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‘Her compass always pointed to service’
The life of Emily Simon (1858–1920)

This chapter sheds light on the unexplored life of Emily Simon. The chapter illustrates the history of Emily’s wider family to show the close-knit network of relations between the German communities in Manchester and Bradford. The chapter traces Emily’s family life, her many philanthropic endeavours in her local community as well as her anti-suffragist activism.

3.1 Emily Simon (date unknown). Source: Henry Simon of Manchester (1997).

When Emily Simon died in 1920, the Manchester Guardian reported her death as that of ‘Mrs Henry Simon’ with no mention of her first name in the article.1 Of the quartet studied in this book, Emily is the one who is lost to history. To a degree that is inevitable, for the archival record is sparse. Closely inspecting the materials which do exist, however, does enable a reconstruction of her ancestral Germanic mercantile background and her extended family. In unearthing her familial history, we not only learn of the rich set of social networks which linked the business communities of Manchester and Bradford together, but we also gain a much fuller sense of her philanthropy, political activism and work in the community as well as the many tragedies in her life and that of the wider Simon family.

Stoehr connections

She was born Emily Anne Stoehr on 27 April 1858 at the family home, 20 Cecil Street, in the All Saints district of Manchester where her parents, Emil and Helene Stoehr, had lived since 1856.2 Many immigrants from continental Europe already lived in this semi-rural area on the southern edge of the city. The 1861 census recorded that nearby at 14 Ducie Street four German men were lodging with a retired grocer called Benjamin Bishop. One of them, a civil engineer, aged twenty-five, was called Heinrich (sic) (later Henry) Simon who would later become Emily’s husband.3 From Cecil Street the family – Emily, her parents, Emil and Helene Stoehr, and her older brother, Charles, and younger sister, Matilde – moved in 1860 to Oakfield, a house on the ‘Oaks’ Estate in Rusholme, south Manchester, adjacent to The Firs on Ladybarn Lane. In 1845, plots were offered for the creation of ‘respectable residences’ and over the next ten to fifteen years several notable families, including the Stoehrs, moved in. Oakfield was one of the grand mansions on a horseshoe-shaped road called Oak Drive off Didsbury/Wilmslow Road in Rusholme. Some of their neighbours in 1861 were famous in the history of Manchester. The innovative mechanical engineer Joseph Whitworth (1803–87) lived at The Firs. Alfred Waterhouse (1830–1905), the architect of Manchester Town Hall, lived at Barcombe Cottage. On Oak Drive was Mary Louisa Orrell (1829–96), widow of the mill-owner and former mayor of Stockport Alfred Orrell (1815–49). In 1871, she was to become Joseph Whitworth’s second wife. Families of German origin included Henry Michael Steinthal (1821–1905) and his wife Wilhelmine Pauline Steinthal (1827–83), who lived with their seven children at a house called Hollywood (probably the house later known as the Hollies). The merchant Edward Behrens (1837–1905) moved in later that decade to a large house called The Oaks on the corner of Old Hall Lane.4 The area was known to Rusholme locals as the home of the cotton magnates. A photograph of the Stoehrs’ house, Oakfield, was taken by a German-born photographer, Helmut Carl Friedrich Martin Petschler (1832–70), who lived nearby in Egerton Road, Fallowfield. He specialised in snow scenes and Carte Visage photographs.5

3.2 Aerial view of the Oaks Estate. Source: Martin Dodge.

After the Stoehrs moved on from Rusholme, Oakfield was later occupied by the journalist and leader writer on the Manchester Guardian, Charles Edward Montague (1867–1928) and his family in close proximity to his father-in-law, Charles Prestwich (C. P.) Scott (1846–1932), editor of the Manchester Guardian, who was by then living at The Firs.6 Emily’s parents, Emil Moritz Stoehr (1827–77) and Helene Margarethe Stoehr, née Worms (1831–1908), were of German birth and already had one child, Charles William Stoehr (1856–1926), born in 1856 at 20 Cecil Street. Emily was the second child, and after her seven more siblings were to follow: Matilde, Marie-Louise Christine, Emil Moritz, Oscar Henry, Clara Helene, Susanne and Friederich (Fritz) Otto.7

Little is known about Emil Moritz Stoehr’s origins in Germany except that he came from Sachsen Altenburg and was born on 23 February 1827. His marriage certificate suggests that his father was Wilhelm Stoehr, a postmaster.8 Emil seems to have fled from the German state of Baden in 1848 after the suppression of the March revolution of that year, and he arrived in Manchester via Hamburg. Simon family legend had it that Emily had inherited a torn newspaper cutting from 1848 offering a reward for Emil ‘alive or dead’. His arrival from Hamburg as an alien was recorded by the captain of the ship Trident at the Port of London on 1 June 1849.9 Stoehr declared himself a merchant from Hamburg and received a Certificate of Alien Arrival No. 2009 from the Port authorities. He met up in Manchester with physician Dr Louis Borchardt (1816–83), who was also an exile from the 1848 revolution and came from Breslau. Both of them, together with merchant Henry Michael Steinthal (1821–1905), who had been born in Eccles, had business connections with Heinrich Simon (1805–60) and his mining activities at Murg on Wallensee in Switzerland. It was through Heinrich that they first encountered his nephew, Henry Simon.10 Emil was a textile merchant; the London Gazette of 25 June 1858 recorded that on 3 June a patent for the invention of ‘certain improvements in looms for weaving’ was granted to Emil Moritz Stoehr of Manchester.11 He went into partnership with Friederich Carl Prieger, forming the firm Prieger, Stohr (sic) and Company.12 The Prieger–Stoehr partnership was dissolved in 1867, and from then on Emil had his own company of E. M. Stoehr & Co.13

Emil’s textile business involved trade with merchants in Bradford, the international capital of the wool industry. It was a town occupied by many merchants of German origin including Jacob Behrens (1806–89), founder of the great firm of Sir Jacob Behrens & Sons Limited which is still operating today in Manchester.14 Many members of the Steinthal family were merchants there too. The area occupied by the merchants’ wool and yarn warehouses was known as ‘Little Germany’.15 It was in Bradford that Emil most likely met Helene Margarethe Worms, who had been born in Hamburg in 1831 and was the daughter of German wool merchant, Charles Worms, and his wife, Emily. Charles Worms arrived from Hamburg at the port of London on 8 January 1837.16 He worked in Bradford for the Hamburg-based thread manufacturers, Emmanuel & Co. Before 1842, he had been in partnership with Moritz Steinthal (1795–1848) and Hermann Schlesinger (1791–1847) as merchants and yarn dealers in Bradford, but the partnership with Schlesinger was dissolved on 13 December 1841.17 Charles Worms went on to be a successful and wealthy woollen merchant operating in the ‘Little Germany’ part of Bradford’s merchant quarter. The family lived first at 10 Eldon Place on Manningham Lane and then moved to a much larger mansion, 8 Mount Royd. Helene had two other siblings, Alfred Worms (b. 1831) who died unmarried in Bradford in 1893 and Anna Maria Worms (b. 1834) who married Francis Anton (Frank Anthony) Steinthal (b. 1824), eldest son of Moritz Steinthal, at St Peter’s Church, Bradford on 18 September 1858 just a few months after her niece, Emily Stoehr, was born in Manchester.18 The extended family of the Steinthals, in both Bradford and Manchester, feature recurrently in Emily’s life. The daughter of Moritz Steinthal (1795–1848) and Friedericke Emmanuel (1802–66), Wilhelmine, married another Steinthal, Henry Michael, the former business partner of Heinrich Simon and the older brother of Samuel Alfred Steinthal, who would baptise Emily in 1861.19 The interaction and intermarriage between these Germanic merchant families was extensive both in Bradford and Manchester and between the two cities.

