2.1 Henry Simon (c. 1880s). From Rathschlaege für meine Kinder (c. 1899). Source: private family papers.

In a letter dated 19 February 1889, Henry Simon wrote to his brother-in-law Oscar Stoehr in Bombay.¹ He says he has taken the liberty of sending him the Pall Mall Budget (a weekly digest of the Pall Mall Gazette, published from 1868 to 1920) to the end of the current year, as he had mentioned he had little to read. Henry says it contains ‘a very good collection of weekly news and literary notices’, and that he hopes that when reading it Oscar will think of him. A bit of news next:

Then, after some family gossip about Oscar’s brother Emil, a somewhat surprising request:

It is surprising given Henry’s expressed hostility to religion. In his biography of his grandfather, Brian Simon tells a story of Henry’s reaction to a request to contribute to a Manchester Jewish cause in the 1890s:

His passion for science is manifest in letters, advice to his sons, an important address he gave on the occasion of the laying the foundation stone of the new physics laboratory at Owens College in Manchester in 1898, and in maxims and aphorisms he printed in calendars he produced and circulated over a number of years.⁵ An exchange with his son’s, Ernest’s, housemaster at Rugby school in January 1897, insisting Ernest be allowed to focus on science rather than classics, might also suggest rather a Gradgrind philosophy of life and education.⁶

And yet this is very far from the case with Henry Simon. He was a highly cultured man, fluent in several languages, extremely well read in literature, deeply involved in music and the arts. Perhaps his view on religion is well expressed in a quotation from one of his calendars: ‘Religion consists less in solemn phrases than in right doings.’⁷ And another, clearly open to the best of religion: ‘The acts and practice of religion, to wit, sympathy, charity, truthfulness, purity, gentleness, kindness.’⁸ One can see that Buddha might fit well with such a notion of faith and morality.⁹

***

Henry Simon arrived in Manchester in 1860 at the age of twenty-five, with a degree in engineering from the newly established Zurich State Polytechnical School. He was born in Brieg, Silesia, on 7 June 1835, and named Gustav Heinrich Victor Amandus Simon.¹⁰ His father, Friedrich Gustav Simon (known as Gustav), was a civil servant and a director of one of the first German railways. His mother, Antonie Theodora Stöckel, published three novels in later life. Gustav died relatively young, in 1867, but Antonie lived another twenty-six years, and Henry visited her frequently in Brieg until her death in 1893. He attended the local Gymnasium (grammar school). But when his uncle Heinrich, brother of Gustav, left for Switzerland after the 1848 revolution, Henry and his parents decided to join him in Zurich. There Henry studied at the Zurich School of Industry, as Brian Simon records:

In 1853, at the age of eighteen, Henry returned to Prussia to study science and mathematics at the University of Breslau. Two years later he embarked on his studies at the Zurich Polytechnic, acquiring advanced knowledge in theory of machines, mechanical drawing, machine construction and building construction. The course also involved excursions to sites of industrial development in Germany and Switzerland. As Brian Simon points out, Henry was already making contacts that would prove valuable later in his professional life.

Heinrich had been actively involved in the all-German assembly in Frankfurt 1848, leader of a group of about fifty of the ‘moderate left’ and then elected to the Constitutional Committee. With the failure of the Parliament in Frankfurt, Heinrich was among the small, increasingly radicalised group, that transferred to Stuttgart – known as the Rumpfparlament – and was elected to the Reich Regency of five. Confronted by military force, this too failed; and Heinrich, charged with high treason, fled to Switzerland, taking with him the seal of the Reich Regency. At some point this came into the possession of his nephew Henry, who brought it to Manchester.¹² After over a century it was formally returned to the German Government by the Simon family in 1990.¹³ It is now on display in the Bundestag in Berlin.

In the last year of his life Henry proudly claimed the radical tradition of his family, and in particular of his uncle Heinrich, a very great influence on him as a young man. He explained his resignation as President of the Schiller Anstalt as a protest against that body’s celebration of the Kaiser’s birthday. Concerned that they were ignoring reactionary trends in Germany, he wrote on the 31 January 1899:

2.2 Seal of the Deutsche Reichsregentschaft. Source: C. Klein, German Bundestag, Exhibition on Parliamentary History, 2023.

