4.1 Caricature of Ernest Simon from News Review (19 June 1947). Source: private family papers.

Terrified of being judged, nervously quiet and deeply introspective, as a young person Ernest Simon did not seemingly have the hallmarks to become historically important. Yet, over the course of five decades between 1910–60, he would become a notable local and national politician and reformer who left an indelible mark on Manchester and British society. Ernest shaped a whole range of issues as diverse as air pollution, university education and nuclear disarmament, and subsequently various aspects of his work have been studied by academics.¹ Despite scholarly interest, Ernest, however, remains a relatively unknown figure. Ernest Simon of Manchester, written in 1963 by his friend and fellow reformer Mary Stocks, remains the only major biographical account.² While Stocks’ work remains an illuminating and essential source for those interested in Ernest’s life, this chapter seeks to build upon her book to provide a revised account of Ernest. Through examination of the plethora of books and articles he authored, alongside his and his wife’s extensive papers, this chapter critically examines Ernest’s life and considers how his work speaks to today’s society.

Childhood and education

Ernest Emil Darwin Simon was born on 9 October 1879. The son of Henry Simon and Emily Simon and the eldest of their seven children, Ernest grew up in a large house in Didsbury in Manchester named after Henry’s hero Charles Darwin. The wealthy family lived there until 1892, when they moved into a grand mansion, Lawnhurst. At an early age Ernest and his siblings attended Lady Barn House School. Founded by W. H. Herford, the school taught children along progressive Fröbelian lines and appealed to Manchester’s numerous liberal-minded German immigrants and civic elites, such as the owners of the Manchester Guardian, the Scott family, who sent their children there including Ernest’s lifelong friend John Scott.³

4.2 Ernest as a young child. Source: SSP M14/4/24.

After Lady Barn House, Ernest with John Scott attended Rugby School. According to Ernest’s reflections recorded in his diary over a decade after he left Rugby, his time there was marked by bullying and loneliness stemming from his chronic shyness:

Ernest placed the cause of his shyness on a paucity of mutual understanding with his parents, which led to his inability to learn how to properly converse with them and therefore others. He was unable to speak to his mother about ‘difficult matters’, and his father’s ‘reticence’ and ‘very reserved nature’, in conjunction to the age gap between them, hampered their ‘companionship’.⁵ This lack of understanding, however, was not for want of affection between Ernest and his parents. In a 1920 letter to his own children, Ernest described his relationship with Emily as ‘about the ideal of relations of mother and son’.⁶ Moreover, letters sent from Henry to Ernest and his brother Harry at Rugby show his father as jovial and caring.⁷

4.3 Ernest as a teenager. Source: SSP M14/4/24.

At Rugby Ernest specialised in science, something only enabled by the efforts of Henry and Emily in overcoming the opposition of Ernest’s housemaster Robert Whitelaw. Achieving highly, he won a place at Pembroke College Cambridge to study engineering.⁸ Ernest’s years at Cambridge between 1898–1901 were ones he later regretted, for instead of applying himself in studies he wasted his time indulging in hedonistic pursuits. Despite achieving a first-class degree Ernest did little study, having already ‘done nearly all the work beforehand at Rugby’, and instead sought to find camaraderie with those who enjoyed a high life of opulent pleasure, having ‘a sneaking admiration for the bad bold man of wine[,] women & gambling’. Passing his time visiting Newmarket races and playing ‘bridge and poker’, Ernest failed to make friends, continuing to find interaction with others difficult owing to his shyness.⁹

A guiding faith

After Cambridge, Ernest joined the family businesses. His father having died in 1899, Ernest rose through the ranks of his late father’s companies to assume control of them in 1910.¹⁰ Working for the firms afforded Ernest self-belief. He gained a sense of self-exceptionalism arising from a perception of ‘intellectual superiority’ which cast off much of his nervousness.¹¹ Ernest realised,

From the late 1900s, Ernest was to undergo an even more significant transformation. Sheepish about asserting his own opinions, Ernest’s shyness rendered him open to different ideas, and having resumed his childhood love of books, he came across the writings of leading intellectuals.¹³ Ernest was captivated by prominent socialist and science fiction writer H. G. Wells and was enthralled by his work First and Last Things (1908). It stirred within Ernest a strong yearning to work for the common good which he conceived as his own ‘religion’.¹⁴ In addition to Wells, Ernest studied Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s Industrial Democracy (1897) and The Break up of the Poor Law (1909). Ernest was in awe of their intellectual prowess, shown in their argument for replacing the antiquated nineteenth-century Poor Law, notorious for introducing workhouses, with a modern, progressive and far-reaching welfare system.¹⁵ Combining both the ideas of Wells and the Webbs, Ernest came to believe that ‘one’s whole duty’ was to work for the happiness of the community, holding the Webbian goal of providing ‘equality of opportunity for all’ to realise their true potential as the ‘good in itself’.¹⁶