In 1856, Emil Stoehr married Helene Worms at the English Presbyterian Chapel on Chapel Lane in Bradford. After their marriage, Emil and Helene moved to Manchester to live in Cecil Street.20 Their first child, Charles William, was baptised at Manchester Cathedral, but that is unlikely to indicate an attachment to the Established Church: they had, after all, been married at an ‘English Presbyterian’ or Unitarian chapel in Bradford.21 The next two children, Emily and Matilde, were baptised at Platt Chapel, a Unitarian chapel in Rusholme, both on 4 May 1861. The family’s attachment to Unitarianism was clear enough. The baptisms at Platt Chapel were conducted by the Reverend (Samuel) Alfred Steinthal (1826–1910), a notable figure in Manchester Unitarianism. On the same day, two of the younger sons, Edwin Alfred and Walter Oliver of Henry Michael Steinthal of Hollywood (sic), Fallowfield, were also baptised by Alfred Steinthal who was their uncle.22 Henry Michael and Samuel Alfred were both sons of Ludwig Steinthal (1784–1861).

Alfred Steinthal appears at many critical stages in Emily’s life. At the time of her baptism in 1861, he was serving as a Unitarian minister in Liverpool working with poor immigrants, but in 1864 he was appointed to Platt Chapel, from where he moved in 1870 to the celebrated Cross Street Chapel, where he was for many years a colleague of William Gaskell. He was a teetotaller, an advocate of women’s suffrage and more generally of equality of the sexes and championed many advanced causes.23 He was a notably vociferous supporter of the abolitionist cause in the United States alongside Massachusetts Unitarian minister Samuel May Jr (1810–99).24

In 1866 the family moved from Oakfield to one of the large impressive villas that had been built on the leafy heights of Woodbrook Road and Macclesfield Road on the west slope of Alderley Edge. A residential colony for affluent Mancunian merchants had been established there, made possible by the building of the London and North Western Railway from Manchester in 1843. The villas were Italianate, Tudor, Gothic castellated and Swiss in yellow or red brick, white render or local stone and each stood in a two-acre plot on the former de Trafford estate. The Stoehrs home, The Larches, was the third villa designed by Manchester architect Joseph Stretch Crowther (1820–93) and he himself lived at one of the other villas, Redclyffe Grange, in this early housing development which was complete by 1870. The Larches was near the top of the Edge and had a famous garden.25

If the Stoehrs moved in Unitarian circles, that might help account for Helene’s early attachment to the cause of women’s suffrage, given the link between Unitarianism and early feminism in the nineteenth century.26 Hers was one of over 1,500 signatures on the Suffrage Petition presented to the House of Commons by John Stuart Mill, Liberal MP for the City of Westminster, on 7 June 1866. The signatures had been collected astonishingly quickly over the course of May 1866 from women of all classes, occupations and marital status across the whole of the UK, and it helped secure the first parliamentary debate on women’s suffrage the following year. Mill’s attempt to amend the Second Reform Bill to replace the word ‘man’ with ‘person’ was defeated but marked the start of the campaign for the enfranchisement of women.27 A fellow signatory, Ursula Bright, wife of Mill’s ally Jacob Bright MP, lived in Alderley Edge near the Stoehrs and may well have collected Helene’s signature for the petition.

Marriage

Emily’s father died shortly before his fiftieth birthday in 1877. His death certificate, signed by Dr Louis Borchardt, recorded that he had had a brain tumour and paralysis for several years so Emily and her family would have endured his lingering illness for some time before he died.28 Helene Stoehr was now a widow, aged forty-five, with nine children to bring up ranging in age from Fritz aged five to Charles William aged twenty. She never remarried and was a widow for thirty-one years until her death in 1908.

At the time of her father’s death, Emily was nearly nineteen, and the following year she became engaged to widower, Henry Simon, who was twenty-three years older. It is clear that Henry had known Emily and her family for many years since their days as neighbours in All Saints and that her father was one of his long-term friends. It was indeed Emil Stoehr to whom Heinrich Simon had written to from Switzerland asking if he could find a job for his nephew, Henry, in Manchester.29 Presumably Emily met Henry’s requirements for a wife which he noted in a diary he wrote between 1864–67: ‘Schönheit, Güte, Verstand und Geist’ [beauty, goodness, understanding and spirit], which he doubted he would find in Manchester!30 The photograph of her taken around the time of her wedding (Figure 3.1) does show her as an attractive young woman. In one of Henry’s letters to Emily at the time of their engagement he writes of ‘taking you away from your beautiful – exceptionally beautiful – home and bringing you to a much simpler house’, and indeed his home at 84 Palatine Road was simple in comparison with The Larches. He obviously also valued the bustling and cheerful family life of Emily’s home in comparison to his quiet house where he only had his little son Ingo, aged two, and servants.31 The couple were married on 30 November 1878 at St Philip’s Anglican Church in Chorley (Alderley Edge) near Emily’s home at The Larches. The report of their wedding noted that:

St Philip’s Church, Chorley was well filled on Saturday morning on the occasion of the marriage of Miss Emily Stoehr, eldest daughter of Mrs Stoehr of the Larches, Alderley Edge, to Mr Henry Seaman (sic) of Didsbury. The service was conducted by the Rev Mr Consterdine of Chorley, and the party left the church amid a peal of music from the organ. The path from the church was covered with scarlet felt carpet. The bride was simply but appropriately dressed in a plain white silk Princess dress. The bridesmaids were attired in pale blue silk dresses, trimmed with swan’s down. The happy party were conveyed from the church in six carriages. The proceedings throughout were of a very quiet and simple character, owing, we understand to a recent family bereavement. The number of people congregated at the church testified in a very strong manner to the high esteem and respect in which the bride and her family are held everywhere they are known.

The report spelt Henry’s surname as Seaman, which is how it was pronounced until the family anglicised the pronunciation in 1915.32

Emily, the young bride, left her family home in Alderley Edge for ever and went to live with Henry and son Ingo at Henry’s home, ‘Darwin House’. Emily and Henry’s first son Ernest Emil Darwin Simon was born on 9 October 1879, and was followed in quick succession over the next seven years by Heinrich Helmuth (Harry) (October 1880), Eleanor Christadora (Nell) (January 1882), Margaret Antonia (January 1883) and after a short gap Victor Herman (October 1886) and Eric Conrad (September 1887). All were born at Darwin House. Six years later, Antonia Dorothea (Tony) was born in September 1893 at their new home, Lawnhurst.33

As Emily’s new Simon family in Didsbury grew, her old Stoehr family in Alderley Edge started to break up. Emily’s younger sister, Marie-Louise, married the German immigrant merchant Gustav Eckhard (1851–1929) in 1883.34 Gustav had started working as a clerk in a ‘stuff’ and yarn house in Bradford, possibly in a firm owned by another branch of the Eckhard family, and was naturalised just before his wedding.35 The couple settled initially in Fallowfield before later moving to Didsbury. They and their children were to feature greatly in Emily’s later life.

