His father, Joseph Horowitz, immigrated with his family from Russia at the age of fourteen and went into the textile business. His mother Diana, née Elias, was born in Manchester to a Jewish family that came to England from Algeria in the early nineteenth century. At first Ivor attended a local grammar school, but he did so well in his studies that his parents transferred him to a prestigious public school in Derbyshire, not far from Manchester. Upon graduating in 1913, he was admitted to King’s College, Cambridge, where he began to read law and English literature. After a year of debating between the two he decided, in consultation with his parents, to study law. Ivor Horowitz was not immediately mobilized when war broke out in August 1914. During his second year in Cambridge, however, he was asked to report for his physical, and at the start of his third year, in October 1915, he was called up. After basic training in southern England, he shipped out with his regiment to France. Ivor, a medium-height, chubby, bespectacled young man, tried unsuccessfully to obtain a position as a regimental clerk and in April 1916 was sent to the front—where, between the French villages of Dompierre and Méricur, he saw action in nine weeks of hard fighting and was nearly killed twice.