4.4 Ernest (c. 1900s). Source: private family papers.

Ernest’s sense of public duty was further awakened in the late 1900s and early 1910s by two other main sources. As Ernest recorded in his diary, his understanding of ‘religion’ took much from John Stuart Mill’s essay The Utility of Religion (1874). Such was the influence of the Victorian philosopher over Ernest that there is a clear echo of Mill’s ‘intensely interesting’ (as Ernest described it) Autobiography (1873) in the ‘little autobiography’ Ernest wrote for his children which, too, traced his own mental development.¹⁷ The example of his parents also began to mould Ernest’s public-spiritedness. Ernest read his father’s book of moralistic advice inspired by the teachings of his great uncle Heinrich Simon and wished that Henry had been alive when he had ‘began to think for himself’ as he would ‘have benefitted immensely’ from his ‘experiences and outlook’.¹⁸ Several years later he depicted his parents in rather glowing terms for his children, describing them as dutiful and selfless citizens to emulate.¹⁹

Galvanised by his ‘religion’, Ernest threw himself into political campaigning. Converted as an ardent supporter of the Webbs’ Minority Report campaign for the introduction of their own version of welfare provision, Ernest invited them to Lawnhurst in December 1909 before a campaign rally at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. The visit affirmed Ernest’s admiration for the Webbs and soon afterwards he became a director and important financier of their nascent political journal the New Statesman founded in 1913.²⁰ His support of the Webbs reintroduced Ernest to his old Rugby housemate R. H. Tawney, whose role in the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) convinced Ernest to sponsor its work enthusiastically as well.²¹ Ernest, however, desired to be more than a financial backer to the causes he supported, but to be actively involved in them. He took elocution lessons so he could gain the confidence to make speeches, and made his first real foray into social reform tackling air pollution in Manchester.²²

Smoke had blighted Cottonopolis since the Industrial Revolution, with soot caking Manchester’s buildings and being breathed in daily by its inhabitants, with the consequence of hundreds of deaths each year.²³ Having attended a meeting of Manchester City Council’s Sanitary Committee in 1910, Ernest learnt of smoke abatement and sought to apply himself towards furthering it and in 1911 became the honorary secretary of the newly founded Smoke Abatement League of Great Britain.²⁴ The following year he played an instrumental role in the creation of its Manchester branch, the headquarters of which were located at 20 Mount Street, the home of the Simon businesses. With Ernest as its chairman the branch monitored polluting factories and lobbied the council to take the issue of air pollution seriously. In 1913, the council got behind Ernest and tasked him with experimenting in designing better domestic heating methods than coal fires.²⁵ Ernest’s expertise in fighting air pollution saw him appointed by the Ministry of Health to a committee on air pollution, and in 1922 he authored his first book The Smokeless City with Manchester social investigator Marion Fitzgerald.²⁶ Ernest’s work made a lasting impact in Manchester. Ardwick-born Labour minister Ellen Wilkinson, speaking about her native Lancashire on BBC radio in 1945, remembered how Ernest’s ‘overpowering energy and personality’ helped to clean ‘the skies of our northern cities’.²⁷ In 1946, the government charged Ernest with leading another committee on Domestic Fuel Policy. Its report, calling for smokeless zones in residential areas, the adoption of cleaner fuels and advanced domestic appliances to reduce the use of coal, was directly echoed by the 1954 Committee on Air Pollution led by Sir Hugh Beaver which paved the way for the momentous Clean Air Act 1956.²⁸ While the act came in the wake of the 1952 great London smog, ‘the spade work’ for the act was, according to Beaver, accomplished by Ernest and his fellow ‘crusaders’ for clean air.²⁹

