Inventor, Hotelier, Entrepreneur Jan Horal started his career with the RAF – at 17
Eighty-five year-old Czech entrepreneur Jan Horal has lived a life that would make a Hollywood epic – except that no screenwriter could have invented the twists and turns his life has taken. An interview with him is punctuated by greetings from his staff, visits from friends, and lunch – along with his dachshund Rudy (“a professional beggar”) – in the restaurant of one of his three hotels.

Fluent in seven languages (Czech, English, German, Swedish, Russian, Hungarian, and French), he speaks slowly and clearly, with an astonishing memory of his life and his many adventures.

Above: A jaunty but exhausted Horal in 1945, “somewhere in France”

In 1940, at the young age of seventeen, Horal became one of the Czech members of the RAF. One of his experiences, though he couldn’t have known it at the time, would have a profound effect on his postwar life. This was the discovery of a set of Leica cameras left behind by a German journalist in El-Alamein.

In 1942, his Spitfire was shot down over Tobruk, and Horal experienced injuries that left his equilibrium impaired. The doctors told him that they could do nothing for him; he would never, they said, be able to walk again due to his incapacity to balance himself.  Horal says he decided to commit suicide, initially planning to use his service revolver. “But,” he explains, “I was fond of my landlady, and I didn’t want her to have to clean up the mess.” His second choice was to overdose; his doctors had given him several different types of medication to deal with his condition.

“Eight days later,” he says, “when the chemicals cleared from my bloodstream, I was fine.” He mentions that the doctors were skilled surgeons, but not well-versed in internal medicine; the plane crash had left him with a broken leg, possible broken ribs, shrapnel wounds, and shock. The shock was the cause of his balance problem, exacerbated by the medication he was given.

Horal, eager to rejoin the fight, returned to the RAF. However, the RAF had him listed as a permanent invalid, and despite his obvious return to health, they refused to allow him to re-enlist.

Horal then fell in with a Czech military group in England, he relates, joining them and becoming a tank driver in the Czech Second Tank Brigade. During his admission physical, the doctor had noted several scars on his body.

“Where did you get those?” the doctor asked him.
“Motorcycle accident,” was his laconic reply.

Horal fought through the end of the war with the brigade, getting wounded again. “I came home in 1945 and became a student of mechanical engineering in Prague,” he explains. In 1948, when Czechoslovakia disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, Horal told himself, “This is not what I fought for.”

Left: Horal and his spitfire in Tobruk, 1942, not long before he was shot down
Right: Horal inside his tank, still fighting after the injury that prevented him from rejoining the RAF

He made the trek to Berlin to apply for British residency on the basis of his RAF record.  The office in Berlin was sympathetic, but explained that they couldn’t process his application; he would have to make another journey, this time to Copenhagen.

In Copenhagen, Horal met a young Swedish woman who invited him to Sweden for the weekend. This “visit” turned into a job with a Swedish company, SKF, which made ball bearings. Always mechanically inclined, Horal then created the first fully-synchronized camera flash unit, he claims. Those Leicas he had found in Africa were a good model; he was able to study the workings of the shutter and rangefinder of still cameras. He explains that the previous problems with flash bulbs required the camera shutters to be open for a long time (1/15 to 1/10 of a second, requiring the subject to be completely still to prevent blurring), while the flash’s burn time itself was very brief (1/17,000 of a second). These old flash units didn’t allow action photography, which severely limited their range of use.  Horal’s invention led to the establishment of Moberg and Company; as a foreigner, he needed a Swedish partner, and he found one. This successful partnership came to an end when his partner married “a very unpleasant woman,” as he puts it, and the man’s new wife and in-laws made it impossible to cooperate any further.

Horal then founded another company, this one importing merchandise from Japan. He continued to have good ideas; the next one led him halfway around the world in search of a producer. Horal had an idea for manufacturing a zoom lens far more affordably than the then-current processes allowed (early zoom lenses were very bulky and very expensive to manufacture and buy). The Germans were uninterested in his idea, so Horal made the journey to Japan. At that time, the 1950s, the Japanese were busily producing lower-priced knockoffs of German cameras, but nobody had the necessary capital to work with Horal. He then bought the majority share in a Japanese company in bankruptcy.

The company eventually became the world’s largest manufacturer of movie cameras, Horal claims, under the name of Chinon. They made cameras for companies such as Kodak and Agfa.

In 1969, the recently elected and ill-fated Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, introduced enormous taxes in a vain effort to end the disparity between the rich and the poor. The result, Horal says, was that companies left Sweden in droves;“tax-wise,” he too left the country, though he remained a citizen. He sold his company to the British concern Dixon Photographic, moved to Monte Carlo, and worked in England.

In 1989, following the upheaval of the Velvet Revolution, Horal returned to his native land. He settled here fully in 1991, soon to become a “hotelier by accident.” One of his relatives, a professor of economics, went into partnership with some colleagues (also economics professors) and bought the Hotel Duo in Prague 9, on credit, during privatization. The hotel was in such bad condition that the neighbors had nicknamed it the “Horror Intercontinental.” The new owners, uunfortunately, had no money to restore the hotel, and Horal was offered a partnership in exchange for investing in the project. After a few months, it became clear to Horal that his new partners knew a great deal of theory but had very little practice concerning economics. He bought them out and took over the hotel.

“I’ve spent approximately a third of my life in hotels,” Horal says, the worst a mosquito-infested dump in Karachi; the best, luxury hotels in the Caribbean. So Horal believes he has a thorough knowledge of what guests want from a hotel. One innovation he has introduced is a series of solar panels on the roof, the sole source of power for all the air conditioning in the hotel.

The Hotel Duo was the first of Horal’s hotels. Later, on a trip to Český Krumlov, he made an offhand remark about the poor condition of the Hotel Růže, and found himself buying it the same day. The third hotel that he owns is the Hotel Old Inn, also in Český Krumlov, about a five-minute walk from the Růže.

The interview ends with our return to Horal’s office. We find Horal’s secretary working and taking care of his other dog, a three-month-old terrier named Little John, who is delighted to have the chance to give his owner’s nose a good wash.

Horal passes on his closing words of wisdom with a satisfied smile: “Cats are very standoffish. But dogs always love you.”

Left: Horal with his dog Rudy, the “professional beggar”
All photos courtesy of Jan Horal