The presence in late Victorian and Edwardian Manchester of a substantial and influential German population has long been acknowledged, as has their contribution to the industrial and commercial growth for which the city is famed. In those days, the Midland Hotel housed a German restaurant, German music and musicians featured prominently in concert programmes, and German businesses were trading in textiles, engineering, chemicals, banking and retail. Names such as S. L. Behrens & Co., Schunck, Souchay & Co., Steinthal & Co., Prieger, Stoehr & Co. and Ermen & Engels must have been familiar among cotton manufacture and trading circles. Terry Wyke describes nineteenth-century Manchester as ‘a city whose warp was textiles and whose weft was migrants’, and rapidly expanding industry was undoubtedly a major factor drawing German migration.¹ It has been estimated that in 1851 there were around 1,000 German-born residents in Manchester, and that by 1891 Germans were the single largest foreign element in the city.² But by the early twentieth century this presence is assumed to have disappeared, and definitively so as the result of two devastating wars. The sinking of the RMS Lusitania in May 1915 is often cited as a turning point in the souring of Anglo-German relations, resulting in anti-German riots across Manchester and Salford, targeting businesses with German-sounding names.³ Unlike Bradford, where the district called Little Germany bears witness to the prominence of Germans in the nineteenth-century wool trade, the cosmopolitanism of ‘Cottonopolis’ appears to have vanished without trace. This chapter considers both the complex reasons for the Germans’ presence in Manchester and the nature of their influence, in terms of the achievements of individual migrants, and also of the networks that they joined, formed and maintained. The actors in this story include civic institutions, science and technology, religious tolerance, political liberalism, educational reforms, music and other ‘rational recreation’ such as gymnastics and mountaineering. Even if many of those who came settled, naturalised and had British descendants, their presence opened up vectors of connectivity with mainland Europe, so that their migration may be viewed less as a one-off movement than as a traffic of ideas, technologies, commerce and culture that endured. To view their migration in this way reveals an impact that goes far beyond the lifespans of prominent individuals and even the devastation of two world wars.

Prussia

To assess the ‘push’ factors driving German migration, one must recall that ‘Germany’ as a unified nation did not exist for much of the nineteenth century, but instead a German Confederation of thirty-nine German states – dominated in the north by Prussia and in the south by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.⁴ Emerging from the Congress of Vienna in 1815, this confederation was politically weak, and a disappointment to liberals hoping for a united German nation after liberation from Napoleon.⁵ When Frederick William IV acceded to the Prussian throne in 1840, there were hopes of greater political freedoms and German unity. Demands for constitutional rule came from German universities such as Jena, Giessen and Breslau, where student organisations (Burschenschaften) had long been the advocates of liberalism and national unity.⁶ The end of the Napoleonic Wars had seen a revival of German universities; as centres of a new nationalism, they also enjoyed a renaissance in many disciplines – particularly in science.⁷ But the increasing strength of the liberal movement in the 1840s was met with reactionary measures, severe censorship and state control of universities. When revolution broke out in France in 1848, unrest soon spread through the German states, and in May a preliminary assembly was convened in Frankfurt am Main to prepare elections for a new national assembly to replace the German Confederation and its (unrepresentative) Diet. Prominent among those tasked with drawing up a new constitution was the lawyer August Heinrich Simon (henceforth Heinrich Simon) (1805–60), uncle of Henry Simon (1835–99). The proposed constitution included principles such as equality before the law, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of religious observance and freedom of the judiciary from political interference. (Heinrich Simon himself had resigned in 1845 as a judge in the Prussian State Service, in protest against a law regulating the conduct of public servants.)⁸ When, in March 1849, the Prussian king refused to reign on the terms of constitutional monarchy presented to him by the Frankfurt Parliament, Heinrich, who already faced a charge of high treason for his outspoken opposition, went into exile in Switzerland. There he gathered some of his family around him, including his nephew, whom he encouraged to study engineering at the Zurich State Polytechnical School, and subsequently to seek employment in Manchester in 1860. There he had the support of other political exiles from 1848, such as the physician and paediatrician Louis Borchardt (1816–83) and the merchant Emil Moritz Stoehr (1827–77), whose daughter Emily became Henry’s second wife.⁹

Manchester

The commercial opportunities and relative social and political freedoms in northern English towns meant that German migrants felt at home in Manchester, away from the political repression and conservatism of their homeland, and they were widely accepted there.¹⁰ The city welcomed immigrants who showed a willingness to work hard, bring prosperity and assimilate to local cultural norms. Jonathan Westaway also notes the sympathy of the Manchester liberal and nonconformist middle classes for the political struggles of German liberals, as well as their admiration for German cultural capital.¹¹ Their own brand of liberalism was focused more on free trade and regional autonomy than the German desire for national unity, but, as Christopher Clark has pointed out, they shared a sense of ‘provincial patriotism, defence of “liberty” and resistance to the expansion of state power’.¹² So perhaps it is not surprising that a Deutscher National Verein was founded in Manchester in 1848 to support the German liberal cause, that on 30 March that year a public meeting was held at the Manchester Athenaeum with speeches only in German supporting the revolutionaries and that German companies in Manchester raised £500 for families affected by the violence.¹³ Such liberal sympathies were further alienated by the increasingly militaristic and autocratic nature of the Second Empire founded in 1871 as a result of war, not popular uprising.