A Beatrice for his Sidney

Upon realising his ‘religion’, Ernest hoped to find a wife he could work with in the cause of social reform. Impressed by the dynamism of the Webbs and their achievements, Ernest ‘wanted a wife who could play Beatrice to his Sidney’.³⁰ As it happened, in February 1912 Ernest met Shena Potter at a party in Didsbury, introduced by their mutual friend Eva Hubback.³¹ Shena, a like-minded Cambridge-educated economist and active feminist campaigner from a wealthy shipping family, made a more than suitable match. Having gone to the London School of Economics in 1907 on the advice of its co-founder Beatrice Webb, she became side-tracked from her studies and had begun her career as a social reformer. When she met Ernest, she was in the midst of campaigning to ensure that the interests of women, particularly those of poorer insecure workers as well as married women, were covered by the provisions of new National Insurance legislation.³² Ernest corresponded with her over the course of the first part of 1912, and they were to meet another six times before Ernest proposed to her in July. Shena was certainly attractive, but Ernest believed that ‘character & intellect’ and a mutual interest in addressing ‘social problems’ in a partner outweighed physical beauty.³³ Having just recovered from an operation, he wrote the following in his diary after his proposal:

4.5 The cover of The Smokeless City (1922). Source: SSP M14/6/7.

4.6 Ernest with Roger (1914). Source: SSP M14/4/24.

Marrying in November, they spent their honeymoon travelling around Europe before settling in Didsbury. Married life was, as Ernest recorded in his diary the following year, ‘an enormous & increasing success’, and in spite of his earlier apprehensions about physical attraction, it was clear that he had fallen deeply in love with Shena.³⁵

Two months before their marriage, Ernest had been elected unopposed as a Liberal councillor for Didsbury.³⁶ Having stood on a platform to combat high rates of infant mortality, Ernest worked to establish council maternity centres to assist new mothers in raising newborns between 1914 and 1915. In his work he campaigned with the recently formed Manchester and Salford Women Citizens’ Association, in which Shena was a central figure.³⁷ During the 1910s, Ernest and Shena were to enjoy having their own newborns with the arrival of Roger in 1913, Brian in 1915 and Antonia (Tony) in 1917.³⁸

During the First World War, Ernest lost all three of his younger brothers, Eric in 1915, and Victor and Harry in 1917. Ernest saw the war as a futile, horrendous slaughter which was brought ‘home very closely’ by the death of Eric. The youngest of Ernest’s brothers, he ‘could not bear the thought of killing’ as a soldier and had resolved to ‘kill only vermin’. Having nearly, on Ernest’s advice, avoided frontline action, he was killed within three months of going to France.³⁹ Ernest’s pain was compounded by his fears of being attacked for his German ancestry due to the prevalence of Germanophobia in Britain during the war. Government propaganda coupled with rumours of German atrocities and fears of enemy agents hiding in plain sight whipped up anti-German hatred. Following the German sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, the feeling reached a climax with nationwide anti-German riots consuming the country. Many Germans and their property were afflicted, including the large community which lived in Manchester. The violence led the government to detain and repatriate unnaturalised Germans.⁴⁰ Against the background of xenophobia and his witnessing of the hatred directed towards prominent local politician Margaret Ashton for her pacifism, Ernest felt compelled to ‘lie low and be very careful’, ‘owing to’ his ‘German blood’. He even attested for service in 1916 to appear ‘patriotic’, so his reputation and therefore his means to work for social reform would not be sullied.⁴¹ At the war’s close, Ernest had emerged unscathed from any hatred with ambitions to head to Parliament.

Ernest had long harboured ambitions to enter national politics and at the First World War’s end he was unexpectedly drawn into the fray of Westminster.⁴² Five days after the armistice, Ernest was on a train to London on his way to see Tawney when he encountered C. P. Scott and a deputation from the Manchester Liberal Federation. Scott and the Liberals were travelling to London in an attempt to secure a reconciliation between the leaders of British Liberalism, David Lloyd George and Herbert Asquith, and invited Ernest to join them. Lloyd George’s displacement of Asquith as prime minister in 1916 had divided the Liberal Party and the delegation sought to fix this rupture in light of the impending general election. Both Lloyd George and Asquith, however, proved intransigent to the peace-making efforts of Ernest and his fellow Mancunians, and a few days later Lloyd George and the Conservative leader Bonar Law endorsed their ‘couponed’ candidates to fight against Asquith’s independent Liberals.⁴³ The rupture left many Liberals in the invidious position of having to choose between the alternative leaders, and it proved ‘a great mental struggle’ for Ernest. After consulting the Webbs, who opposed cooperation with Lloyd George, he decided to back Asquith. While campaigning in Withington for the Asquithian candidate was exciting for Ernest, he despaired at the anti-German demagoguery of Lloyd George and came away from the election fearing for democracy itself.⁴⁴

