My friend Franz Steiner, who has died aged 96, was a Catholic from a Jewish family and a refugee from Austria who became quintessentially British.

The son of Paula and Richard Steiner, Franz – Franzi to his family, Frank to his friends – was born into a well-established family in Vienna. His family had converted from Judaism to Catholicism and his father was a high court judge. Franz and his brother, Willi, attended the Schottengymnasium, where they were taught to become loyal Austrian citizens. Then everything changed with the Nazi occupation of Austria in March 1938.

While the two brothers were sent to Britain on the Kindertransport, any trace of their parents was lost between Budapest and Auschwitz. Franz wrote that he “thought that in a long life everything had gone right … in things that did not matter all that much, but where it really mattered there had been real catastrophes, such as the events of 1938 and what followed”.

On arrival in Britain he was sent to refugee camps in Suffolk before being offered a scholarship to the Benedictine Belmont Abbey school in Hereford. After a stint in the civil service and the private sector in 1960 he joined a stock brokerage in London, where he remained until his retirement in 1987.

At least equally important were his many other activities: in 1949 he joined the Reform Club, the same year he started reporting for the newswire service of the Austrian Catholic church Kathpress.

He also joined the Catholic Union of Great Britain and for many years chaired its parliamentary and public affairs committee. On his retirement as chair in 2005, the Vatican awarded Franz the most prestigious lay-honour: he was made a knight of St Gregory.

His ties with Britain did not mean a severing of his ties with the his home country. “Those Austrians I am friends with are good people,” he once said to me. “And those who are not, I don’t want to know.” In 2000, he was awarded the Republic of Austria Insignia in Gold.

Franz met Rosemary Oldham through the Newman organisation for Catholic graduates, and they married in 1963. She died in 1990. He is survived by their children, Rob and Claire, and grandchildren Emily, Gregory, Alfie, Betty, Lola and Wilfie.