In fact, his arrival in Manchester had everything to do with 1848 and with Heinrich’s own connections with friends and colleagues in the German community there. Dr Louis Borchardt and Henry M. Steinthal were partners in Heinrich’s copper mine business in Murg, Switzerland; Borchardt had, like Heinrich Simon, been a fugitive from the failed 1848 Revolutions in Germany. Borchardt, also like Heinrich Simon, was from Breslau, Silesia (now Wrocław in Poland). Heinrich wrote to Henry (at the time completing military service in Berlin) on 25 February 1859 to say that he has written to Emil Stoehr in Manchester (another 1848-er, from Baden) asking him to arrange a job for Henry for the middle of the following year. He enclosed Stoehr’s reply and encouraged Henry to get in touch with him.¹⁵ After military service, Henry worked for a time in a machinery construction company, Roehrig & Koenig near Magdeburg, and at Heinrich’s suggestion then returned to Zurich to prepare for his emigration to Manchester. Over the coming four decades he established himself as a highly successful engineer and later a great philanthropist and civic activist. He married twice and had eight children; the youngest was only five years old when he died at the age of sixty-four in July 1899.

***

In his first years in Manchester, Henry worked as a consulting engineer, travelling a great deal during that time. He was appointed superintendent and resident engineer for railway contracts in Russia by Messrs Jametel of Manchester. During 1861 and 1862, he was based between Warsaw and Vilna, supervising work on the railways there. Over the next two years he travelled in Italy and France for business on his own account; much of 1867 was spent in Paris in connection with the English section of the International Exhibition there. In Manchester he opened an office at 20 Deansgate, and in 1868 moved to 7 St Peter’s Square. From 1884, the company offices were based in a five-storey building at 20 Mount Street in central Manchester, near the old Central Station (now the Manchester Central Convention Centre). According to Brian Simon, in 1868 Henry appears in a local trade directory as ‘Civil and Consulting Engineer, Contractor, Exporter of Machinery and Agent for Foreign Patents’.¹⁶ For the next few years he worked hard establishing commercial and business links with British firms and also companies in Europe. His real breakthrough came in 1878, with his adoption of a radically new method of flour milling – the use of roller mills to replace the mill stones that had been used to grind wheat. In 1881, he designed the first completely automatic roller flour mill for F. A. Frost & Sons at Chester; within another decade or so he had over 400 mills around the world using the Simon System. His milling business became a limited company, Henry Simon Ltd, in 1897. In addition, his success was compounded in 1881 with a second invention, a new industrial process for by-product coking, formed in partnership with François Carves. Simon-Carves became a limited liability company in 1896. From the late 1870s he was therefore well established and able – in due course – to support a large family comfortably, build a beautiful new house and become active in civic and philanthropic enterprises.

2.3 The first page of the letter Heinrich sent to Henry on 25 February 1859. Source: University of Birmingham, the Simon papers HS/A/91. Copyright the University of Manchester (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Throughout his years in Manchester, Henry had strong ties with families in the German community – Stoehr, Steinthal, Behrens, Eckhard and others. The executors of his will were Gustav Behrens and Gustav Eckhard (his second wife’s brother-in-law). His second wife, Emily, was the daughter of Emil Stoehr, who nearly twenty years earlier had facilitated his entry into Manchester society. The Unitarian minister Rev. Samuel Alfred Steinthal officiated at his first wedding and at his funeral; his nephew, Edwin Alfred Steinthal, was architect with his partner Edward Salomons (son of a German Jewish cotton merchant) of Henry’s Didsbury villa, Lawnhurst.¹⁷ Henry was a member of the German Liedertafel music association (founded 1841) and the Schiller Anstalt (founded 1860).¹⁸ Apparently in 1898, though by then in extremely poor health, he seriously considered accepting the post of German consul in Manchester.¹⁹ And throughout his life, for work, family and health reasons, he visited Germany very frequently.

***

In a diary entry in 1912, Ernest Simon recalls his mother reading him a diary his father, Henry, had kept between 1864 and 1867, when he was between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-two and still establishing himself in work and life in Manchester.

