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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.
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.
The conclusion provides an overview of the organisation’s history since the interwar years and the ways that it has adapted – and not – to broader social changes. Following the Second World War the GFS, like Britain, struggled to find its place and redefine itself in a post-imperial world. It shifted its imperial work to focus on missionaries and developed a World Council, its own version of a Commonwealth, to connect its branches worldwide. Yet it still grappled with systemic problems, including the perception that it was an outdated organisation. The organisation continues to exist today with around twenty thousand members in branches throughout the world, but it looks very different from the GFS of 1875. The nucleus of power within the GFS has shifted from England, and branches in Africa account for over 70 per cent of the GFS worldwide membership. As the GFS prepares to mark its sesquicentennial in 2025, it is confronted with old and new questions, including its relationship with the Anglican Church and whether single-gender organisations are still relevant. The Black Lives Matter movement led the GFS to reflect on racism within the organisation. The conclusion reflects on how the legacies of colonialism continue to shape girls’ lives and frame the contemporary politics of girlhood.
While acknowledging the differences between the Simons, the conclusion vindicates the book’s approach of considering the family together as justified by the family’s shared values of public service. It details how each family member contributed to this shared family ethos and how it was transmitted to their descendants. The conclusion also considers how the family’s connection with Manchester was integral to their identity. It also briefly compares Ernest and Shena’s regionalism with contemporary devolution. The conclusion features a ‘legacies’ section which provides an overview of the fate of the Simon Engineering businesses, significant places in Manchester connected to the Simons and the impact on society of their descendants.
This chapter comprises a biography of Shena Simon which seeks to demonstrate her historical significance and the influences which undergirded her career as a public servant and reformer. The chapter details her early work as a social reformer before exploring her work in local government in Manchester. It details Shena’s role in expanding educational provision and the many years she spent as a campaigner for educational equality. It discusses how her campaigning was inspired by education in America and the Soviet Union. In exploring Shena’s feminist ideas, the chapter discusses her friendship with Virginia Woolf. The chapter demonstrates that underscoring Shena’s career was a radical feminist and freethinking streak. It concludes by asserting that Shena should be given more attention in histories of women in social reform and politics.
This chapter focuses on India and the GFS’s efforts to reform two groups that provoked considerable anxiety among colonial governments and the GFS: poor white and multiracial girls. These girls seemingly threatened ideas of whiteness and purity by complicating binary racial distinctions and raising the spectre of racial degeneration. The GFS instituted training programmes for these girls to raise their status and thereby avert the supposed degeneration of the white race, but these programmes encountered problems and resistance, revealing fault lines over race within the GFS. The GFS encouraged its members to think of themselves as belonging to ‘a very large family’ and an ‘Imperial sisterhood’, but not all girls were welcome or equal members in this sisterhood. The GFS presented itself as an organisation that transcended racial divisions, but debates over the membership of non-European girls, especially in India and South Africa, revealed the contradictions in such pronouncements. Because the organisation relied upon the support of Indian and African girls, it begrudgingly admitted them but simultaneously worked to segregate girls and deprive their branches of resources, ultimately leading girls to leave the organisation altogether. These actions demonstrate that girls were not passive participants in the GFS but actively shaped the society in accordance with their interests, sometimes disrupting the organisers’ plans in the process.
This chapter explores the German community in Manchester and the impact it made on the city in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how Germans were drawn to Manchester and illustrates how they shaped the city in various ways. It explores the networks these Germans established in science, religion, business and culture, and how their influence made Manchester a cosmopolitan city by the end of the nineteenth century.