The next of Emily’s siblings to leave home was her older brother, Charles William Stoehr (1856–1926), in 1885. He made a typical Alderley Edge marriage when he married Mary Georgina Verena Tonge (1861–1952), known as Verena. She was the eldest daughter of East India merchant, Yorkshireman Richard Tonge, who lived at the biggest mansion on the Edge called Croston Towers, directly opposite The Larches. His business career did not flourish, however. Several business ventures failed. The marriage to Verena produced two sons, Charles Felix Stoehr born 13 January 1886 and Oscar Humphrey Stoehr born 12 April 1889, but in other respects was no more successful than Charles’s business career. Verena was very supportive of her mother-in-law, Helene, for many years but eventually moved to live in Llanhyddland Valley, Anglesey, in North Wales where she died in 1952, aged ninety. Charles migrated to South Africa, where he died in Durban in June 1926.36

While Verena’s life was marked by its longevity, the lives of Emily’s siblings, Matilde and Oscar, were cut short. Their deaths represented the first of many losses in Emily’s life. In December 1886, Emily’s younger sister, Matilde, died at The Larches. She was only twenty-seven and died of ulcerative endocarditis which she had suffered from for six months. Her youngest brother, Fritz Otto, aged fifteen, registered her death.37 Three years later Oscar was to die aged twenty-three. Oscar had pursued a military career, studying at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and proceeding from there to join the Royal Engineers. He was posted to India as a member of the Bengal Sappers and Miners. His group were hewing out a home for the Gurkhas who were with them on the side of the Himalayas. However, he was bored by the remoteness of the place and came down to the plains below the Himalayas for a break, bringing his two greyhounds with him. While there he was accidentally fatally shot when his greyhound playfully jumped on him when he was leaning on his loaded gun against his chest.38

There were also problems in this period with another of her brothers, Emil Moritz Stoehr, which no doubt upset Emily. Her husband, Henry, alluded to it in a letter to Oscar in February 1889:

You will possibly have heard from your mother that Emil has again lost patience with his present occupation and has now made up his mind, against everyone else’s advice in the family to go to America and try cattle ranching. He has not at all behaved nicely, in fact is not on good terms with any of his family, even his sisters. It is a great pity and a gross trial for your mother. We all feel very sorry for her. Do not in your letters to your mother mention anything about this unless she has written to you about it, but I thought it scarcely right to write to you about other subjects without mentioning this matter.39

Whether or not he tried cattle ranching, he certainly travelled in the Americas and, as this letter indicates, was inclined to drift from occupation to occupation. Born in 1864, he had been educated at Rugby School, Owens College and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1887 at the age of twenty-three.40 He died of bronchial consumption in Bournemouth in 1904, which he had suffered from for two years.41

Emily’s younger sister, Susannah, married a barrister, Walter John Napier (1857–1945) in Singapore on 23 November 1889.42 Napier was from an Alderley Edge family. He had been called to the bar in 1881 and worked for a firm of solicitors in Manchester from 1882 to 1888. In 1889, he joined a firm of advocates and solicitors in Singapore. He became a member of the Straits Settlements Legislative Council and was appointed its attorney general in 1907.43 Walter retired in 1909 and was knighted. Susannah thus became Lady Napier and the couple moved back to Surrey in England. There Lady Napier was a leading light in the Women’s Institute and the Surrey County Nursing Association. The West Sussex Gazette reported that Walter died at the age of eighty-seven on 22 February 1945.44 The following year, Susie died at the age of seventy-seven after being struck by a motor vehicle.

At the time of the 1891 census, Emily’s mother, Helene Stoehr, aged fifty-nine, was living at a house called Harkness on Barlow Moor Road in Didsbury. Her two youngest children and Emily’s siblings, Clara Helene Stoehr, aged twenty-four, and Fritz (Friedrich) Otto Stoehr, aged nineteen, both students, were living with her.45 They had trajectories that were interestingly different from Emily.

Having been educated at Alderley Edge High School and in Frankfurt, Clara sat the Cambridge Higher Local Examinations in the summer of 1890 and went on to Newnham College, Cambridge.46 Clara was deeply involved on her return to Manchester from Cambridge in the establishment of the University of Manchester Settlement in Ancoats in 1895 and served as the first head of the Women’s House, living at the Ancoats Art Museum while organising the work of the settlement. She stepped down from that role on health grounds in 1898, and later settled in Hindhead in Surrey. There she was an active suffragist: she regularly spoke at meetings, organising rallies and campaigns with other well-known suffragists. Clara followed her mother on the suffrage question; but, as we shall see, her elder sister, Emily, took a very different position. At the beginning of the First World War, Clara was the organising secretary for a hostel for Belgian Refugees in Kensington, London. She possibly influenced Emily who later took in Belgian refugees at Lawnhurst in the early part of the First World War. In 1924, Clara migrated to South Africa and died there twenty years later. She never married.47

Emily’s youngest sibling, Friedrich (Fritz) Otto Stoehr, was educated at Clifton College in Bristol. Like Rugby, Clifton was one of the public schools favoured by Manchester Unitarians and businessmen of German-Jewish heritage: there are a number of Steinthals and Kyllmanns in the school register, sons of Henry Michael Steinthal and Edward Kyllmann.48 From Clifton, Fritz went to Trinity College at Oxford and took a Second in Greats (Classics) in 1894, before going on to study medicine, graduating MBChB in 1899. He served with the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) until 1902 in the Anglo–Boer War. In 1903, he joined, as the medical officer, an expedition which was carrying out a geodetic survey of southern Africa. Between 1903 and June 1906, they were working in what is now Zambia and Mozambique. During this period, he collected plants and birds for the South African Museum and this became his major interest. He also carried out some work for the Belgian Government in the Congo and published a work in French on sleeping sickness, La Maladie du Sommeil au Katanga, which was caused by a protozoon carried by the tsetse fly. In 1913, he took an Oxford MD and became a psychiatrist. That year he also married Elsie Maude Stanley Hall, a famous and gifted Australian classical pianist, who had been a child prodigy. His life continued in Africa at his farm in Zambia, practising in Johannesburg and living in Cape Town where he died in 1946.49 Fritz kept close to his family, writing letters to his mother, Helene, and his two sisters, Emily Simon and Marie-Louise Eckhard, until his death.50