In a letter to his son Harry (27 January 1899), Henry tells him he suffered real loneliness before he was married. Earlier, in a series of reflections and pieces of advice he composed for his children in Venice in 1888 – Rathschlaege für meine Kinder – he recalls advice from his uncle Heinrich on the topic of marriage. The collection is written in a mixture of English and German. This one, in German, relates that when Henry, as a young man, had been enamoured of a young woman, Heinrich counselled prudence, telling him that if you buy a new horse and it proves to be a mistake that is not too great a tragedy. On the other hand, it is a more serious mistake to choose the wrong wife, the misfortune being irreparable.²²

2.4 The cover of Rathschlaege für meine Kinder. Source: private family papers.

2.5 Mary Jane Simon (née Lane). Source: Henry Simon of Manchester (1997).

In fact, the woman Henry married was not German and not (as far as I know) educated in Paris. She was Mary Jane Lane, of Higher Broughton, aged twenty-three (to Henry’s thirty-five) on the date of their marriage, 25 January 1871.²³

At the time of the wedding, Henry was living in Clifton Avenue, Fallowfield; during their short marriage they moved into Darwin House in Didsbury (named by Henry – like his son Ernest Darwin Simon – in honour of one of his heroes in science). They had one child – Ingo, born on the 7 May 1875. Mary Jane died of laryngeal croup on 17 April 1877, before Ingo’s second birthday. It seems Henry had help with the child from a children’s nurse, Annie Jackson; there are short letters from her to him when he was travelling, reporting on Ingo’s activities. (One, dated only ‘Friday morning’, says that Ingo ‘sings all day long’; and a letter of 3 October 1878 from Henry to Emily Stoehr, who would soon become his second wife, says ‘Ingo is singing loudly in his bed’. I suppose there is nothing unusual about a child doing this, but it seems worth remarking given Ingo’s later training and career as a professional singer.)²⁴

2.6 Henry’s former home ‘Darwin House’, 84 Palatine Road, Didsbury. Photo courtesy of David Leitch.

Many letters from Henry to Emily are preserved in documents kept by the family – much of this archive is now in the John Rylands Library in Manchester. It is interesting to learn, from a letter dated 19 June 1878, that three-year-old Ingo apparently went to stay with Emily and her family during one of Henry’s absences (the letter is headed Union Carlsbad). He says he is ‘longing badly for my boy’, and that he is happy to know that he is exceedingly well taken care of – ‘better than at his own home under present circumstances’. This was before he and Emily were married, and even before they became engaged. It is clear that after their marriage (30 November 1878) Emily cared for Ingo as her own son, and he felt her to be his mother. (Ingo writes in one of Henry’s letters to ‘Dear Mama Em’, and signs ‘your loving son Ingo’.) It seems that Henry proposed to Emily on the 30 July 1878, which I deduce from a lovely and touching letter he wrote to her the next day (handwritten, but with his work address – 7 St Peter’s Square – at the top). It is eight pages long, and it is tempting, but for lack of space, to reproduce the whole of it here. He opens with this:

He says he has always found it difficult to speak about his own good qualities, but that he has known her since childhood (she, the child of his friend and sponsor Emil Stoehr, was two years old when Henry arrived in Manchester), and that she should not consider herself unworthy to fill Mary Jane’s place.

He adds that it is right that Emily should consider his age (at the time she was twenty and he forty-three) – that he realises she might have envisaged a different life than the one with him. That he is aware he would be taking her away from her ‘exceptionally beautiful home’ (in Alderley Edge) to a much simpler house, and that she should consider that ‘I am by no means a rich man, and that I have to work hard’.

2.7 The first page of the letter Henry sent to Emily on 31 July 1878. Source: JRL HSC, Box 1. Copyright the University of Manchester (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

He tells her again that she should take her time deciding, and to telegraph him when she is ready to see him.²⁵

It is not known when the official engagement was, but the wedding took place in November that year.²⁶

***

Henry was right to tell Emily that he had to work hard. The year of the marriage was the year of his first important roller mill installation, and one assumes only the start of accelerating success (and increasing wealth). Their first child (of seven) was Ernest, born in October 1879, followed by Harry a year later, Eleanor (Nell) the next year, Margaret in 1883, and Victor, Eric and Dorothea in 1886, 1887 and 1893.²⁷ One measure of growing success is the fact that the 1881 census already records, alongside the family, a governess, a cook and two other servants. By 1891 there was a governess, a cook and three housemaids. (A newspaper report on Henry’s funeral lists, among the eight carriages of family mourners, two carriages of servants.)²⁸ Throughout, he worked hard, travelled frequently and often dealt with the stresses of his occupation and businesses. There were a couple of cases of patent litigation in the 1890s. Anthony Simon writes that even towards the end of his life Henry could not relax.