Ernest’s dejection was short lived, however. Returning unopposed as a councillor for Didsbury in 1919, Ernest’s re-election coincided with an electoral earthquake in Manchester. Thirty years of Conservative domination was broken by a progressive majority of Liberal and Labour councillors and opened up a major opportunity for him to shape policy. Lloyd George’s electoral pledge of ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ had led to the 1919 Addison Act which enabled local authorities to embark on major schemes of housebuilding, and Ernest as the chairman of the council’s housing committee sought to capitalise on this. Exhilarated by the opportunity, he aspired ‘to make Manchester’s housing scheme the best in the country’ to show ‘that a municipality can build houses’. Red tape and postwar scarcity of labour and materials, however, proved to be the undoing of Ernest’s hopes, with the council only building a fraction of the houses they set out to construct.⁴⁵ Ernest’s vision for housing in Manchester also saw the committee set in train the preliminaries for the creation of a garden city in Wythenshawe to relieve Manchester’s terrible overcrowding.⁴⁶

The whirlwind of Withington

One of the political implications of the post-1914 world was to shake the foundations of British Liberalism. A number of developments since the war, including economic turmoil and the heightening of the class tensions, had left Liberalism ‘unequipped’ to address major societal problems.⁴⁷ For Ernest this was starkly revealed at the 1918 general election. He confided to his diary there was an:

In the context of postwar industrial strife and mass unemployment, Ernest considered it imperative to address ‘working-class discontent with the present economic system’. Consequently, during the winter of 1918–19, Ernest brought together a group of Manchester businessmen who shared his view that the party needed to formulate a new industrial policy. The group invited Ramsay Muir, Professor of History at the University of Manchester, to the meetings of the group and he summarised their discussions in a book, Liberalism and Industry (1920). The book proved to be influential, leading the national party to adopt a stance on industrial issues in early 1921. Buoyed by their accomplishment, the Mancunian coterie resolved to invite ‘about one hundred younger Liberals to meet in Grasmere’ later the same year. Proving to be a success, it set the template for the creation of the Liberal Summer School movement which began the next year. Meeting annually, the Summer Schools acted as forums for influential intellectuals such as John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge to float their ideas about contemporary economic and social questions. Embraced by the party leadership, the schools increasingly shaped Liberal Party policy as the 1920s progressed.⁴⁹

In November 1921, Ernest became Lord Mayor of Manchester. Ernest’s mayoralty was abruptly interrupted when he contracted septic pneumonia in February 1922. With Ernest confined to bed for three months, Shena as Lady Mayoress took on all engagements having already used her position to be proactive and outspoken in civic affairs. Pneumonia being a serious illness before the advent of antibiotics, Ernest feared he could die, but was ‘kept alive by brandy & morphia and hourly doses of oxygen!’⁵⁰

The fall of the Lloyd George coalition in October 1922 resulted in a general election, called for 15 November. Ernest’s term of office as Lord Mayor came to an end on 9 November and he only had days to campaign as Withington’s Liberal candidate before polling day. Dubbed by the Manchester Evening News as ‘Withington’s Whirlwind Candidate’, Ernest campaigned on housing and tackling unemployment, but was defeated by 670 votes, having been subjected to slander which alleged he was German and therefore anti-British.⁵¹ A second opportunity to contest the seat emerged in 1923 when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin decided the reintroduction of tariffs required another general election. With the Liberal Party reunited under the old Shibboleth of free trade, Ernest was elected with a majority of 3,918.⁵²

4.7 Ernest and Shena campaigning during the 1922 General Election. Source: SSP M14/4/24.

Ernest’s maiden speech in Parliament focused on housing and his experience of it in Manchester. With a hung Parliament, he believed that cooperation between Labour and the Liberals could be fruitful especially for housebuilding, as had been the case in Manchester.⁵³ Using his Manchester-honed expertise, he closely scrutinised the legislation which became the Wheatley Act and got his own private member’s bill passed: the Prevention of Eviction Act 1924.⁵⁴ A radical and pragmatic piece of legislation, it curtailed landlords’ ability to arbitrarily evict tenants. Ernest hoped it would ‘put an immediate end to the misery, the hardship and the sense of insecurity from which so many tenants are suffering all over the country’.⁵⁵ The fall of the first Labour government in October 1924 produced yet another general election and Ernest was defeated in the wake of conservative reaction to the red scares of the Campbell case and the Zinoviev letter.⁵⁶