The Manchester to which Germans were drawn was a relatively new city with a rapidly increasing population, an expanding industrial workforce and a growing, prosperous middle class.¹⁴ From a Lancashire town trading in textiles from water-powered mills in the Pennine valleys, Manchester was transformed into a modern industrial urban centre. A population of 95,000 in 1800 grew to 310,000 by 1841, due to the rapid expansion of the textile and related industries.¹⁵ Alan Kidd and Terry Wyke point to the transition from thermal to kinetic energy as the driving force in the city’s transformation; the steam engine made it possible to convert heat into controllable work, and this had a dramatic impact on the topography of the city. Industry became concentrated in the centre in the form of huge steam-powered cotton mills and giant warehouses, with canals linking them with markets elsewhere.¹⁶ Industrialisation on this scale made Manchester synonymous with the Industrial Revolution, associated with enormous wealth, unchecked pollution and the appalling living conditions of the workers. When the town of Chemnitz became known as ‘the Saxon Manchester’, due to its similar industrial pre-eminence in textiles and machine tools production, it was not entirely a compliment.¹⁷ Manchestertum became a pejorative term for free-market capitalism in nineteenth-century Prussia.¹⁸

Much of what we know of the negative impacts of industrialisation in Manchester is from the young Friedrich Engels (1820–95). He originated from the town of Barmen (now part of Wuppertal), a textiles town on a tributary of the Rhine, which in the early nineteenth century ‘mushroomed into a “German Manchester” of spinners, weavers, dyers and manufacturers’.¹⁹ Appalled in his youth by the condition of industrial workers in his home town, and radicalised by his reading of G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach and Moses Hess, he was sent to Manchester in 1842 to work in his father’s cotton trading business Ermen and Engels, which also built Victoria Mill at Weaste in Salford. Far from distracting him from radical politics, as his father had intended, Engels’ apprenticeship in Manchester informed his critique of the inequalities exacerbated by modern capitalism in The Condition of the Working Class in England (published in German 1845). Engels read contemporary studies exposing the impact of industry on public health, attended meetings at the Owenite Hall of Science and befriended leading Chartists, whom he identified as practically representing working-class consciousness.²⁰ But he also had first-hand access to the impoverished slum dwellings of the workers, due to his personal relationship with the Irish mill worker Mary Burns. As Tristram Hunt writes, ‘Mary Burns acted as his underworld Persephone’, taking him into the slums of the Irish community and instructing him on the living and working conditions of the most impoverished industrial workers.²¹ In addition to the driving force of steam, Engels identified class struggle as a spatial dynamic at work in Manchester. The workers were crammed into overcrowded, polluted slums next to the factories and the wealthy industrialists lived in suburbs on the outskirts, their routes into the city lined with smart shops and warehouses which ‘suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement to their wealth’.²² As Hunt points out, Engels produced a pioneering analysis of class zoning:

Engels was impressed by the level of education of many mill workers, and was convinced that the destitution in which they lived would ignite revolution from below. However, he also rubbed shoulders with the very bourgeois elites he condemns in The Condition, and from whom he had to hide his ‘irregular relationship’ with Mary Burns. This secrecy, and his legitimate fear of Prussian police spies, account for his use of pseudonyms and frequent changes of address in the city. But he did join the gentlemen’s clubs frequented by German merchants, subscribed to their charitable societies and enjoyed riding out with the Cheshire Hunt.²⁴ Notwithstanding Engels’ polarised view of class conflict, many of Manchester’s affluent Germans were only too aware of the problems industrialisation had caused, pursuing a path of philanthropy and reform rather than revolution. It was their integration into the life of the city, and simultaneously into mainstream European culture and commerce, that enabled them to become part of the fabric of Manchester itself, its intellectual, educational, civic and cultural life. In addition to the steam engine and the forces of capitalism, migration emerges as another transformative force shaping Manchester’s institutions, built environment and middle-class culture.

Jews, Protestants and Unitarians

The German population in industrial northern England was also a largely Jewish population, the more prosperous of them secular Jews who were well-integrated in the city’s bourgeois commercial and social life. Many less affluent and more religiously observant Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe worked predominantly in immigrant workshops for the clothing and furniture trade.²⁵ The Simon family were secular Germans from Breslau in Silesia. Their ancestor ‘Hirsch’ Simon (1730–92) had been born into a poor Jewish community and accrued his wealth in one of the few occupations open to Jews in eighteenth-century Prussia: the management of currency.²⁶ But he espoused the German-Jewish Enlightenment with his commitment to a broad education, interest in secular science, liberal politics and progressive values. His descendants converted to Protestantism in 1805, which enabled their upwardly mobile social status and access to professional careers. In Prussia, Jews were excluded from university teaching, and to a large extent from the civil service, whereas in nineteenth-century Britain, Jews had relative freedom and protection (although English universities were largely closed to non-Anglicans until the 1850s). Those Jewish Germans who settled in England were drawn both by commercial interests and relative social freedoms.²⁷ They tended to identify as Germans rather than Jews, to promote German culture and to establish German organisations, always open to an English membership and audiences. Their acculturation is all the more evident in contrast with the more religiously observant East European Jews who settled in the later nineteenth century, and whose close-knit community has been called ‘a voluntary ghetto’.²⁸ In contrast, the Reform movement led by figures such as Tobias Theodores strove to modernise Judaism and integrate into secular bourgeois society, and was arguably a more dynamic force for change precisely due to their level of social, commercial and civic integration in the city. Edward Behrens (1837–1905), a wealthy shipping merchant and managing director of his father’s cotton manufacture and export business S. L. Behrens & Co., was a member of the Reform Synagogue, and his wife, Abigail Behrens, was a founding member of the philanthropic Jewish Ladies’ Visiting Society, set up in 1884 to promote healthy food and housing for impoverished Jewish families.²⁹