Despite this, it was the period of his many civic and philanthropic endeavours, especially during the 1890s. He was the first chair of the Manchester Labourers’ Dwellings Company, and one of the initiators and first directors of the Manchester Pure Milk Supply Company. With C. P. Scott he founded Withington Girls School, intent, as Brian Simon writes, ‘on providing a sound education for daughters’.³⁰ He established a chair of German literature at Owens College (from 1903 the University of Manchester), and was a leading benefactor of the new physics laboratory at the College, giving a speech on 4 October 1898 on the laying of the foundation stone of the laboratory.³¹ He also sponsored the explorer Fridtjof Nansen for his expedition to the North Pole.³² As already mentioned, he served as president of the Schiller Anstalt from 1898 (until his resignation on political grounds in January 1899). And at the very end of his life, he provided funds for the construction of a footbridge over the Mersey river, linking Didsbury and Northenden to facilitate access for Didsbury’s poor to allotments on the other side of the river. The bridge was built in 1901, two years after Henry’s death.³³

One of his most notable acts was the establishment of the Manchester Crematorium in 1892. This was something he had taken a strong interest in, travelling abroad to Paris, Milan and Zurich and elsewhere to acquire knowledge about the technology involved. The practice was very new in England, the only existing crematorium at the time being in Woking, where the first cremation took place in 1885.³⁴ The debates at the time, on topics of health, sanitation, aesthetics and overcrowding of cemeteries, are quite fascinating. One rather interesting discussion concerned whether, when the time came, God would be able to raise a body at the resurrection – would this be impossible from ashes? As Bishop Fraser opined, in his sermon in Bolton in 1874:

2.8 Simon’s Bridge. Photo by Janet Wolff.

Problems of foul play and exhumation are discussed in debates at the time, and the risk of what is politely (though still terrifyingly) referred to as ‘premature burial’. One text reads: ‘Are our readers aware that many cases have happened wherein a person has been buried whilst alive? Think of the eternity of horror on the two or three minutes awakening, and the hopeless struggle to free oneself.’³⁶ In this context, a consensus was emerging on the great advantages of cremation instead of burial.

In Manchester, discussions on the subject had begun in the late 1880s, and a Cremation Society for Manchester and District was formed, deciding at a meeting in 1890 on the erection of a crematorium. A limited company was set up, with Henry Simon as chairman. The Duke of Westminster served as president. The project gained 275 subscribers, a significant number of them (forty-five) with German names.³⁷ The architects appointed were Salomons and Steinthal, who also designed Lawnhurst. Henry himself designed the furnaces for the crematorium. On his death (and of course he himself was cremated), Emily Simon offered to provide an organ for the crematorium in his memory.³⁸ Outside the crematorium building is a large memorial to the Simon family.

***

The Simon family had moved into Lawnhurst by 1893. There had been an earlier house, also called Lawnhurst, belonging to a Samuel Taylor and his wife, Mary. This house was demolished, and Henry Simon bought the land and commissioned a new building from architects Salomons and Steinthal. The date carved above the front door is 1891, though a list of accepted estimates from the architects (to a total of £12,498, including architects’ charges) is dated 4 April 1892.

It seems likely the building (or extension) work carried on after they moved in. In a letter to Harry of 22 October 1897, Henry writes ‘The smoking room will now be ready in a day or two, all except furnishings, curtains &c.’³⁹ The large garden required the employment of a head gardener and three assistants, the former earning 30 shillings a week (as well as having a house in the grounds to live in).⁴⁰ Mary Stocks, Ernest Simon’s biographer, describes life for the young children growing up in Lawnhurst:

2.9 Manchester Crematorium. Source: Cremation in Great Britain (London: The Cremation Society of England, 1909), p. 29.

As she says, at the time, Didsbury – now part of the city of Manchester and only five miles from the centre – was a separate village. Indeed, in a letter to Emily from Darwin House (also in Didsbury – now West Didsbury), undated but filed with letters from late 1878, Henry writes teasingly: ‘You are quite wrong in your geography if you think that Didsbury has anything whatever to do with Manchester, except that it is near by [sic].’⁴² As for Stocks’ comment on size, and the measure of prosperity, this is perhaps attested to in the next census – 1901, two years after Henry’s death. It records as resident Emily, Ernest, Harry, Eleanor and Dorothea; three students, aged nineteen, twenty and twenty-one; a cook, kitchen maid, nurse, three housemaids and a waitress. The gardener Joseph Towe and his wife Fanny lived in the gardener’s cottage, and the coachman Richard M. Loud in the coachman’s cottage.