4.8 Ernest and Shena (seated to his left) during the 1924 General Election. Source: SSP M14/6/9.

Britain’s industrial future

The derisory performance of the Liberal Party in the 1924 general election made Ernest review his political allegiances. He had previously wrestled with his party affiliation in 1920, having seriously considered joining Labour largely owing to his admiration of the ideas of Tawney and the Webbs.⁵⁷ The seemingly poor prospects for the Liberal Party put stress on Ernest’s commitment to Liberalism yet again. Decidedly to the left of the party, he had even found himself agreeing ‘with my extreme Labour audience’ while standing in a by-election in Dundee in 1924, despite his public ‘anti-socialist’ platform. Moved by the poverty he had witnessed there, he considered his central ‘political aim’ was ‘to give the best chance to every child, and to remove the excessive inequalities of today’, which was for Ernest ‘practically the aim of Labour’.⁵⁸ Ernest’s position was exemplative of the egalitarianism of left-liberalism and its fluid boundary with socialism in the 1920s, but he did not jump ship.⁵⁹ Labour’s commitment to mass nationalisation struck Ernest as impractical. Moreover, he disliked the party’s close relationship with the trade unions; a dislike accentuated by his fear of class conflict engendered by the 1926 General Strike.⁶⁰ Ernest thus decided to remain with the Liberals, a decision bolstered by Lloyd George’s support for bold new policies.

In 1926, Lloyd George got behind the Summer School movement Ernest had founded and gave it £10,000 from his infamous political fund to finance an inquiry into industrial policy. Ernest played a central role in the inquiry, which culminated in the production of Britain’s Industrial Future (1928).⁶¹ Amongst a litany of proposals, it advocated a major public works programme to tackle unemployment as well as profit-sharing schemes and worker consultation to abate class tensions. ‘The product of a remarkable collaboration between politicians and economists’ such as Lloyd George and Keynes, it represented a third way between ‘harsh individualism and the employer-autocracy’ and statist socialism and laid the foundations to the Liberals’ 1929 election manifesto We Can Conquer Unemployment.⁶²

Back in Manchester, Ernest had stepped down as a councillor in 1925, but he was about to make one of his and Shena’s biggest contributions to the city.⁶³ Manchester’s plans to build a garden city looked doomed because of expense. Frustrated by inaction, Ernest and Shena purchased Wythenshawe Hall and 250 acres of surrounding land and presented it unconditionally to the City Council in 1926. Their donation proved decisive, enabling the council to purchase the rest of Wythenshawe and transform it into a garden city.⁶⁴ Home life in Manchester for Ernest and Shena was hit by tragedy, however, when Tony was diagnosed with a malignant tumour of the eye which led to her death three years later. Tony’s protracted illness and passing was devastating for both Ernest and Shena. Tony’s stoicism moved Ernest to tears, and her resilience in her dying days proved to be an inspiration, allowing him to find serenity in the face of bereavement.⁶⁵

The Liberal Party entered the 1929 general election with a reinvigorated policy agenda. Ernest won his old seat and joined the other fifty-eight Liberal MPs propping up the minority Labour government. Ernest was favourable to the new government, supporting its decisions to continue housing subsidies and to raise the school leaving age, as well as its foreign policy. As the Liberals’ spokesman on housing, Ernest worked with Eleanor Rathbone to ensure that the 1930 Greenwood Housing Act would enable municipalities to charge lower rents for poorer families in council houses.⁶⁶ However, he soon became disillusioned with Parliament. Ernest’s perception of Lloyd George’s ineptitude combined with ‘the whole atmosphere of personal ambition’ left him frustrated, considering Parliament an ‘insufferable waste of time’.⁶⁷

In summer 1931, a financial crisis led the leadership of the Labour government to consider cuts to unemployment benefit. It caused a major split in the party and the collapse of the government. With the ensuing formation of the National Government, Ernest was asked to take ministerial office as parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Health. He accepted on the condition that housing subsidies would not be cut. Frustrated by civil servants’ ‘lack of enthusiasm and vision’ regarding housing, Ernest’s ministerial career lasted two weeks before a general election in October.⁶⁸ Having become disillusioned with Parliament before his appointment, he had decided not to contest Withington and had to stand in Cornwall. Despite a personal endorsement from Ramsay MacDonald, he was defeated by a Conservative, and thus Ernest’s parliamentary career ended for the time being.⁶⁹

How to abolish the slums

Having left Parliament, Ernest was appointed by MacDonald to the government’s Economic Advisory Council in 1931.⁷⁰ The following year he was knighted. Thinking little of honours, he and Shena had joked about looking forward to the day when he could reject a knighthood. In accepting the title, however, he believed that it would bring influence and thereby enable him to forward the cause of reform, chiefly in housing.⁷¹

Ever since his appointment as chairman of the Housing Committee on Manchester City Council in 1919, the housing problem in Britain had become a significant concern of Ernest’s. After having established himself as a national leading authority on housing in Parliament, he directed his energies towards writing three books: How to Abolish the Slums (1929), The Anti-Slum Campaign (1933) and The Rebuilding of Manchester (1935) to raise awareness of the crisis and promulgate his solutions to it. Drawing on a mass of nationwide statistical evidence and his direct experience of Manchester, Ernest traced the history of housing reform from the Victorian era, highlighting the current terrible conditions of many dwellings and the successes and failures of postwar housing policy.