Public life

While all the changes in the lives of her siblings and her mother were taking place in the wider world, Emily was firmly based in Didsbury, raising her growing family and supporting her husband in his business interests. Emily’s life was not restricted to the private sphere, however. She was actively involved in social, philanthropic and political causes in the community. Her public activity began in 1889 with Emily helping to expand the education of girls in Manchester. She was an advocate of women’s education and the development of the ways in which girls were taught. All of Emily’s children attended Lady Barn House School in Withington, one of the first co-educational day schools in the country, having been created by the Unitarian Minister, William Henry Herford, and Louisa Cabutt in 1873. While the Simon boys left at eleven to attend public boarding schools, there was limited schooling provision for the Simon daughters at that age. Faced with this paucity, Emily and Henry became the driving forces behind a new local school for girls which taught along modern lines. At a meeting on 16 October 1889, in the drawing room of Miss Caroline Herford at Lady Barn House School where she was now the headmistress, Emily and Henry joined a group which included C. P. Scott and his wife, Rachel, Marie-Louise Eckhard, Mrs Lejeune, Mrs Renold and Professor Core to discuss the creation of a ‘higher girls school for Withington and District’. Dr Adolphus Ward, Professor of History at Owens College, was in the chair, and a management committee was formed. A statement from the committee about the educational principles of the school said:

The importance of the natural sciences as a training in accuracy of observation and reasoning was noted and more prominence was to be given to manual training and outdoor games than is usual in girls schools.51

Withington Girls’ School (WGS) subsequently opened in a house on Mauldeth Road in Withington in April 1890.52 A year later, C. P. Scott became chairman of the council of the School on 1 April 1891 and his daughter, Madeline, was one of the first four pupils of the school. Henry Simon became the treasurer of council from the beginning and his role was taken over and continued by Emily after his death. All three of their daughters, Eleanor, Margaret and Dorothea, attended WGS.53

Emily continued to support the school for over twenty years until she died. In 1897, she gave two seats and a selection of trees for the school playing fields. In 1903, she enabled the school to move from 16 Mauldeth Road to Wellington Road. In 1905 she donated a sanatorium (cottage) in the school grounds and in 1914 she undertook an extension of the building with two new classrooms and the refitting of the laboratory. Finally, in 1920, she endowed the school, in perpetuity, with extensive fields and grounds which are still used for sporting activities behind the main buildings off Wellington Road in Withington. She founded the Emily Simon Scholarship for former pupils of WGS at the University of Manchester, and this is still awarded today.54 After Emily’s death, Shena Simon, who spent her career in education in Manchester, became a member of the management committee in 1925 and thereby maintained the family’s connection with the school.55 The school’s four houses are named after the most important founders: Scott, Simon, Herford and Lejeune. Emily’s portrait hangs in the WGS entrance hall along with that of the other key founders. She is long remembered there and is named publicly at every annual school founders’ day.

Among Henry’s papers at the John Rylands Library is a calendar which Emily made by hand for Henry in 1890 which started a great Simon tradition. There is a card for each day of the year with a motto in one of three languages – English, French and German – and the cards for each month are wrapped in a hand-sewn envelope and wrapped with a red silk ribbon and tied with a button (Plate 14). They are all stored in a hand-carved wooden box with the initials ‘H. S.’ on the lid. Emily chose all the mottos. The whole is delightful still, but very fragile. The tradition of making a calendar with a motto for clients of the Simon companies was established in 1892, and Emily continued to be involved in the choice of mottos for many years.56 Occasional Letters were also created for clients. The Occasional Letter for 1897 has a picture of the whole family on the front, which was taken while they were on holiday at Pendyffryn Hall near Conwy in Wales in 1896.57

At the beginning of the 1890s, the family moved from Darwin House on Palatine Road to their new home, Lawnhurst, on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury village opposite the famous Methodist Training College. Family life continued for Emily revolving round the children and supporting Henry, whose health was not good, as well as her WGS involvement.

In 1899, Henry’s health was rapidly deteriorating as a result of heart problems. In his last weeks of life, Emily had little rest or sleep and was getting very tired and overwhelmed despite having a nurse living in. She was ordered by the doctor to rest, to go out every day and to take a sleeping draught at night. Her commitment and devotion to Henry continued to the end. In July 1899, Henry died at Lawnhurst, leaving Emily a widow with responsibility for eight children ranging in age from Ingo, who was now twenty-four, to Dorothea, who was just five years old.58 One of Emily’s first tasks in the early autumn of 1899 was to take Eric, aged twelve, to his new boarding school, Bedales, at Petersfield in Hampshire. Bedales, founded in 1893 and co-educational since 1898, represented a new departure for the family, since Eric’s older brothers had gone to Rugby.59 The progressive ethos of the new school no doubt appealed to those families involved with Lady Barn House School, and the Simons were probably attracted by the school’s non-denominational approach to religion, and indeed a degree of secularism implied by the absence of a chapel. The school’s founder and first headmaster, John Haden Badley, recalled that ‘in these early days many of the children came from thinking manufacturing families of Unitarian connection in the North and Midlands’.60 Eric met his future wife, Winifred Levy, who was Jewish, at Bedales.61

Emily was only forty-one at the time of Henry’s death, and thereafter she started to take a more active role in the local community and also to make decisions and undertake roles that she had not done before. Indeed, she also began to be publicly associated with social, philanthropic and political causes. One of Emily’s first decisions, with other members of the family, was to pay for an organ in the chapel at the crematorium in Henry’s memory. A memorial plaque was installed on the wall in 1900, just below the organ gallery.62

In autumn 1899, she also returned to a project she had started on 1 April 1898 before Henry became gravely ill, and that was being a member of a Ladies Committee formed to provide support to Didsbury National School on Grange Lane. The Girls’ School log book for the period 1898 to 1911, maintained by the headmistress, records regular visits throughout this period by Mrs Simon, often accompanied by Mrs Mark Ashton, to see the girls’ needlework and most importantly to take books for them to read. 63 These are typical entries at the beginning of 1899:

Jan 13th Began school on Monday after Christmas holidays. Today, Friday, Mrs Simon began a library in this room providing both cupboards and books. Mrs Simon and a friend gave out the books to the girls and told them to bring them next Friday to have them changed.

Feb 3rd Mrs Simon visited today and gave out the library books. Standard III and IV have used these books for their lesson in silent reading, excepting those who are not fluent readers – they were taken specially by their teacher.

The first entry after Henry died read:

Oct 13th 1899 Mrs Simon and Mrs Mark Ashton visited this week. They spoke about prizes for needlework and attendance, also said they were bringing some more books for the library – seemed anxious for good results from reading.

Mrs Mark Ashton was the young widow of textile merchant William Mark Ashton, who had died in 1895, and lived at Heyscroft, on Palatine Road between Didsbury and Northenden. She was of German origin like Emily, having been before her marriage Letitia Mary Kessler. Margaret Ashton, the famous Manchester local politician, was her sister-in-law.64 Emily supported the school in many other ways, including giving them her children’s rocking horse for the nursery. In memory of Emily one of the school (now Didsbury C of E Primary School) houses is Simon, alongside Gaddum, Pankhurst and Fletcher Moss.