2.10 Architect’s invoice for Lawnhurst 1892. Source: JRL SEGA, 56, ‘Father’s Letters 1887/1902’. Copyright the University of Manchester (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

2.11 Exterior of Lawnhurst (c. 1899–1920). Source: SSP M14/4/24.

Towards the end of the substantial archive of letters from Henry to his son Harry, now on Lawnhurst headed notepaper, Emily and Harry’s sister Eleanor (Nell) take over from Henry, as he becomes more and more ill. The letters make for sad reading. On 6 May 1899, Emily writes (to ‘My dear boy’) first with news about lovely weather, tennis, Victor’s school match, but then reports that Henry is a little unwell:

On 10 June, she says ‘Father’s state continues most unsatisfactory … he had a very uncomfortable night and has not been up at all today … Today for the first time he has felt too weary to read as usual.’ Two days later she reports that another doctor, Dr Steele, has attended, and says he may have a morphine injection if he cannot rest without. On 18 June, she says he is so ill and has difficulty breathing, requiring night nursing. Still optimistic, she writes on 20 June that he is sitting up in bed, but ‘recovery will be slow’. After that the letters are from Nell, alternating ‘better news’ with worse news through the rest of June. Finally, Emily writes again on 13 July:

Henry died on 22 July.⁴³

***

Two weeks after Henry Simon’s death, on 9 August 1899, Gustav Behrens received a vitriolic anonymous letter, written on Manchester Reform Club notepaper. Behrens had been working with Henry Simon and James Forsyth to appoint a new conductor for the Hallé Orchestra after the unexpected death in 1895 of Charles Hallé, and to secure the continued existence of the orchestra itself.

Richter was Hans Richter, perhaps then the most famous conductor in the world and at the time the principal conductor of the Vienna Opera. He was offered the conductorship of the Hallé Concerts on 3 November 1895, in a combined approach with the Liverpool Philharmonic Society, though in the end he was not able to take up the position for another four years. Cowen was Frederic Cowen (born Cohen), pianist, composer and conductor, who had conducted the Philharmonic Society in London as well as orchestral and choral concerts in Melbourne. With strong support from Liverpool, he was appointed to conduct the Hallé for the 1896–97 season, and then again the following year. By that time, Richter wrote to say that he was at last able to be free of his Vienna contract and to come to Manchester for October 1899. In the months leading up to Richter’s arrival in Manchester, Cowen had managed to orchestrate a campaign in favour of his own retention on a permanent basis, the anonymous letter being from one who took his side in the case.⁴⁵

The initiative for the rescue of the Hallé had come from Gustav Behrens, who then involved James Forsyth, Charles Hallé’s business manager and founder of the Manchester music shop (still existing today). They asked Henry Simon to join them to act together as guarantors for the next three seasons of concerts. The task of finding a new conductor was their most urgent one, but they also needed to establish the future of the concerts. Before the 1898–99 season – the last of the three guaranteed seasons – they formed the Hallé Concerts Society, incorporated in June 1899 under the Companies Act with, initially, fifty members. In all this, even as his health was failing, Henry was actively involved, including a visit to Vienna in 1896 to meet with Richter.⁴⁶ Early in this four-year saga, he was defending Cowen against an apparently critical report in the Manchester Guardian. On 13 February 1896, he wrote to the critic (Henry Hiles) to object to his negative views on Cowen.

The next day he wrote to C. P. Scott, editor of the newspaper, explaining the history of his involvement in this enterprise.

He says this will be for no personal profit to the guarantors, except to Forsyths ‘a reasonable remuneration for their professional work, similar to that, in principle, which they received from Sir Charles Halle before’. He predicts possible future disagreements with Liverpool, and says ‘Mr. Cowen, Mr. Brodsky and Mr. Forsyth will meet at my house on Tuesday week for a general conversation, and a settling, as it were, of the politics and budget for the next season.’⁴⁸ He continues:

He ends by noting that he is pleased that Mr Hiles has withdrawn his critical remarks the day before, in a letter in the Guardian ‘which seemed dictated by a desire to counteract as much as possible the evil effect of that leaderette’.