While the period after the First World War saw unprecedented levels of housebuilding by both the private sector and local councils, this boom in construction benefited the middle classes and did little for the needs of millions of working-class people. ‘The very people who were most in need of improved living standards’, as Keith Laybourn writes, ‘were not … the chief beneficiaries’ of housing expansion.⁷² Instead, as Ernest observed, huge numbers of people, including two million children according to his own estimates, were living in vastly overcrowded, damp, flea-ridden houses which were rapidly deteriorating.⁷³ For Ernest, working-class people had been failed as new housing was simply too expensive and overcrowding was growing worse. The private sector had built houses for sale which were beyond the means of the poor, and new council houses were being leased at rents only affordable for the aristocracy of the working classes.⁷⁴

To solve the crisis Ernest argued that alongside relief for larger families and rent restrictions, subsidies towards municipal house building had to be substantially increased so that newly constructed houses could be affordable for the poor.⁷⁵ The history of housebuilding since the nineteenth century had, according to Ernest, shown that as the public regulation of housing increased, so did its quality, and he concluded that the private sector could not build houses as cheaply and to as good a standard as those built by municipalities.⁷⁶ Additionally, to ease overcrowding, Ernest believed that slum clearance had to be put on hold until there was a surplus of new dwellings.⁷⁷ The eventual abolition of the slums would offer a fantastic opportunity to redesign the city centre. In The Rebuilding of Manchester, Ernest with J. Inman and Max Tetlow drew up plans to drastically reshape the city centre. Alongside the construction of 40,000 municipal flats, schools, shops and other amenities, Ernest envisaged the creation of huge parks in the city centre coupled with a grand new exhibition hall and cathedral. To be completed in 1985, it would replace the antiquated ring of Victorian housing surrounding the city centre clustered amongst factory works totally lacking in green spaces.⁷⁸

Underscoring Ernest’s arguments was his opposition to Sir Hilton Young, who had been appointed the Minister of Health in November 1931. Young had frustrated Ernest by cancelling subsidies for municipal housing, allowing only the private sector to build new homes. Furthermore, he criticised Young for pressing ahead with slum clearances without, in Ernest’s eyes, building enough alternative affordable accommodation to replace demolished housing.⁷⁹ Lambasting Young’s policy in the New Statesman and engaging him head-on in an animated debate on BBC radio, Ernest attacked Young’s strategy as catastrophic for the poor.⁸⁰

4.9 The map of the reimagined Manchester city centre in The Rebuilding of Manchester (1935). From E. D. Simon and J. Inman, The Rebuilding of Manchester (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1935).

Education, democracy and totalitarianism

Like housing, Britain’s economic woes were at the forefront of Ernest’s mind and were to sow the seeds of his other main campaign in the 1930s: citizenship education. With politicians unable to solve the economic crisis, Ernest believed the public was left ‘disillusioned, unhappy and uncertain’. This alienation, coupled with the rise of Nazism in Germany in 1933, led Ernest to fear that citizens could easily be seduced by fascism as the public seemingly had little understanding or interest in democratic government or in the value of freedom.⁸¹ The future of democracy was thus at a crossroads; the great question for Ernest was whether people were ‘to live as free citizens of democracies’, or become ‘the docile followers of a despot’?⁸² Ernest believed the answer to safeguarding democracy lay in education and he founded the Association for Education in Citizenship with Eva Hubback in 1934. Attracting a host of leading educationists, intellectuals and politicians, the association aimed to reform education so that school-age pupils could be taught to appreciate liberal and democratic values and to take an active interest in public affairs. Leaving school as informed and engaged citizens, they would not fall victim to the fascist demagogue, but would be able to elect able representatives who could address the complex economic problems facing society.⁸³