Many of the manufacturing, mercantile and professional families in Manchester were nonconformists, and among these, the Unitarians were both disproportionately influential and particularly welcoming to foreigners and dissenters of all kinds. Due to its non-Trinitarian, undoctrinaire theology, it was also acceptable to secular Jews or Jewish converts:

The Doctrine of the Trinity Act made it legal to be Unitarian in England from 1813, and Unitarianism claims the first trained female minister in any denomination, who happened also to be German: Gertrud von Petzold (1876–1953). Cross Street Unitarian Chapel was both a cultural and religious hub, hosting meetings of the Literary and Philosophical Society (founded 1781) until 1799. William Gaskell was Unitarian minister at the chapel along with Samuel Alfred Steinthal (1871–93), the brother of the wealthy cotton merchant Henry Michael Steinthal (1821–1905), who was also a member of the congregation. The Jewish calico printer Salis Schwabe (born Salomon ben Elias; 1800–53) converted to Anglicanism in 1831 and joined the Unitarian Church around 1842. Like many other middle-class Germans who gravitated to Unitarianism, Salis and Julia Schwabe frequented the house of Elizabeth and William Gaskell in Plymouth Grove.

The German Protestant church on Wright Street (now the Stephen Joseph Studio in Lime Grove) opened in 1855, holding services in German. Greenheys, as the area was then known, was populated by many wealthy German immigrants, and the church was active in collecting for charity, notably for the infirmary, but increasingly for German-based charities. Celebrations of the Kaiser’s birthday indicate a more unquestioningly patriotic sentiment than was common among the more liberal Germans, but Su Coates remarks that its solemn Protestantism made it ‘not truly foreign or potentially heretical’, and therefore acceptable to Manchester’s middle classes.³¹ However, the church was closed during both world wars, and was sold in 1948, the congregation moving to a new location in Stretford.³² This church is not to be confused with the German Mission Church and school in Cheetham, near Ducie Bridge, presided over by the Reverend Joseph Steinthal from 1853 until his death in 1877.³³ Both church and school aimed to help poor and itinerant Germans, and were dependent on donations from the wealthier German community. Coates presents Joseph Steinthal as a charismatic individual, outspoken in his criticism of the lack of support for his church from his wealthy countrymen, many of whom he called ‘modern cosmopolitans – viz. Jews – who have thrown off the mosaic Gospel’ and made life easy for themselves, or indeed had embraced ‘that comfortable religion Unitarianism’.³⁴ This must surely have been directed at his namesake (and relative by marriage) the Rev. Samuel Alfred Steinthal of Cross Street Chapel, and the other Germans drawn to the Unitarian faith.

1.1 The German Protestant church, Greenheys; now part of the University of Manchester (unknown date). Source: MCL ref. M63706.

One endeavour that seems to have overcome many confessional and political divisions among the German population was philanthropy, and a charity to which principally Germans subscribed was the Society for the Relief of Really Deserving Distressed Foreigners, founded in 1847 (as was the Jewish Board of Relief).³⁵ It supported impoverished foreigners of any origin (though clearly not the feckless or professional beggars), often paying for their passage home. Thus, as Su Coates suggests, the presence in the city of destitute foreigners was probably an embarrassment to wealthy foreign merchants, and as it happens the majority of recipients were German. The shipping merchant Martin Schunck (father of chemist Henry Edward Schunck) was its chairman from 1847 to 1873, and its subscribers over the years included members of the Behrens, Schuster and Schwabe families, the cotton merchants Charles Souchay and Henry Michael Steinthal, the Reverend Joseph Steinthal, Frederick Zimmern (managing director of Steinthal & Co.), alderman Philip Goldschmidt (the first foreign-born mayor of Manchester), the cotton and silk merchant Henry Gaddum, Friedrich Engels and Ernest Delius.³⁶

Commerce and industry

The Napoleonic Wars had already driven many wealthy German merchant families to settle in Manchester in the early nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s Continental Blockade of 1806 imposed a trade embargo on English goods. These included the manufacturer and exporter of cotton textiles Soloman Levi Behrens (arrived 1814), the calico printer Salis Schwabe (Glasgow 1818, Rhodes in Middleton from 1832), the textile and shipping merchant Johann-Carl Schunck (1808), grandfather of Henry Edward Schunck, and members of the banking and cotton trading Schuster family (1808). In Prussia, the Continental System damaged the fortunes of the Simon family, though it failed in its aim to isolate Britain. Herman Simon (1781–1851), father of Heinrich, lost much of his family’s wealth due to the blockade on trade with Britain, but it also brought many successful German businesses to England, long before the political exiles of 1848.