Two years later, the pages of the Guardian were mobilised by both sides of the Cowen/Richter debacle. On 4 October 1898, the paper published a long leader reviewing the situation, proclaiming itself pro-Richter. Meanwhile, Richter himself appears to have received anonymous letters (presumably from the pro-Cowen supporters), and wrote at length to Behrens to declare ‘I am incapable of tackling any work if I am to be followed and interrupted by malicious and intriguing people – for I have no weapons against infamy.’ Gustav Behrens and Henry Simon telegraphed in reply: ‘Please do not allow yourself to be misled by malicious individuals. You quite mistake position of affairs here. You are expected with open arms.’⁴⁹ This was Henry’s final important civic project. He sometimes had to miss meetings because of ill health, but the commitment and the passion for the right outcome were there to the last.

***

In his (post) proposal letter to Emily, Henry admits to a ‘somewhat serious and taciturn disposition’. Anthony Simon writes of him that ‘he did not readily admit familiarity’ and, commenting on Henry’s tendency to privacy, attributes this to ‘his naturally retiring nature’ (as well as, in later years, to his failing health).⁵⁰ In some of his letters he gives the impression of strictness, moral rectitude and lack of humour, and in business affairs he was clearly able to be very firm when required. In one letter (1 December 1887) he gives notice to ‘Miss Emile’, governess to the children.

On another occasion he writes to a J. T. Cammell giving him a month’s notice, finding that ‘your general accomplishments are not those which I require’, noting particularly ‘the want of theoretical education as an Engineer’.⁵² His many letters to Harry (and in one or two cases to Ernest) often contain advice and instruction (to follow freehand drawing, to go in for pure sciences); on one occasion he returns Harry’s letter because it is too untidy.⁵³ His correspondence with his sons’ teachers (Mr Yeo at Fettes College for Ingo, then Dr James at Rugby for Ernest and Harry) is quite forthright and insistent on his ideas for their education.⁵⁴ And one can easily get the impression, from Henry’s inclination to cite (and, in the case of the calendars, circulate) moral reflections and even certainties, of a humourless and self-important man. And yet this picture quite overlooks the other side of his nature – warmth, affection, a deeply embedded capacity for love. As his early letter to Emily says, he does have a heart capable of loving, and that letter and others at the time make very clear his devotion to the very young Ingo. The letters to Harry are affectionate, often light and jokey (of course Harry was between the ages of eleven and eighteen in those years, some to him still at home when Henry was travelling abroad, the majority during his time as a pupil at Rugby). He has a range of warm greetings and signatures (‘Enrico caro’, carissime Henrice’, ‘Henricissime’, ‘Harryboy’, and ‘fatherly father’, ‘paternally eternally’, ‘Papa H’, ‘lovingly’). And, after all, the calendar mottos include many positive and congenial quotations. For instance, ‘The greatest pleasure of life is love’.⁵⁵

As noted earlier, in relation to the Schiller Anstalt incident in 1899, Henry’s commitment to a liberal politics never wavered. Among some late letters are several examples of this. On 20 March 1889, he wrote to the editor of the Manchester Guardian, taking issue with their Berlin correspondent’s criticisms of the Volks Zeitung, which he insists ‘is a respectable radical paper of I believe about 40 years standing’. Apparently, the correspondent ‘stigmatises that paper as having used “scurrilous and mendacious terms” in speaking of the Emperor William I’, who had died the previous year – Henry asks for a justification of this claim by providing an abstract of these terms. On 7 February 1896, writing (in German) to a Herr Bamberger in Berlin, he sends him a copy of the Manchester Guardian, which – unlike The Times – represents liberal England and not the interests of the aristocracy. A few days later he is writing (in German) to Dr Albert Wolffson in Hamburg, again saying that only the Guardian reports sensibly on international, and especially German, politics. However, he takes a more conservative position on trade union issues in a letter to Mr Volkhofsky (19 October 1897), writing firmly in defence of the employer in the face of what he fears will be excessive union power.