To work towards protecting popular rule in Britain, Ernest was keen to investigate how democracy functioned elsewhere. In 1938, he toured Switzerland as well as the Nordic nations. Publishing his findings the following year in The Smaller Democracies (1939), Ernest was impressed by the active engagement of citizens in civic affairs, their education and their freedom-loving nature. Fascism had been arrested in these countries, as their citizens elected competent democrats who were able to overcome the challenging economic crisis. The Scandinavian countries, in particular, showed to Ernest that healthy democracies with educated citizens could ‘overcome the complexities of the machine age’ and flourish instead of sinking into economic despair and fascism.⁸⁴

4.10 Ernest (c. 1930s). Source: SSP M14/4/24.

Permeating Ernest’s ideas about democracy was a tension between technocracy and active citizenship. On the one hand he felt that expert elite representatives should hold the reins of government. ‘Leadership’, Ernest argued, was ‘just as important in democracies as in dictatorships’, and as much as citizens had to become informed about public issues, they had to leave solutions to experts.⁸⁵ Citizens had ‘to realise their own ignorance and select the right people for Parliament’.⁸⁶ Yet, on the other hand, Ernest proclaimed that his ‘faith’ as a democrat was underpinned by citizen ‘self-government in a great variety of small affairs’, and in Switzerland he was in awe of the inculcation of democratic virtues through citizen participation in decision-making.⁸⁷ Ernest’s reconciliation between these polar positions would help shape his most ambitious plan for reform, the rebuilding of Britain after the Second World War.

An equally important factor in shaping Ernest’s future postwar plans was a trip to the Soviet Union. In 1936, Ernest and Shena with the academics William Robson and John Jewkes set off to study various aspects of Soviet Moscow, collating their findings in their book Moscow in the Making (1937). At the time of their visit, the USSR was a subject of great interest in intellectual circles. In the context of frustration at the economic slump and inequality in capitalist Britain, figures from across the political spectrum were intrigued by the Soviet Union’s planned economy and rapid industrialisation. Some, such as Ernest’s old friends the Webbs, saw the USSR as a new socialist civilisation, and their own extensive and popular study of the communist nation inspired Ernest and Shena’s visit to Moscow.⁸⁸

Hoping to garner lessons from the Soviet experiment, Ernest studied town planning, local government and housing in the capital. He was impressed by the public-spirited enthusiasm and efficiency of the one-party Communist government, as well the collective ownership of land which enabled effective planning. Nonetheless, unlike the Webbs, Ernest was no apologist for the regime and recorded very high levels of overcrowding, vastly beyond anything he had seen in Manchester. Moreover, with their visit coinciding with the beginning of Stalin’s great purge, Ernest was critical of the government’s repression of any form of dissent. Ernest’s experience of the USSR left him to wonder whether the success of planning and the resolve of its government could be replicated in Britain while ‘maintaining the freedom of minorities and the kindly tolerance of England?’⁸⁹ It was a question which was to remain with him as the catastrophe of the Second World War unfolded.

The Second World War

Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Ernest volunteered to work for the Ministry of Information. His tenure there, however, was short and mired in bureaucratic mismanagement on the part of the ministry. Shortly afterwards, Ernest’s expertise as a leading industrialist was called upon when he was appointed in spring 1940 as the area officer for the Ministry of Aircraft Production in the North-Western Region, and then as regional advisor to the ministry a year later. In 1941 he was also made deputy chairman of the Building and Trade Council at the Ministry of Works. During his tenure, Ernest led two reports: Training for the Building Industry (1942) and The Placing and Management of Contracts (1944).⁹⁰ The reports formed the basis of Ernest’s book Rebuilding Britain – A Twenty Year Plan (1945). It represented the sum of Ernest’s years of experience as an authority on housing and town planning.

To avoid the failures of the interwar period, Ernest argued that the government had to carefully plan postwar reconstruction. For Ernest, not enough affordable homes for the working class had been built during the interwar period as the building industry had been unplanned and therefore prone to booms and busts because of oscillating demand in housebuilding. During boom periods, materials and labour became scarce and therefore expensive, costs which were passed on to the price of erecting homes, which in turn meant they were let at rents which were unaffordable for many working-class people. Ernest had witnessed this first-hand in Manchester following the First World War. Even though he was instructed by the Minister of Health to use ruthless means, as chairman of the Housing Committee he had struggled to find supplies and labour and as a result the council built nowhere near enough houses. During periods of slump, hundreds of workers were left unemployed despite the desperate need for housing, a problem which was worsened by the fact that private builders were inclined not to go to the expense of recruiting additional workers for fear that a slackening in demand would worsen unemployment. To avoid the mistakes of the past, Ernest argued that the government had to control the volume of houses being built through a scheme of mass municipal housebuilding. It would thereby control the rate of construction and help to expand the workforce by guaranteeing employment for builders in line with the 1944 White Paper on Employment Policy which committed postwar governments to ensuring a high and stable level of employment.⁹¹