Manchester was not the only destination for German textiles companies, as demonstrated by the Behrens family. Nathan Behrens (cousin of Soloman Levi Behrens), based in Bad Pyrmont (now Lower Saxony), imported cotton and woollen goods from England to the German market. His son Jacob Behrens (1806–89) settled in Bradford in 1838, established the company Jacob Behrens & Co., exporting woollen products to Germany and France, and became a government advisor on international trade.³⁷ Louis Behrens, Jacob’s brother, established a branch of Jacob Behrens & Co. in Tib Street, Manchester, which was later run by Jacob’s son, the engineer Gustav Nathan Behrens (1846–1936).³⁸ Thus, two branches of the same family were active in Manchester at the same time (the shipping merchant Edward Behrens managed S. L. Behrens & Co.). As we will see, Gustav Behrens was to play a role in the musical life of the city and was a close friend of Henry Simon. Gustav’s son Leonard Behrens was Hallé Concert chairman in 1958, continuing the family’s support for the orchestra.

German industrial and textile-producing areas were the source of many of these migrants: Silesia (home of the Simons), Westphalia (Schwabe, Engels) and Saxony (Beyer). The early industrialisation of cotton production in England threw handloom weaving in Silesia into crisis after 1815, when Prussia’s free-trade policy led to the flooding of the market with English cotton products. Then mechanisation of Silesian linen weaving further threatened the livelihoods of handloom weavers, resulting in a famous uprising in 1844 in which damage to factory owners’ property and machinery was brutally punished by military force.³⁹ Competition with British weaving technology also lay behind the migration of Charles Frederick Beyer (born Carl Friedrich Beyer, 1813–76), the son of poor handloom weavers in Plauen, Saxony.⁴⁰ His talent in drawing earned him a state scholarship to study draughtsmanship at Dresden Polytechnic, after which he was sent to Manchester in 1834 to report on weaving machine technology. He then declined offers of work in Saxony and returned to Manchester, where he was employed as mechanical draughtsman by Sharp, Roberts & Co., manufacturers of a self–activating mule for spinning machines, the very machinery that put an end to handloom weaving.⁴¹ Beyer so impressed his employers that they put him in charge of the other branch of the business: locomotive design. He regarded aspects of British locomotive design as unmechanical, and introduced many technical innovations that took account of the dynamics of engine design. In 1853, he entered into partnership with Richard Peacock (a Unitarian, son of a Yorkshire lead miner), with whom he designed the Gorton Foundry for locomotive manufacture, delivering the first engine in 1855. The company expanded rapidly, and Beyer employed an assistant from Plauen, Hermann L. Lange in 1861, knowing that he would have the same training and theoretical knowledge as himself (technical school in Karlsruhe and engineering experience in Berlin).

Beyer was convinced that industry should be closely informed by science, and that university education could make this link. The model of the German technical university was far removed from the British university tradition, and it served industry much better. He was also a philanthropist, building churches and schools for his employees in Gorton, and rebuilding the church on his country estate in Llantysilio, North Wales (where he is buried). In his lifetime he campaigned and raised funds for the chair of engineering at Owens College (1868), founding the first applied science department in the North of England, on the model of the European polytechnic schools. He entirely funded the building of the Beyer Building to house the departments of biology and geology, and helped to raise funds for the move of the college to its current site on Oxford Road and for the construction of the John Owens Building. Dying without heirs, he was the single largest donor to Owens College, leaving a bequest of around £104,000 in 1876. He had made it clear to the then principal of Owens College, Prof. Greenwood, that he favoured a broad-based university education: ‘Professor Greenwood has stated that, from personal intercourse, he knew Mr Beyer shared the opinion that the prosperity of such institutions was best secured when all the various branches of liberal and scientific knowledge were pursued in common.’⁴²

1.2 The Beyer building in 1898 (?). Source: University of Manchester Library. Reference: UPC/2/234. Copyright the University of Manchester (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

There are clear parallels with Henry Simon, whose career in Manchester also began with work on European railways, who knew the superiority of German (and Swiss) technical training and whose major technological innovations drew inspiration from his travels abroad.⁴³ In Simon’s case it was the Austrian roller milling technology he used to revolutionise flour milling and the coke oven design using waste products that he observed in France.⁴⁴ In his Rathschlaege für meine Kinder [Advice for my Children] he wrote:

Similarly, Simon was convinced of the importance of scientific training for engineers, donating funds to Owens College for the construction of a new physics laboratory designed by his friend the physicist Arthur Schuster. Similarly to Beyer, he also promoted a broad-based university education that included languages, and he endowed the Henry Simon Chair of German Literature in 1895. German was on the curriculum from the inception of Owens College in 1851, taught by Tobias Theodores, who was also tutor to the children of William and Elizabeth Gaskell, and a pioneer of Reform Judaism.

