnings (always a dangerous business because of the pyrophoric nature of the material) and adding a crushing facility, resulting in FeTi powders and lumps produced to specific sizes.

There is no one I know in metals who did not think of Richard as ‘a one-off’ and a maverick when it came to original and creative thinking in the world of metals. A visit to the portacabin in his yard was always accompanied by copious amounts of tea, imbibed from rather well-used mugs that did not appear ever to have seen a dishcloth, let alone the inside of a dishwasher. Here again, while claiming to be overloaded with work – which he certainly was – he would regale the visitor with stories of the trade, many involving characters whose sharp practices Richard despised but triumphed over - thanks to his metallurgical ingenuity. Nor was Richard keen on bureaucracy. On one occasion the Fire Service asked Richard to upgrade the fire safety at his yard as he was told the depot was too far away. Richard’s answer was to purchase a second-hand fire truck which he obstinately placed in the middle of the yard. This was a heyday, with good prices for his product and independent buyers who bought parcels of FeTi for stocking and trading. In 2005 the business was sold to the German company, Cronimet GmbH in Karlsruhe, and so Graham and Richard partnered up again to form Alloy Masters Ltd. The two bought a yard in Welshpool and latterly in Telford making higher grades of FeTi and supplying special grades of FeTi powders for cored wire production.

Richard’s metallurgical ideas never dried up, but he could not implement them all. This led him to suggest to me the idea of trading zirconium which was then flowing out in large unsaleable quantities from the former Soviet Union. He suggested I use it to make copper-zirconium or ferro zirconium master alloys. And it worked. The Russian nuclear grades could never be used in nuclear applications because of specification - but it was perfectly serviceable for master alloy.

Richard was always a generous sharer of knowledge and adept at sorting out the usual problems of claims that are synonymous with the scrap trade. In Richard’s world, you didn’t send emails but got in a car or onto a plane and proceeded to the source of the problem. On one occasion we had supplied Alnico and Kovar magnet scrap to a yard in Sheffield only to be told by the buyer after arrival that the goods were not as contracted. Three hours later we were standing in the buyer’s yard with the buyer declaring apologetically that he had ‘mixed up’ the parcels in the warehouse. All Richard had done was point to another pile in the warehouse and say in his quiet Dudley accent, ‘Isn’t that ours?’.

In those early days of the post-Soviet era in one year alone we moved 1000 mt of Titanium into Sheffield with items that painted a picture of a society that no longer existed. One item was a reactor shield from a Komsomolets class nuclear submarine, another was a titanium-walled bathyscope, while another was a chopped-up titanium-fabricated vodka distillery from Armenia which the locals had disguised as a piggery.

Richard’s hobbies included guns as a legacy from his father who had been a sniper. He was obsessed with the mechanics of how guns and gunsights worked and acquired permission from the authorities to customise firearms which he then used when accompanying rangers to protect livestock. His other great hobby was flying, and it was while taking off and landing from Welshpool airport in his twin-engined Beechcraft Duchess plane, that he came to see and admire a Victorian stately home by the name of Leighton Hall. The Hall had been built by John Naylor, from Leyland, the founder of Lloyds Bank, surrounded by a park that contained the first examples of the hybridised tree that has come to be known as Leylandii - the blight of every suburban road.  He expressed interest until one day he was contacted by the NatWest bank to say that the former owner was now in default and they were not in the business of owning stately homes. And so, with Graham Mee’s backing, he bought it.

By the late 1990s when he acquired it, it had fallen into disrepair and was condemned. But using the appliance of science, Richard developed solutions and virtually single-handedly cured the dry rot and re-built the roof. The interior included Pugin wall-panelling in Grinling Gibbons style and floor tiles by Minton – both of which were contemporary to those in the Palace of Westminster. In this splendour he lived out his last decades with a project that kept him busy until the end, while the yard in Telford provided the outlet for his creative metallurgical genius, modifying and customising furnaces.

He leaves his wife Katharina, and daughter Josephine, his brother Krzysztof, sister Elżbieta, and mother - Janina.

His father’s medals are testimony to one of the most brutal stories of the 20^th century which left a legacy in the character of his sons and daughter.

by Anthony Lipmann

Published 'The Crucible', Sept 2026