Emily was admired in Didsbury for her other philanthropic activities and the support that she provided especially to the poor.65 She was described as a pioneer in the field of social welfare in Didsbury. She founded and built Didsbury Lads Club on Elm Grove and even taught there once a week in 1911. Didsbury’s first library was created in that building and was known in 1908 as Didsbury Institute and Library. She also bought three existing houses in Elm Grove specifically to help women. One (no. 21) was used as a day nursery/creche for babies and young children whose mothers went out to work. A second was used to provide dinners for schoolchildren for the same reason.66 As a service for women at the other end of life she bought a third house called ‘Kirklees’ at the end of Elm Grove (no. 16) from William Grunewald, where eight older women, who were poor and friendless, could live with a caretaker. Some had previously been involved with the Simon family. The 1939 census named it as a Home for Old Ladies with the residents being Fanny Brindle, Margaret Treweek, Eliza Holbrow, Nellie Scott, Edith Irving, who was the resident housekeeper, and Regine Sara Stiglitz.67 The latter resident was a refugee, an enemy alien exemption from internment. This home continued for many years into the 1960s, and a couple of the female members of the family maintained the Simon connections with it. The Help the Aged Housing Association eventually agreed to accommodate the remaining residents and in return accepted the freehold of the house and were able to realise its value. The house was incorporated into Heald’s Dairies before it was demolished and replaced by new housing. The Boy Scouts were lent the stables at the back of this house.68

One of Emily’s other public roles was in the anti-suffrage movement, and it created some friction within the family and its social networks. In August 1909, she held a garden party at Lawnhurst, addressed by the leading anti-suffragist Edith Somervell (wife of the composer Arthur Somervell).69 In October the same year, the Free Trade Hall hosted a high-profile debate on women’s suffrage, pitting the suffragists Margaret Ashton and Helena Swanwick against Mary Ward (the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward) and Edith Somervell again. The two anti-suffragists were invited to stay at Lawnhurst. Ernest, who was pro-suffrage, and whose diary is our source for this, was not impressed: ‘they did not speak well, Miss Ashton and Mrs Swanwick were better, & won easily. But … none of them would convince an inquirer.’70

Emily was at that time honorary secretary of the Didsbury sub-branch of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League, and soon took on the same role for the Manchester branch and continued in that position when the league merged with the Men’s League in 1910 to form the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage.71 Emily wrote letters to the Manchester Guardian in August 1911 on the subject. In one of these letters, co-authored with Cordelia Moir on behalf of the National League, Emily took issue with Helena Swanwick, arguing that once the sex disqualification was abolished, adult suffrage would imply that women voters would outnumber men, and that would amount to ‘a political and social revolution’: as such, ‘it ought to be deliberately discussed and decided upon by the electorate of the country before being adopted’.72

The issue of women’s suffrage could reveal some disagreements within families. Something of the tensions produced within the Simons’ social circle by the suffrage controversy emerges from the pages of The Common Cause, the suffrage journal largely financed by Margaret Ashton and edited by Helena Swanwick. It reported in October 1909 that Mrs Marie-Louise Eckhard, Emily’s sister, had held a meeting to set up a Didsbury branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. The report continued:

Didsbury has been a happy hunting-ground for the anti-suffragists. Out of 10,000 inhabitants 1,000, they say, signed their petition; but an idea of their methods may be gathered from the fact that one of the ladies who joined our committee had herself signed the petition, being told by its bearer, to whom it was explained that she was in favour of Women’s Suffrage, that it was ‘only against the militants’. Similar stories met us on every hand in the village, and we shall have the strong support of many of the ‘petitioners’, all the stronger because they feel that they have been cheated.73

This drew a riposte from Emily’s daughter, Margaret Simon, protesting against ‘the tone adopted towards anti-suffragists in the report from Didsbury’:

It can scarcely be unknown to its author that I personally organised nearly all the canvassing for signatures to the Anti-Suffrage petition for Mrs Henry Simon, who is hon. Secretary of the Didsbury sub-branch of the W.N.A.L.. It goes without saying that I gave my canvassers very careful explanations that the petition is against votes for women, and not exclusively against the militant section, and if any statement made by one of them misled the lady referred to in your correspondent’s report I very much regret it. But it does not impress one much with the reliability of the lady who takes sufficient interest in the question of votes for women to join the newly formed Didsbury branch of the N.E.S.W.S. [sic] that she was unable, or did not trouble, to read the object of the petition clearly printed at the top of each petition form before appending her signature.74

Whatever tensions may have emerged it is clear that these intra-familial divisions were not fatal to family unity and Emily continued to have a close connection with her sister.75

In addition to her philanthropy and anti-suffrage campaigning, in the 1910s Emily had started to take holidays in Germany and Switzerland to relax and visit her and Henry’s relatives, taking her daughters and nieces with her. In 1910, she visited the Rappards, whose friendship with the Simons stemmed all the way from 1850 when Heinrich Simon fled with Conrad von Rappard to Switzerland.76 Her mother, Helene Stoehr, who had lived with her at Lawnhurst on occasions, had died in 1908 of cancer and bronchitis at her house, Elm Bank in Alderley Edge, with Emily most likely at her side.77 Helene was buried with her husband, Emil, and two children, Matilde and Emil Moritz, at St Bartholomew’s Church in Wilmslow.78

Later years

Emily embarked on another project after her mother’s death. From 1909, she compiled a family chronicle which was circulated quarterly to relatives everywhere. It documented weddings, births and social activities.79 The births of Lindisfarne Hamilton and Patrick Hamilton in 1907 and 1908 to her daughter Eleanor and her husband George Hamilton, of Oliver and John Simon to her son Eric in 1912 and 1914, and of Diana Meek in 1913 to her daughter Dorothea, and also of Harry’s four children, Anthony, Monica, Michael and Christopher Simon, would all have been recorded.80 The effects, however, of the forthcoming war and the continuing tragedies in Emily’s life could not have been imagined. In July 1914, most family members, including Emily, attended a very happy occasion, the society wedding of her nephew, Charles Felix Stoehr, Charles William Stoehr’s older son, at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, to Kathleen Hudson. The couple left for Aden where he was serving with the Royal Engineers. Kathleen Stoehr, Emily’s niece-in-law, returned to England in autumn 1915, but on her way back to join her husband in Aden her ship, SS Persia, was blown up in the Mediterranean off the coast of Crete by a German U-Boat, U-38. She died, aged twenty-one, with most of the other passengers on 30 December 1915.81 This was also the year that Emily’s youngest son, Captain Eric Conrad Simon, serving with the 2/5th Lancashire Fusiliers, was killed in August 1915. He was buried at Millencourt Communal Cemetery.82 The word MAITRI and the Star of David are on his gravestone. In November 1915, his older brother, Victor, was awarded the Military Cross.83 Despite the service of Emily’s sons in the army, in the midst of widespread Germanophobia, the Simon family changed the pronunciation of their name from the Germanic ‘Seaman’ to the anglicised ‘Simon’ during the war.84

More family tragedy was to follow for Emily in 1917 with the deaths of her sons, Victor and Harry, and of her nephew, Oscar Humphrey Stoehr, in the space of three months. Major Victor Simon MC of the Royal Engineers died in France on 5 June 1917 and is buried at Villers-Faucon Communal Cemetery.85 Oscar died at Scapa Flow, when his ship, HMS Vanguard, on which he was a torpedo officer, blew up on 9 July 1917, just a few days before the ship’s crew, including Oscar, had taken part in a theatrical party.86 Major Henry (Harry) Simon of the Royal Field Artillery died on 8 September 1917 following shrapnel wounds from a shell.87 He left a widow, Edith (née Horsfall) and four small children. There were a few moments of light for Emily that year, however, as two more grandchildren were born: Antonia, the third child of Ernest and Shena, and Tufton Beamish, Margaret’s second child.88 All three Simon sons are listed on Didsbury War Memorial. Only one other family in Didsbury lost three sons and that was the Scott family whose names are on the same war memorial.