Chemistry and physics

Akin to the fragmented nature of the German states, German universities were dispersed centres of learning, but the universities of Giessen, Heidelberg and Berlin were pre-eminent in the teaching of experimental science.⁴⁶ Justus von Liebig (1803–73), widely regarded as the originator of organic chemistry, had a teaching laboratory at the university of Giessen that drew chemists from all over Europe. Liebig famously disparaged English science when addressing a meeting of the British Association in Liverpool in 1837: ‘England is not the land of science. There is only widespread dilettantism, their chemists are ashamed to be known by that name because it has been assumed by the apothecaries, who are despised.’⁴⁷ On a further British lecture tour in the early 1840s, he convinced Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel and Prince Albert, among others, that there should be Royal College of Chemistry in London. When it opened in 1845, its first director was a Giessen-trained chemist, August Wilhelm von Hofmann, whose interest in aniline derived from coal tar inspired his student William Perkin, who produced the first useable synthetic colour, mauve, in 1856. Simon Garfield points out that other scientists before Perkin had produced synthetic dyes, but without a sense of their usefulness in industrial processes. For a scientist like Perkin to seek commercial application of his discovery also seemed a betrayal of pure science, even to Hofmann. But 1851 seems to have been a tipping point in the changing relationship between industry and science. Garfield points to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its exposure of a lack of technical education in Britain, and to the founding of Owens College that year, at which chemistry professor Edward Frankland (who had studied with Robert Bunsen in Marburg) warned that Britain’s textiles industry lacked a sufficient basis in science.⁴⁸

Liebig’s research laboratory in Giessen and Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen’s work in spectroscopy in Heidelberg were nodes connecting the trajectories of many Manchester scientists whether they worked in industry, as independent ‘devotee scientists’, at the Mechanics’ Institution or at Owens College, where the connection between science and industry was being forged. James Sumner has noted the growing professionalisation of science in mid-nineteenth-century Manchester, where devotee scientists with private means still conducted research, often alongside business ventures. Without the institutional framework of a university appointment, they relied on institutions such as the Literary and Philosophical Society, the Natural History Society, the Mechanics’ Institution, the Hall of Science and the Royal Manchester Institution to communicate and support their research.⁴⁹ One such scientist was Henry Edward Schunck (1820–1903), born in Manchester to Martin Schunck, an export shipping merchant, whose own father, Carl Schunck, had settled in Manchester in 1808, having fought on the side of Britain in the American War of Independence. Carl Schunck founded a textile shipping company Schunck and Mylius, later Schunck, Souchay & Co.⁵⁰ The company expanded into manufacturing and Henry Edward worked for a while at its calico printing works in Rochdale, before devoting himself entirely to research. He studied for his PhD with Liebig in Giessen, and did important work on indigo and madder dyes, becoming very eminent in the field of industrial chemistry, while conducting his research from a private laboratory at his home in Kersal. He was a leading member of the Literary and Philosophical Society, a governor of Owens College (though never employed there), and in 1895 made a large donation to the college for the endowment of chemical research. On his death he bequeathed his laboratory to the university, where the entire building was rebuilt on Burlington Street in 1904.⁵¹ Liebig’s work was also influential in informing early studies of the effects of industry on public health. It had become evident that the slum dwellings, air pollution from factory chimneys and the toxic effluent from dyeworks in the already polluted rivers were all serious risks to health. Liebig’s adaptation of ‘miasma theory’ proposed that diseases such as cholera were caused by the decay of animal and vegetable matter, and formed the basis for demands for improved sanitation in towns. Lyon Playfair (1818–98), later a Liberal MP and government minister under Gladstone, was manager of a calico printing works at Clitheroe, appointed Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Manchester Institution and served on the 1843 Royal Commission to examine public health in large industrial towns. He had trained with Liebig in Giessen and supported the agenda to improve water supplies and sewage disposal in industrial towns. Robert Angus Smith (1817–84) came to Manchester as Playfair’s assistant, but was also Giessen-trained, and went on to form an inspectorate for the control of air pollution (he was the first to coin the term ‘acid rain’).⁵² Both Playfair and Smith were well networked with industrialists in the Manchester Lit and Phil, which both informed their work and enabled them to encourage compliance with regulatory controls. As James Sumner points out, this civil engineering response to public health was ‘a palatable basis for reform: poor sanitation, not the system that produced poverty, could be blamed for the worst of the city’s ills’.⁵³ Of course Engels had little faith in the benevolent concern of rich industrialists, writing in the Preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England: ‘Have they done more than paying the expenses of half-a-dozen commissions of inquiry, whose voluminous reports are damned to everlasting slumber among heaps of waste paper on the shelves of the Home Office?’⁵⁴

The network emanating from Liebig’s laboratory in Giessen and Bunsen’s department in Heidelberg did, however, have a direct impact on the founding of science departments at Owens College, which became the Victoria University of Manchester in 1903. The Unitarian Henry Enfield Roscoe (1833–1915) was an important link in this network, having studied chemistry in Heidelberg with Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen, and continued his collaboration with Bunsen after return to Britain in 1857, where he was appointed to a chair of chemistry at Owens College. They did pioneering work in photochemistry, and carried out the first flashlight photography using magnesium as a light source.⁵⁵ Roscoe was instrumental in bringing German scientists to work with him in Manchester, such as Carl Schorlemmer and Arthur Schuster.⁵⁶

