Though a stockbroker, Winton was also "an ardent socialist who became close to Labour Party luminaries Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee and Tom Driberg". Returning to London, he became a broker at the London Stock Exchange. He also earned a banking qualification in France. In 1931, he moved to France and worked for the Banque Nationale de Crédit in Paris. He then went to Hamburg, where he worked at Behrens Bank, followed by Wasserman Bank in Berlin. He left without qualifications, attending night school while volunteering at the Midland Bank. In 1923, Winton entered Stowe School, which had just opened. They also converted to Christianity, and Winton was baptised. The family name was Wertheim, but they changed it to Winton in an effort at integration. His parents were German Jews who had moved to London two years earlier. His elder sister was Charlotte (1908–2001) and the younger brother, Robert (1914–2009). Winton was born on in Hampstead, London to Jewish parents Rudolph Wertheim (1881–1937), a bank manager, and his wife Barbara ( née Wertheimer, 1888–1978), as the middle-born of their three children. He died in his sleep, in 2015, at the age of 106. On 28 October 2014, he was awarded the highest honour of the Czech Republic, the Order of the White Lion (1st class), by Czech President Miloš Zeman. In 2003, Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to humanity, in saving Jewish children from Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia".
The British press celebrated him and dubbed him the "British Schindler". His work went unnoticed by the world for nearly 50 years, until 1988 when he was invited to the BBC television programme That's Life!, where he was reunited with several of the children he had saved. This operation was later known as the Czech Kindertransport (German for "children's transport"). Winton found homes for the children and arranged for their safe passage to Britain. Born to German-Jewish parents who had emigrated to Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, Winton supervised the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE (born Wertheim – 1 July 2015) was a British banker and humanitarian who established an organisation to rescue children at risk from Czechoslovakia.
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