Emily carried on resolutely through all of this sadness, initially opening up Lawnhurst in 1914 as a place of refuge for Belgian refugees, then running it as a home where wounded soldiers could recuperate. In May 1916, she donated Lawnhurst as an official Red Cross Hospital for the remainder of the war. An additional building was erected to house more patients.89 Her Red Cross VAD card records her involvement. It says she was engaged from 7 December 1914 and her duties were as housekeeper. She was recorded as giving ‘three weeks’ half-day duty out of each month since Dec. 1914’ and that she had ‘also lent her house for a Hospital since May 1916’. She was also vice-president and honorary commandant of the Red Cross Society, Didsbury Branch.90 Emily lived in two small rooms in her house, and while she ran the hospital, she was not in charge of its medical and nursing services.91 Volunteer nurses and other staff were recruited locally and one such volunteer was Luly Hassan, a former pupil of WGS, who lived at 198 Wilmslow Road, Withington.92 WGS gave money to support a bed at Lawnhurst each month throughout the war.93 It is recorded that the matron at Lawnhurst was Miss Constance Mackay Selbie (1878–1963) of 139 Withington Road, Whalley Range. Mrs Hilda King of Beechwood, Didsbury, was the quartermaster from 1916 and Mrs Beatrice Curzon of Elm Road was the assistant quartermaster.94

On 2 February 1918, the Manchester Guardian published the names of ladies whose work had been brought to the attention of the Secretary of State for War for their valuable services rendered in connection with the establishment, maintenance and administration of hospitals in Lancashire and Cheshire. Emily Simon’s name was there alongside those of the Marchioness of Cholmondley, Lady Donner (Fallowfield) and many other distinguished women.95

National recognition came for Emily’s efforts when it was announced in the Supplement to the London Gazette on 30 March 1920 that she had been awarded an OBE. The citation read:

Emily Anne, Mrs. Simon

Vice-President, Didsbury Division, British Red Cross Society; Commandant and Donor, Lawnhurst Hospital, Didsbury.96

Strangely, the only other reference to this award was in a now very rare journal, Milling, in May 1920. It refers to her being Henry Simon’s wife and a cutting from the journal is in a press cuttings book formerly belonging to Ernest and Shena Simon in Manchester Central Library.97

Inevitably the stresses and strains of the war and familial tragedies she had suffered throughout her life since she was eighteen, including the death of her father and her beloved husband, and particularly those in the last six years, took their toll. She went with her daughter-in-law, Edith Simon, Harry’s widow, and her grandson, Anthony Simon, to visit Harry’s grave in autumn 1920, but while in Belgium, she had an accident and subsequent poor medical treatment led to a serious illness.98 Emily died in Didsbury on 7 November 1920 shortly after reaching home. She was sixty-two. Ernest registered her death the next day. The doctor who signed the death certificate was Dr Thomas Ashton Goodfellow MD who gave two causes of death – chronic myocardial degeneration over seven years and cardiac failure. Dr Goodfellow would have known her well as he was the medical officer for Lawnhurst Military Hospital during the war and also the chairman of the Manchester War Committee.99 Her cremation took place at Manchester Crematorium on 10 November and the service was conducted by the Rev. F. C. L. Hamilton, rector of Northenden. The brief report of the funeral in the Manchester Guardian said that as well as family members being present, there were representatives from various local organisations she had supported: the Didsbury Helpers, the Didsbury Lads Club, the Didsbury Liberal Association, the Didsbury Day Nursery and the Withington and Didsbury Branch of the British Red Cross Association.100 An unnamed person who had served with Emily for five years as a fellow commandant at Lawnhurst wrote in the article in the Manchester Guardian how:

Mrs Simon did noble work … The men who were so skilfully nursed back to health have full reason to look back on Lawnhurst and bless her memory. We who knew her intimately, loved her … and we feel that Manchester should be proud of this unostentatious but truly great heart, now passed to a fuller life.101

Another former colleague called her ‘a Mother of Mothers, whose compass always pointed to “Service”’. We know nothing of the author of this description, except that it was someone writing in a Didsbury Parish Church Review in 1958, having served as a kitchen orderly with Emily, forty years before, over the new year period. Emily had returned from attending the watch night service at (St James) Church and talked to all the patients and staff and was praised for her gracious and kindly personality and care for all the staff.102

A memorial service was held at Manchester Crematorium for Emily in December 1920 at which her eldest granddaughter, Lindisfarne Hamilton, aged thirteen, read out a poem she had written entitled:

‘Grannie’

The mirth of sunshine and the rain-swept sky

The smell of earth newly baptised with rain

The pleasant melancholy of the grey

Wet mists that robe the wide, wise-hearted moor

The song of birds in the grey April dawn

The lore and laughter of her human kind

She knows no more; for she has passed beyond

Our human joys and with her lost beloved

Is happy in a land where the dawn sings

And music blossoms … Tears will cease

And we shall joy again in joys of earth

But still enshrined within a thousand hearts,

Her spirit lives, a sacred memory.103

Emily’s will and its codicil appointed Ernest and Eleanor as her executors and trustees. There were one or two interesting features of this will, dated 1 March 1918. She bequeathed the sum of £500 to her friend Henrietta Hayne Smith, a legacy of £500 to her sister-in-law Verena Stoehr, and to her godson Lennox Napier £100. Each grandchild was to get £100 to enable them to travel. Not surprisingly she left donations to Didsbury Institute and Lads Club but also to another cause she supported – the Benevolent Fund of the Manchester Governesses’ Home. The houses and land she had bought in Elm Grove in 1911 were left to Ernest and Eleanor. In the codicil dated 30 July 1920, she voluntarily granted land in Withington off Wellington Road to the Trustees of Withington Girls’ School which was to be used as a recreation ground and playing fields for the school.104

3.11 Emily in Red Cross uniform during the First World War. Source: The Simon Engineering Group (1953).

Miss Grant, the headmistress, writing in the WGS newsletter for October 1920–November 1921 records the ‘deep sorrow of the school over Mrs Henry Simon’s death and the grateful realisation of all she has done for the school’. She also noted the benefit of Mrs Simon’s gift of the playing fields to the school, the donation by Mrs Hamilton and Mrs Ernest Simon of all Emily’s books to the school library plus busts and a globe and the fact that pupil Margaret McDougall was awarded the Emily Simon Scholarship to study at the University of Manchester.105

In an additional WGS Newsletter written shortly after Emily’s death on 7 November 1920, Miss Grant wrote ‘she carried on a multitude of quiet deeds of help and courtesy … neither personal sorrow or fatigue nor the pressure of much business, were allowed to interfere. Her outlook and her faith are fittingly expressed in the words of her calendar for 7 November – “only be strong and very courageous” (Joshua I.7)’.106 The impact of Emily’s philanthropy and support for the local community was long felt after her death and is still recognised today.