Carl Schorlemmer (1834–92) studied chemistry in Heidelberg (with Robert Bunsen) and Giessen (with Liebig). In 1859, he became personal assistant to Henry Roscoe at Owens College, and remained in Manchester for the rest of his life. He was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society in 1871, and in 1874 he was appointed to the first chair of organic chemistry in Britain, at Owens College. Three years later the first volume of what would be his and Roscoe’s unfinished great Systematic Treatise on Chemistry was published. He is known for his research on paraffin hydrocarbons, and as a theorist, historian of science and co-founder (with Liebig) of the new discipline of organic chemistry.⁵⁷ As Roscoe recalled after his friend’s death, Schorlemmer’s research into the structure of hydrocarbons made possible the enormous growth of the chemical industries that had generated such wealth and employment.⁵⁸ He himself lived modestly, and was known as the ‘red chemist’ for his life-long commitment to communism. He remained a paid-up member of the German Social Democrat Party, and when Bismarck’s first Anti-Socialist Law was passed in 1878, Schorlemmer naturalised as a British citizen to protect himself from persecution. He frequented the Thatched House Tavern, off Market Street, where German scientists from Manchester’s chemical industry gathered to talk science, business and German politics. This may have been where he met Engels, and they soon became close friends.⁵⁹ Schorlemmer often visited Marx and Engels in London after Engels moved there from Manchester in 1870. At Schorlemmer’s burial at the Southern Cemetery in Manchester officiated over by the Unitarian Rev. Samuel Alfred Steinthal, Engels laid a wreath from the German Social Democrat party on his grave. His affectionate obituary for Schorlemmer fondly recalled the facial injuries sustained by his friend in the course of his experiments with unstable substances. He also paid tribute to his unusually Hegelian insight into the dynamic nature of reality:

If Marx and Engels taught Schorlemmer the economic foundations of his instinctive communist convictions, Schorlemmer was among those who influenced Engels’s scientific materialism and Marx’s interest in agricultural chemistry.⁶¹ In his memory, at the instigation of Roscoe and the industrial chemist Ludwig Mond, the Schorlemmer Organic Laboratory was built at Owens College, designed by Alfred Waterhouse and fitted out according to Roscoe’s direction, dedicated to the teaching of organic chemistry. In his address on the opening of the laboratory in 1895, Roscoe expressed the hope:

Shortly after the Schorlemmer laboratory was opened, another German scientist was planning a state-of-the-art physics laboratory at Owens College. Arthur Schuster (1851–1934) came to Manchester in 1870, where some of his cotton-trading family had settled in 1808 to avoid the Continental Blockade. He began working in the family firm Schuster Brothers & Co., while also attending Roscoe’s evening lectures in chemistry at Owens College. After a degree in maths and physics at Owens College 1871–72, he took his doctorate in Heidelberg 1872–73, working on spectrum analysis with Gustav Kirchhoff. Schuster returned to teach at Manchester and was appointed to a chair of mathematics 1881–88, then a chair of physics 1888–1906. Sumner notes how his career exemplified the professionalisation of university science: ‘Schuster […] unusually combined the patronage opportunities and commercial connections of a wealthy nineteenth-century devotee with the institution-building agenda of a twentieth-century university leader.’⁶³ Schuster’s parents had converted from Judaism to Christianity in the 1850s, around the time when he and his brother Felix Otto (the future banker and free-trade campaigner) were born. This branch of the family moved to England in 1869 after the Prussian annexation of Hesse, and both sons had distinguished careers, exemplifying a new international bourgeoisie.⁶⁴ Arthur became known internationally for his scholarship on earthquakes, magnetism, atmospheric electricity and solar eclipses (which took him all over the world). He played a leading role in the formation of the Victoria University of Manchester and its Faculty of Technology, and served on the Education Committee of the Manchester City Council. He designed and raised the funds to build a brand-new physics laboratory in 1898, the fourth largest physical laboratory in the world, and built to serve both teaching and research. Without this world-class facility Rutherford, who succeeded him as Langworthy Professor of Physics in 1907, would not have been able to conduct his world-famous research. Henry Simon laid the foundation stone in October 1898, acknowledging in his speech his lengthy association with the college, his longstanding friendships with both Roscoe and Schorlemmer and his optimistic vision of scientifically informed industry.⁶⁵

1.3 The British Association for Advancement of Science meeting, Manchester (1887). Carl Schorlemmer (seated far right), Henry Roscoe (perched on chair) and Edward Schunck (standing, top right) with other notable scientists. Roscoe is lighting a cigar for Dimitri Mendeleev. Source: University of Manchester Library. Reference: DCH/1/6/6/1. Copyright the University of Manchester (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

German clubs: the Albert Club and the Schiller Anstalt

Germans in Manchester joined the existing clubs frequented by middle-class businessmen, such as the Brazenose, the Bridgewater and the Reform Club.⁶⁶ But they also formed their own clubs based on the German concept of the ‘Verein’ as a voluntary association promoting ‘polite conviviality’, self-improvement and ‘rational recreation’. The Albert Club and the Schiller Anstalt were two such gentlemen’s clubs, founded by Germans but open to their English peers, and which, as Westaway puts it:

The name of the Albert Club (1842–88), a tribute to Prince Albert, was a reflection of the dual identity of its founding members.⁶⁸ It contained a library, newsroom, billiards room, dining room, smoking room, card and committee rooms. Originally it was formed by a group of young Germans, but by 1869 half of its 120 members were English. Martin Schunck was one of the first trustees. Other members included Samuel Moore (a close friend of Engels) and Godfrey Ermen (Engels senior’s business partner), architect Edward Salomons (1828–1906), Dr Louis Borchardt (a friend of Heinrich Simon), Dr Eduard Gumpert (a friend of Marx and Engels) and Charles Souchay (a leading calico printer and cotton merchant). Engels was on the committee in the 1860s and kept up his membership after moving to London in 1870. According to Coates it was a very ‘harmonious’ club, but closed in 1888, possibly eclipsed by the success of the Schiller Anstalt.

In the autumn of 1859, German-speaking Europe celebrated the centenary of the birth of German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). Long before there was a unified German nation, Schiller was its ‘intellectual founding figure’ for the values championed in his works: freedom of the individual, universal human rights and protection against tyranny.⁶⁹ The same centenary was celebrated on 11 November 1859 at the newly opened Free Trade Hall in Manchester, followed in 1860 by the founding of the Schiller Anstalt (1860–1911/12), a social and cultural club for the Germans in Manchester, which became famous for the quality of its chamber concerts.⁷⁰ This coincidence illustrates the convergence in Manchester of the capitalist ideology of free trade and the humanist ideals embodied by Schiller’s work. The physician (and refugee from 1848) Dr Louis Borchardt was its first chairman, Charles Hallé one of the founding vice-chairmen and Philip Goldschmidt was a founding member. Members included Adolf Schwabe (brother-in-law of Salis Schwabe, who took over the Middleton calico printing business on the death of Salis in 1853), silk merchant Henry Edwin Gaddum, Louis Behrens (of Jacob Behrens & Co.) and his cousin S. L. Behrens. Engels joined in May 1861 and was its chairman 1864–68, although he claimed that his friend the physician Eduard Gumpert had persuaded him to join, and he complained that it reminded him of the Fatherland in the way it was run like a police state.⁷¹ Around Engels there formed a radical group in the institute, including Gumpert, Carl Schorlemmer, Wilhelm Wolff and occasionally Marx. Wolff (1809–64), like Henry Simon, came from Silesia and studied in Breslau, but his origins were much humbler and his politics more radical. Having worked with Marx and Engels rallying communist solidarity in Europe in the 1840s, he fled first to Switzerland then to England in 1851. Louis Borchardt knew him from Breslau and urged him to come to Manchester in 1854. There he made a living teaching languages and remained a close friend of Marx and Engels, but renounced radical politics.⁷² His was an overlapping but different trajectory from that of Henry Simon, who became president of the Schiller Anstalt as a wealthy industrialist in 1898, but resigned in January 1899 in protest at the institute’s plans to celebrate the Kaiser’s birthday. If the united Germany that had formed in his absence could not be reconciled with Simon’s liberal and reformist ideals, perhaps the celebration of German culture became all the more important.

Music

One of the lasting traces of the Schiller Anstalt remains its concert programmes, printed in German and featuring German music played by prominent German musicians of the time. These are documentary evidence of the cosmopolitan cultural capital that Germans brought to Manchester in the form of music performances. It is well known that the pianist and conductor Charles Hallé (born Karl Halle, 1819–95) founded the Hallé Orchestra after moving to Manchester in 1853, having fled the unrest of 1848 in Paris, but it is less evident how much he owed to German musicians and music-lovers for the success of his ventures. The engineer and businessman Gustav Behrens (son of Jacob Behrens in Bradford) was a close friend and supporter of the Manchester Gentlemen’s Concerts that Hallé attempted to revive before founding his own orchestra in 1858. Behrens was also on the committee that Hallé assembled to establish a music school in Manchester, the Royal Manchester School of Music (founded 1893).⁷³ And after Hallé’s death in 1895, when the orchestra was in financial difficulty, Henry Simon, Gustav Behrens and James Forsyth secured the future of the orchestra by setting up the Hallé Concerts Society, formally incorporated in 1899. Three of the orchestra’s first four principal conductors were German: Charles Hallé himself (1858–95), Hans Richter (1899–1911) and Michael Balling (1912–14). The prominent Manchester cellist Carl Fuchs (1865–1951) had studied in Frankfurt am Main and St Petersburg before settling in Manchester in 1888. Here he was principal cellist for the Hallé Orchestra, a founding member of teaching staff at the Royal Manchester College of Music (RMCM), and from 1895 to 1914 he was the cellist in Adolph Brodsky’s quartet. On the outbreak of war in 1914, Fuchs (by then a British citizen) was interned in Ruhleben camp in Berlin as an enemy alien, returning to Manchester in 1919 to continue his teaching and performing career.⁷⁴