But he continues:

One wonders whether he ever exchanged thoughts and views with Friedrich Engels, himself a former chairman of the Schiller Anstalt. If the liberalism never faltered, socialism was always a step too far.⁵⁷

***

To the side of the rather grand staircase at Lawnhurst are five beautiful and impressive stained-glass windows, about four metres high. At the top of each is a motto – very much in keeping with Henry’s calendars and with his Rathschlaege for his children. Two are in French: Repos ailleurs (rest elsewhere – this apparently from the Afrikaner writer Jacob Daniel du Toit), and Fais ce que doit, advienne que pourra (do your duty, come what may). Another is German: Erst wägen, dann wagen (translating more or less as ‘look before you leap’). In Latin: Spernere mundum, spernere nullum (despise the world, despise nothing). This last is also one of the recommendations in the Rathschlaege where Henry explains that by despising the world he means despising outward appearance and superficiality. In a mixture of English and German he elaborates – the worthless, ‘carriages, horses, servants with cocards, powdered hair and shoulder knots, luxurious fare and life’. By ‘despise nothing’ he means that everything has its function in the world and is worth understanding and studying.⁵⁸

There is one final motto, a single word: Maitri (Plate 12). This, it transpires, is Sanskrit and means benevolence, loving-kindness, friendliness. The concept is central to Buddhism. So Henry’s letter to Oscar Stoehr in India, asking him to look for a statue of Buddha, is perhaps not so out of character. Not only that – in the detail of Henry’s will we find this item bequeathed to his trustees:

The late wife was Mary Jane (as Emily outlived him), and we can only wonder what the word might have meant to them – whether, indeed, the young wife introduced it into their marriage. In any case, it reappears twenty years later in Lawnhurst. After Henry’s death, it appears once more – engraved on one of the pillars of the family memorial at the crematorium.

It can also be found on the gravestone in Millencourt Cemetery on the Somme for Henry and Emily’s youngest son Eric, killed in action in France in 1915, below the Star of David acknowledging his conversion to Judaism on his marriage.

***

Henry’s letter about trade unions cites Schopenhauer (perhaps somewhat strangely, in that context). I have wondered before about Henry’s great attachment to this philosopher. In Ernest’s 1912 diary, when he quotes his father’s own diary, he adds a note about Henry’s views on writers – ‘hates Hegel and Kant, likes Schopenhauer’. The Rathschlaege begins with a list of ‘First Rate Books’, ‘which I remember having much enjoyed’. Darwin tops the list. Schopenhauer’s Lichtstrahlen (rays of light) is among the other nine.⁵⁹ Without knowing very much about Schopenhauer (other than the generally held view that he is ‘the philosopher of pessimism’), I have for some time been perplexed to have learned that, supporting (and funding) Nansen for his Arctic exploration, Henry sent him a copy of the same volume by Schopenhauer to take on his travels. He had met him at an Owens College dinner in 1892 and visited him in Norway later that year, taking Ingo with him. In February 1897, after the successful expedition, Nansen was a guest at Lawnhurst, a visit recorded by Henry in a special issue of his Occasional Letter in April of that year which also reproduced a speech he gave at a reception for the explorer. ⁶⁰

2.12 ‘Maitri’ engraved on the Simon family memorial at Manchester Crematorium. Photo by John Ayshford.

Even the editor of a collection of Schopenhauer’s works begins his introduction to the book with these words. ‘Schopenhauer has become synonymous with a thoroughly pessimistic worldview. In defiance of tradition … he proclaimed we live “in the worst of all possible worlds”.’⁶¹ And yet Henry wrote to Nansen, when sending the book, that it was to him ‘what to a fervent Christian … the Bible is said to be’.⁶² There is never even a hint of a pessimistic outlook in anything written about – or by – Henry Simon. But of course, his reading of the philosopher is more careful and more subtle. One could perhaps say that the real message is that one must make the best of any bad or difficult situation – a philosophy of acceptance and resignation and an escape, however fleeting, from suffering, primarily through the routes of ascetism, compassion and aesthetic experience. These ideas were strongly influenced by Indian philosophies, to which Schopenhauer was introduced in Weimar by the orientalist Friedrich Majer in the winter of 1813–14.⁶³ References to Hindu texts, the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, recur in his writings.

This may be as near as we can get to an answer to the question of why Henry Simon was interested in acquiring a little Buddha statue from India. And the sad coda to the story is that, as related in the following chapter, Oscar Stoehr, to whom he wrote in February 1889, died about three months later at the age of twenty-three in a tragic accident in India.⁶⁵ It is unlikely that the Buddha ever made it to Didsbury.