Notes

1 ‘Mrs Henry Simon’, Manchester Guardian (9 November 1920), p. 8.
2 Birth Certificate of Emily Anne Stoehr 27 April 1858 in Chorlton upon Medlock, GRO 1858 Vol. 8C, entry 133, p. 467.
3 1861 England Census, Township of Chorlton upon Medlock, Household Schedule no. 234, p. 58.
4 ‘Chancellor’s Hotel’ www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/history-heritage/history/buildings/chancellors/ (accessed 1 September 2023); Thomas Seccombe, revised by R. Angus Buchanan, Whitworth, Sir Joseph, Baronet, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; W. C. Williamson, Sketches of Fallowfield and the Surrounding Manors, Past and Present (Manchester: John Heywood, 1888), p. 108.
6 Trevor Wilson, ‘Scott, Charles Prestwich’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
7 Birth certificate of Charles William Stoehr 2 October 1856 in Chorlton upon Medlock, GRO 1856 Vol. 8C, entry 371, p. 464. Information from the Public Family Tree of the Donaldson Family on Ancestry.com which is maintained by Dr Hugo Donaldson. Material for this tree was researched in 2000 by John Stirland, Donaldson’s uncle, who is descended from Marie-Louise Eckhard (née Stoehr), Emily’s sister.
8 Information from the Public Family Tree of the Donaldson Family.
9 Port of London Certificate of Arrival, No. 1009 (1849).
10 Brian Simon, In Search of a Grandfather (Leicester: the Pendene Press: 1997), p. 34.
11 London Gazette (25 June 1858), p. 3066.
12 ‘To the Directors of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce’, Manchester Courier and Lancashire Advertiser (19 May 1860), p. 1.
13 ‘Bankrupts, &c’, Daily Post (Liverpool) (3 January 1867), p. 8; Slater’s Royal National Commercial Directory of Manchester and Salford with their Vicinities 1876 (Manchester: Slater, 1876), p. 492.
14 D. T. Jenkins, ‘Behrens, Sir Jacob’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Also see: Lucia Morawska, ‘Outlandish Names on the Provincial Doors: German Jews in Victorian Bradford and their Expression of Identity’, Identity Papers: A Journal of British and Irish Studies, 2:1 (2017), 35–43. For Behrens Textiles, see: www.behrens.co.uk (accessed 31 August 2023).
15 For a study of Bradford’s German mercantile community, see: Susan Duxbury-Neumann, Little Germany: A History of Bradford’s Germans (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2015).
16 Port of London Certificate of Arrival (1837) No. 83.
17 Perry’s Bankruptcy Gazette (1 January 1842), p. 8.
18 1871 England Census, Municipal Borough of Bradford, Township of Manningham, Household Schedule no. 108, p. 28; Bradford Observer, 5 March 1868. ‘Worms-Steinthal Marriage’, Greenock Advertiser (24 September 1858), p. 3.
19 Simon, In Search of a Grandfather, p. 44.
20 The York Herald (12 January 1856), p. 5.
21 Select Births and Baptisms, Manchester Cathedral (19 September 1857). Accessed via www.ancestry.co.uk (accessed 31 August 2023).
22 MCL M59, Platt Unitarian Chapel Baptism Register 1861–1912, p. 4. Emily’s younger siblings, Marie-Louise Christine and Emil Moritz, were also baptised at Platt Chapel on 27 February 1864.
23 ‘The Rev. S.A. Steinthal. Congratulations on his Eightieth Birthday’, Manchester Guardian (16 November 1906), p. 12.
24 S. Alfred Steinthal, ‘On Slavery’, The Times (30 March 1853), p. 7; ‘Manchester Anti-Slavery Conference’, The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 2:9 (September 1854), pp. 201–16.
25 See: Matthew Hyde, The Villas of Alderley Edge (Altrincham: The Silk Press, 1999).
26 For the connection between Unitarianism and feminism in the nineteenth century, see: Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–1851 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
27 ‘Parliamentary Intelligence’, The Times (8 June 1866), p. 5; John Stuart Mill, ‘The Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise’ (20 May 1867), in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, John M. Robson (ed.), 33 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963–1991), XXVIII, pp. 161–2. 1866 Suffrage Petition Names, p. 30 www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/parliamentary-archives/1866suffragepetitionnameswebfeb18.pdf (accessed 2 September 2023).
28 GRO Altrincham, Death Certificate of Emil Moritz Stoehr, March 1874, Vol. 8A (1874), p. 125.
29 Simon, In Search of a Grandfather, p. 34.
30 Henry’s desired qualities in a wife and his lack of belief that he would find such a woman in Manchester are recorded in Ernest Simon’s diary. Emily read extracts of Henry’s diary to him in 1912. see: ESD, 25 June 1912.
31 JRL HSC, Box 1, Henry Simon to Emily Stoehr, 31 July 1878. Also see Chapter 2 in this volume by Janet Wolff.
32 The Advertiser (Wilmslow and Alderley Edge), 7 December 1878.
33 Simon, In Search of a Grandfather, pp. 42–3, 75–6.
34 ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages’, Manchester Weekly Times, 21 April 1883, p. 8.
35 The firm of J. C. Eckhard is recorded in White’s Directory of Bradford in 1861; Certificate of Naturalisation to an alien. Gustav Jacob Conrad Eckhard 14 March (1883) no. 3882.
36 Information provided to author by local historian of Alderley Edge, Graham Dillaway, in 2023; Register of Burials in the Parish of Llanhyddland in the Count of Anglesey, p. 79.
37 GRO Altrincham, Death Certificate of Matilda [sic] Stoehr, 16 December 1886, Vol. 08A (1886), p. 127.
38 ‘Death of Oscar Stoehr on 29th May’, The Alderley and Wilmslow Advertiser (7 June 1889), p. 1.
39 JRL SEGA, 56, ‘Father’s Letters 1887/1902’, Henry Simon to Oscar Stoehr, 19 February 1889.
40 A. T. Michell, Rugby School Register. Vol. 3, from May 1874 to May 1904 (Rugby: A. J. Lawrence, 1904), p. 66.
41 GRO Christchurch, Death Certificate of Emil Moritz Stoehr 26 January 1904, Vol. 2B (1904), p. 484.
42 ‘Births Marriages and Deaths’, St James’ Gazette (28 November 1889), p. 12.
43 London and China Express (19 April 1907), p. 5.
44 The West Sussex and Farnham Advertiser (22 February 1945), p. 2.
45 1891 England Census for Civil Parish of Didsbury.
48 E. M. Oakeley, Clifton College Annals and Register 1860–1897 (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1897), pp. 169, 310.
49 ‘Stohr, Dr Frederick Otto’, in S2A3 Biographical Database of Southern African Science. www.s2a3.org.za/bio/Biograph_final.php?serial=2735 (accessed 1 September 2023).