Given Hallé’s fame, it can be important to recall that there was already a lively public music culture in the city before he arrived, but that this was also indebted to German educational ideas. Rachel Johnson’s study of the music programmes of the Royal Manchester Institution, the Manchester Mechanics’ Institution and the Athenaeum demonstrates the importance of music in these institutions dedicated to ‘education, rational recreation and moral improvement’.⁷⁵ She points out that despite the paternalistic social engineering aspect of using music to refine the tastes, enlighten the views and improve the morals of the working classes, the provision of reasonably priced concerts and lectures on music did much to diversify audiences, to cross social and professional boundaries and to encourage serious engagement with music as an art form. The admission of women to concerts and lectures on music, for example, paved the way for admission of women to other courses at these institutions.⁷⁶ Johnson also points to the overlap in leadership between the three institutions, and the prominence of the Unitarians Benjamin Heywood (1793–1865), George William Wood (1781–1843) and Manchester Guardian founder John Edward Taylor (1791–1844) as supporters of their use of music for social improvement. Heywood was both founder and first president of the Mechanics’ Institution (1825–40), inspired by the French, Swiss and German models of vocational and technical education, and an advocate of progressive educational ideas such as balancing bodily health and mental vigour. He provided a gymnasium for the institute in 1830–31, soon converted into a reading room by the disapproving directors.⁷⁷ Heywood was also convinced of the beneficial effects of music education, and thought it should be available, as in Germany, to rich and poor alike as a subject in schools rather than a luxury reserved for the wealthy.⁷⁸

Educational reform and ‘rational recreation’

Heywood’s progressive educational ideas were ahead of his time, but by the 1850s they chimed with those of many other Unitarians and German immigrants influenced by Swiss and German educationalists, such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Philip Emmanuel von Fellenberg. Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852) who studied with Pestalozzi, was particularly influential in England, with his education theory based on nurturing the unique needs and potential of the individual from an early age, with an emphasis on play, being outdoors and physical activity. He coined the term Kindergarten, and the Kindergarten movement spread to Britain in the 1850s.⁷⁹ The Unitarian minister W. H. Herford had visited a Fröbel school in Switzerland in 1847, and he founded one in Lancaster in 1850. He later founded the Manchester Kindergarten Association in 1872, and in 1873 opened a co-educational school with Louisa Cabutt that later moved to Lady Barn House in Withington. Exploratory play, fresh air, rambling and physical activity were important features of the curriculum, and for the first ten years of its existence, almost half of the pupils at Lady Barn House had German names.⁸⁰ Henry Simon’s children all attended the school, and as Brian Simon recalls, ‘As headmaster Herford emphasised discovery, activity, curiosity, in place of traditional didacticism, with the aim of teaching children “to think”, that is “to observe, compare and judge facts and ideas for themselves” rather than depend on verbal memory in learning.’⁸¹

Closely linked to these progressive educational ideas, the influence of German gymnastics had a lasting impact on the outdoor movement, rock climbing and mountaineering in England. Starting in a grass-roots nationalist gymnastics movement (Turnerschaft) founded in Prussia by Friedrich Ludwig (‘Turnvater’) Jahn in 1811, by the 1860s in Britain German gymnastics promoted the same kind of balance between physical health and intellectual activity as was found in Fröbel’s pedagogy.⁸² A Turnverein was founded in Manchester in 1860 to promote German gymnastics and enhance social life with excursions and gatherings, combining educational, social, cultural and sporting activities. Lacking its own premises, it seems to have been based at the Mechanics’ Institution. Unlike the single-pursuit sports clubs common in Britain, the Verein embodied a more holistic German model of physical culture based on harmonious mind–body balance. This was also alien to the ‘athletic fetishism, anti-intellectualism and a boorish gospel of team sports’ promoted in British public schools.⁸³ Gymnastics was not only an indoor pursuit, it included rambling, cultural excursions and recreation combined with instruction. Jonathan Westaway points to its influence on the British outdoor movement from the 1860s, and on the transformation of approaches to rock climbing and mountaineering in Britain. Bouldering, the application of gymnastics to the climbing of short, technically demanding rocks, without ropes, was pioneered by the son of a German exile from 1848 in London, Oscar Eckenstein, and is the antithesis of Alpine mountaineering with its collaborative endeavour and competitive conquest of summits. Climbing in the local Pennine hills or the Lake District was accessible to all, whereas Alpine mountaineering was governed by upper-middle-class ‘unspoken gentlemanly codes’.⁸⁴ The son of W. H. Herford and his German wife Marie Catherine Betge (also a teacher with progressive educational views) became a leading rock climber of the prewar years, his name Siegfried Wedgwood Herford signalling his dual heritage and encapsulating the cosmopolitanism of Manchester bourgeois culture. As Westaway remarks, this points to an understanding of ‘bourgeois’ that is less tied to origins than to a specific way of being in the world: ‘In Manchester it was possible to be both German and British and to exhibit a “specific cultural praxis” somewhere in between, though it became more difficult after the Boer War and impossible after 1914.’⁸⁵ The First World War undoubtedly changed British attitudes to the Germans in their midst, moving some to change their names (Steinthal to Stonedale, Salomons to Sanville) and others to assimilate more completely. But the legacy of Manchester’s connections to European science, commerce, education and culture endures in its universities, its music, its schools and outdoor recreation. Its cosmopolitanism as well as its strong regional identity are rooted in its nineteenth-century industrial prime.