This book traces the history of two generations of the Simon family of Manchester: Henry Simon (1835–99), his wife Emily Simon, née Stoehr (1858–1920), their eldest son Ernest (1879–1960) and his wife Shena, née Potter (1883–1972). The Simons may now be little more than a name in the collective memory of Manchester, but in their time they made a formidable impact on the city, its social institutions and its politics. Some sense of their importance is given by an indication of the institutions and buildings that would not have existed, or might not have endured, without the Simon family’s contribution: these range from the Manchester Crematorium to Jodrell Bank, from Withington Girls’ School to the Hallé Orchestra, from the laboratories where Ernest Rutherford did his path-breaking research to the Wythenshawe Estate, in its time the largest council estate in Europe.

That story certainly tells us what could be done with great personal wealth in the late Victorian period and even in interwar Britain. But while affluence was clearly a necessary condition of the Simons’ roles not just as philanthropists but as social reformers, it was equally clearly not a sufficient condition, and this book attempts to explore the sources of this record of innovation. It explores the formation and transmission of a distinctive family ethos shaped by their German ancestors, the experience of being part of a tight-knit German community in Manchester and by the wider Manchester mercantile elite of which Henry Simon became such an influential member. It analyses the ethic that underpinned the success of the two businesses that Henry Simon founded, but it also traces the values that shaped the family’s contribution to public life.

The book aims to give due weight to each of the four individuals, so as to ensure that Emily, in particular, emerges from the shadows. But the overall purpose of the book is to study the family collectively. The rationale for that is primarily that there was a powerful family tradition of public service, deliberately transmitted. That tends to privilege the male line: it was a Simon family tradition, and Emily and Shena married into it. But they also made important contributions to the shaping of the family ethos. The marriages of Henry and Emily and of Ernest and Shena were strong partnerships in which the wife played an important role not just as homemaker but also as philanthropist and public figure. So this is far more than the story of Henry Simon and son.

0.1 The four Simons: (in order from top-left to bottom-right) Henry, Emily, Ernest and Shena. Source: The Simon Engineering Group (1953) and SSP M14/6/7.

The structure of the book mirrors these two aims. The first part focuses on the four Simons as individuals, although the four biographical chapters are framed by a study of the Manchester German community as a whole. The second part is thematic, and while the chapters mostly focus on one or two members of the family in particular, the objective is to ensure that a sense of the family as a unit comes through. The central focus is on their work in and for the city of Manchester: its economy, its housing and social infrastructure, its city council, its schools, its university.

Margaret Littler’s opening chapter, a study of the German community in Manchester, is intended primarily to explain something of the background to the lives of Henry and Emily Simon. She emphasises wealthy Germans’ integration both into the city of Manchester and into mainstream European culture and commerce. Her chapter highlights just how many of Henry Simon’s civic, cultural and philanthropic interests, from the Hallé Orchestra to progressive educational methods, were nurtured by the Manchester German community. Janet Wolff’s study of Henry Simon reveals him to have been anything but a business-obsessed Gradgrind: a culturally sophisticated man (so much was already known), he is shown to have been endowed with a hitherto undiscovered religious sensibility focused, however, on ‘right doings’ as the essence of religion. He was curiously drawn to eastern religions, to Buddhism in particular, and the man who placed Darwin at the top of his list of first-rate books also included Schopenhauer in his top ten. Diana Leitch then depicts Henry’s second wife, Emily, as a strong-willed woman whose strength of character held the family together. Emily then assumed a much greater public profile during her long widowhood, notably during the First World War, when she allowed her home to be used as a Red Cross hospital under her management.

John Ayshford and Brendon Jones together contribute two co-authored studies of Ernest and Shena Simon. Ernest is painted as someone who self-consciously taught himself to overcome what might have been a debilitating shyness to become not only a successful businessman but also an energetic and creative civic leader and public intellectual both in Manchester and nationally. He would have been the first to admit that his marriage to Shena was the prerequisite for his achievements as a public figure. Theirs was a deeply fulfilled marriage that was at the same time a close working partnership that they modelled more or less explicitly on that of their friends, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Shena was herself perhaps the most vivid and remarkable of the four characters: she had a personability and ease of manner that Ernest lacked, but she was also a powerful and sometimes overbearing political operator. She was a vocal feminist and a long-term campaigner for educational equality, but, like Ernest, she could lack finesse in handling those for whom she had a low regard. As she said of herself, she could afford to be unpopular.

Having introduced the four protagonists in this way, the book goes on to study their contributions, individual and collective, in several domains: business, local government, housing and higher education. Martin Dodge’s chapter on the Simon engineering businesses over a period of ninety years traces the roots of the business success that underpinned the family’s public activities. Dodge identifies key drivers of the success of the businesses, both under Henry’s and Ernest’s leadership: under Henry, engagement with the application of scientific research combined with business acumen, displayed for instance in the shrewd use of patents; under Ernest, confidence in his ability to select key senior managerial staff and a willingness to delegate, combined with a ruthlessness in dealing with those he found to be underperforming. The next chapter, by Charlotte Wildman, then provides a comprehensive assessment of Shena’s work in local government. When Shena was elected to Manchester City Council in 1924 there were still very few women on borough councils, especially in the large cities, and the chapter forms an important case study of a woman in municipal politics. It examines Shena’s contribution on the key issues of housing, education and women’s employment rights, and shows her to have been notably prescient as an advocate of municipal taxation reform as the precondition of the continued vitality of local government. The chapter adds to a small but growing body of recent literature which is challenging the supposed notion of decline in the strength of local government and civic culture in the first part of the twentieth century. The chapter on housing reform and urban planning, by Stephen Ward and Martin Dodge, neatly tells a story in which each of the four made a significant and distinctive contribution. It shows that Ernest’s standing as a major civic and national voice on housing policy was prefigured by both Henry’s and Emily’s involvement in working-class housing schemes. And while it was Ernest who was the housing expert, it was Shena who took the leading role in the development of the Wythenshawe estate. A particularly striking feature of the chapter is that it shows that Ernest’s distinctive vision for democratic town planning was shaped by the extensive international visits he made, with Shena, before and during the Second World War. Ernest was notably keen to use these visits to study urban planning in different contexts: European democracies, the Soviet Union and the United States. The Simons of Manchester, and Ernest in particular, were immersed an important set of international debates on postwar reconstruction. Finally, H. S. Jones and Chris Godden explore the Simon family’s long connection with the University of Manchester and its precursors. Ernest and Shena were at the heart of the University community for many decades, and Ernest used his position and experience as a powerful lay officer to give him credibility in the important public debate on the social role of universities from the Second World War to the eve of the appointment of the Robbins Committee. Ernest’s substantial personal investment in social science research, notably through the Simon fellowship scheme, was conceived as a contribution to the cause of citizenship education, to which he devoted much of his public work from the 1930s onwards, and the chapter teases out some of the tensions between promoting socially useful research and nurturing educational breadth.

0.2 Advertisement for Henry Simon Ltd (1898). Source: Martin Dodge.

There is, inevitably, much that is not in this book. It does not stretch back to explore Henry Simon’s German ancestors, or indeed Emily’s ancestors either, in any great depth; and neither does it stretch forward to consider the trajectories of Ernest and Shena’s children or indeed their grandchildren. Equally, we do not trace the national political careers of Ernest and Shena, although there is much to be said about the Liberal Summer Schools, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, population control and comprehensive schooling. The Simons offer plenty of opportunities for future researchers. Our central focus here is on the relationship between the family and the city of Manchester and its environs. It is the interaction between the family and the city that gives this story its interest.