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This chapter portrays the life story of Henry Simon. Employing a close reading of Henry’s correspondence, it draws out his character as a hard-working engineer and philanthropist. As well as illustrating his private family life, the chapter explores his firm moral principles and liberal beliefs and their antecedents. In this vein, it explores the influence of Henry’s uncle, Heinrich Simon, as well as Henry’s interest in eastern religion. The chapter demonstrates Henry’s integral position in Manchester’s German community and his role in enriching the city’s civic institutions.
Eulogy delivered at James Baldwin’s funeral. Published in The New York Times, December 20, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 29, Column 2; Book Review Desk.
This chapter traces the contribution of all four Simons in housing reform: from Henry’s role in a Victorian tenement scheme, to Emily’s connection with the Edwardian garden suburb movement, and then to Shena and Ernest’s work in interwar mass municipal housing development. In addition to illustrating Ernest and Shena’s important role in the development of the Wythenshawe Estate and their longstanding connections with it, the chapter discusses how Ernest’s unique ideas about democratic town planning were profoundly shaped by his investigations of foreign nations.
This chapter illuminates the Simon family’s longstanding connection with the University of Manchester. In addition to elucidating how the Simons’ link with the university stemmed from the family’s relationship with Manchester’s German business community, it focuses on Ernest’s intellectual vision for university education as a uniquely influential lay governor. In assessing Ernest’s belief that education for citizenship and the social sciences were central to higher education, the chapter details how this vision inspired the Simon fellowship scheme. The chapter considers the scheme’s early history as well as the impact it has had on research in the social sciences.
This chapter presents a holistic account of the largely unrecorded development of the Simon Engineering businesses over the course of ninety years from the 1870s to 1960s. It traces how a global and multifaceted business empire began with Henry Simon’s introduction into Britain of innovative reforms to flour milling and to coke production. The chapter demonstrates how the Simons’ contribution to industry was grounded upon an ethos of fostering innovation to serve fundamental human needs and to benefit society.
Emigration formed a cornerstone of the GFS’s imperial work. In 1883 the GFS established the Department for Members Emigrating to ensure the safe passage of girls and young women travelling between various parts of the empire. The previous chapter examined how whiteness was central to imaginings of settler colonial societies, and this chapter considers how the GFS tried to make these imaginings a reality through its emigration programmes and the building up of settler societies. The chapter begins by outlining the wider contexts in which the GFS’s emigration programmes emerged and situates their development in relation to similar emigration schemes for girls. It then traces the different motives that informed the development of the GFS’s programmes. Child rescue and emigration organisations argued for the necessity of removing girls from the perceived dangers of poverty and urban life in England to the more wholesome environment of the colonies. Girls also provided valuable labour to colonial societies and were integral in making the empire white by ensuring the construction of English households abroad. Despite the high demand for emigrants in settler colonies, the GFS and other emigration organisations faced myriad difficulties, which were rooted in broader class and racial anxieties and specifically concerns about the whiteness of emigrants and white prestige in colonial societies. These challenges also reveal the competing, rather than complementary, objectives among emigration organisers, settlers, and girl migrants and fault lines within emigration programmes and the settler colonial project.