50 University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections (Manuscripts and Archives) Elsie Hall Papers ZA UCT BC 10 F3–F5.
51 Withington Girls’ School Archive, ‘Foundation Document’ (1899), www.wgs.org/archive/foundation/foundation-document/ (accessed 11 September 2023).
52 ‘Withington Girls’ School’, Manchester Guardian (22 April 1890), p. 12.
53 Simon, In Search of a Grandfather, pp. 61–3.
54 Withington Girls’ School Archive, Withington Girls’ School Annual Newsletter October 1920–November 1921; Withington Girls’ School Archive, Supplementary Withington Girls’ School Newsletter November 1920; ‘The Founders of Withington Girls’ School’, www.wgs.org/about-wgs/history-and-founders/founders-withington-girls-school/ (accessed 11 September 2023).
55 Withington Girls’ School Archive, Withington Girls’ School Annual Newsletter November 1924–November 1925.
56 JRL HSC Temp/1. See also: HSC Temp/1 at https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/ (accessed 1 September 2023).
57 JRL SEGA, 17, Henry Simon’s Occasional Letter to Miller’s at Home & Abroad, XXXVII (January 1897).
58 Brian Simon, Henry Simon’s Children (Leicester: The Pendene Press, 1999), pp. 82–3.
59 Simon, In Search of a Grandfather, p. 72.
60 J. H. Badley, Bedales: A Pioneer School (London: Methuen, 1923), p. 71.
61 Simon, Henry Simon’s Children, pp. 90–1.
62 ‘Joint Stock Company: The Manchester Crematorium’, Manchester Guardian (14 December 1899), p. 5.
63 The logbook is held by Sue Good who kindly allowed us to study and photograph it.
64 E. France and T. F. Woodall, A New History of Didsbury (Didsbury: E.J. Morten Publishers, 1976), pp. 193–7.
65 Ernest recalled in the year Emily died how ‘Mother was a wonderful example of unselfishness – her whole pleasure lay in helping others. Everybody in the village who was in need of help automatically went to her – and never in vain.’ Private family papers, Ernest Simon, ‘Mother’, January 1920. Also see: ‘Mrs. Henry Simon’.
66 France and Woodall, A New History of Didsbury, p. 186.
67 1939 Census County Borough of Manchester Registration District 464–1 Schedule No. 92. Elm Grove Kirklees Home for Old Ladies.
68 Information about Kirklees courtesy of Andrew Simon. Private Correspondence (1 August 2023).
69 ‘Our branch news-letter’, Anti-Suffrage Review (August 1909), p. 5.
70 ESD, 26 October 1909.
71 Anti-Suffrage Review (September 1909), p. 6; ‘Women’s Anti-Suffrage League. The Manchester Branch’, Manchester Guardian (26 May 1909), p. 5.
72 ‘The Women’s Suffrage Issue’, Manchester Guardian (1 August 1911), p. 10. In calling for a referendum, Emily and Moir echoed the jurist and prominent anti-suffragist A. V. Dicey, who in a series of works made the case for a confirmatory referendum as the condition of the approval of fundamental constitutional changes such as women’s suffrage. See: Mads Qvortrup, ‘A.V. Dicey: The Referendum as the People’s Veto’, History of Political Thought, 20 (1999), 531–46.
73 ‘Reports of Societies within the National Union’, Common Cause (14 October 1909), p. 10.
74 Margaret Simon, ‘The Anti-Suffrage Petition’, Common Cause (28 October 1909), p. 11. Margaret had been appointed ‘petition secretary’ for the Manchester branch earlier in the year: ‘A Report from Manchester’, The Anti-Suffrage Review (May 1909), p. 8.
75 For instance, in 1912 Emily spent Christmas at the Eckhards’. See: Simon, Henry Simon’s Children, p. 88.
76 Simon, Henry Simon’s Children, p. 89.
77 GRO Macclesfield, Death Certificate of Helen Margaretta [sic] Stoehr 19 June 1908. Vol. 08 (1908), p. 98.
78 St Bartholomew’s Church, Wilmslow. Records of gravestones and their inscriptions in the churchyard. Grave no. B.b.28.
79 Simon, Henry Simon’s Children, pp. 84–5.
80 Simon, Henry Simon’s Children, pp. 112–13.
81 Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 7 January 1916, p. 8.
83 Supplement to The Edinburgh Gazette (6 November 1915), p. 1680.
84 Mary Stocks, Ernest Simon of Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963), p. 49. For Germanophobia in Britain during the First World War, see: Panikos Panayi, ‘The Destruction of the German Communities in Britain during the First World War’, in Panikos Panayi (ed.), Germans in Britain Since 1500 (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), pp. 113–30.
86 ‘A Melancholy Coincidence – HMS Vanguard’s Theatrical Party’, Sunday Pictorial (15 July 1917) p. 1.
87 ESD, 8 September 1917.
88 Simon, Henry Simon’s Children, p. 107.
89 Simon, Henry Simon’s Children, p. 102.
91 Anthony Simon, The Simon Engineering Group (Cheadle Heath: privately printed, 1953), p. 2.
92 https://vad.redcross.org.uk/record?rowKey=99585 (accessed 14 September 2023). We would like to thank Rosemary Eshel for providing the editors with information on Luly Hassan.
93 Withington Girls’ School Archive, www.wgs.org/archive/withington-ww1/ (accessed 14 September 2023).
94 ‘Honours for Nurses’, Guardian (Runcorn) (15 August 1919), p. 5.
95 ‘Ladies’ Hospital Services’, Manchester Guardian, p. 7.
96 Supplement to the London Gazette (30 March 1920), p. 3804.
97 SSP M14/6/3, ‘Civilian War Honours’, Milling (20 May 1920).
98 Simon, ‘Mother’; Simon, Henry Simon’s Children, pp. 108–9.
99 Death Certificate of Emily Anne Simon 7 November 1920. Deaths in the Sub District of Didsbury in the County of Manchester (1920). Registration District Chorlton. Entry no. 117.
100 ‘Mrs. Henry Simon’; ‘Emily Simon’, Manchester Guardian (11 November 1920), p. 16.
101 ‘Emily Simon’, Manchester Guardian, 11 November 1920, p. 16.
102 Private family papers, Didsbury Parish Church Review (June 1958).
103 ‘New Poets in the Nursery’, Manchester Guardian (2 August 1923), p. 14; ‘Miss Lindisfarne Hamilton’s Poem’, Manchester Guardian (8 August 2023), p. 9.
104 For Emily’s will, see: https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk/ (accessed 20 September 2023).
105 Withington Girls’ School Annual Newsletter October 1920–November 1921.
106 Supplementary Withington Girls’ School Newsletter November 1920.
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The Simons of Manchester

How one family shaped a city and a nation

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