Much of Rebuilding Britain was inspired by his experience abroad, particularly by a visit to the USA between September and December 1942. Ernest and Shena travelled across America, Shena lecturing on local government and education and Ernest on postwar reconstruction. During his time there, Ernest studied great planning projects in America and, much to President Roosevelt’s pleasure, greatly admired the Tennessee Valley Authority.⁹² Ernest’s prior visit to the Soviet Union underscored much of the book too. Inspired by the example of Moscow, he proposed in Rebuilding Britain that ‘all land’ had to be ‘made available’ for development, with municipalities able to cheaply and efficiently purchase land to facilitate planning. In addition, he believed that a reconstruction project in Britain had to emulate the determination the Muscovite government had shown in undertaking its own planning scheme. In contrast to the zeal cultivated by one-party rule and repression, postwar planning would be realised by the democratic ‘drive’ of citizens. Here, Ernest resolved his inner tension between technocracy and active citizenship. While the government and expert planners would undertake a long-term programme of housebuilding, the democratic pressure educated citizens would place on the government would ensure it carried out the scheme in full, in a manner which was subject to their criticism and their freely determined wishes.⁹³ Ernest’s proposals in Rebuilding Britain were to anticipate the Attlee government’s major housing and planning reforms. Aneurin Bevan embarked on a mass municipal housebuilding programme, with the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 nationalising development rights and making it easier for local authorities to purchase land for development.⁹⁴

4.11 Ernest inspecting American war planes being manufactured (1942). Source: SSP M14/4/24.

Comrade Lord Simon

In 1946, Ernest re-entered politics, contesting the Combined English Universities by-election which had been called following the death of Eleanor Rathbone. Ernest had great respect for Rathbone and like her decided to stand as an independent. Emphasising his three decades’ experience on the Council of the University of Manchester, Ernest called for the expansion of university education, housing and, like Rathbone, family allowances.⁹⁵ Ernest lost to a Conservative with another ally of Rathbone, Mary Stocks, splitting the progressive vote.⁹⁶ Following this defeat, and after much deliberation, Ernest resolved to join the Labour Party. Impressed by its leadership and now less concerned about nationalisation, Ernest wrote to Shena, a party member since 1935, of his decision, signing off his missive ‘With all my love, darling wife – and soon to be “comrade”’. Having followed Shena in boarding Labour’s ship, he soon found himself back in Parliament after Clement Attlee offered him a peerage. Ennobled as Baron Simon of Wythenshawe in 1947, his title reflected his and Shena’s pride in Manchester’s garden city. ⁹⁷

Later that year, Ernest was asked by the government to become the chairman of the BBC. Ernest was largely silent in the Lords during his quinquennium as chairman to maintain the political neutrality of the role. One occasion, however, did require him to speak, when in 1950 Ernest inadvertently found himself at the centre of political controversy that caused a scandal. As chairman, he had decided to ban further broadcasts of a play by Val Gielgud called Party Manners. Ernest feared that the comedy, which portrayed a Labour government as corrupt, would undermine people’s faith in democracy.⁹⁸ The decision, much to Ernest’s surprise, dragged him into controversy, with the right-wing press making the accusation that, with the support of the government, he had censored a play that attacked his own party. The Lords debated the controversy, affording Ernest the opportunity to account for his mistakes but also to stress the impartiality of the corporation.⁹⁹

4.12 Ernest with (right to left) William Haley, Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan and Shena (c. 1947–51). Courtesy of Helen David.

Ever the investigator, Ernest examined foreign broadcasting as chairman. He was particularly impressed by the decentralised Swiss system and believed that Britain could well benefit from such a system for its nations and regions. As part of his fact-finding, Ernest visited the United States in 1948. Disapproving of what he saw as sensationalist commercial television which did nothing to render Americans ‘wiser or better citizens’, he came away convinced of the need to retain the BBC’s monopoly over broadcasting. This ambition of Ernest’s was cemented in his mind by the Churchill government’s decision to introduce commercial television.¹⁰⁰ Collaborating closely with Mary Stocks, Ernest joined the National Television Council and campaigned in the Lords to oppose the change.¹⁰¹ Ernest’s efforts were in vain, but his work as the chairman of the BBC had been stimulating for him, and he concluded his tenure there with his analysis of the corporation, The BBC from Within (1952).

Ernest’s last campaigns

Now in his seventies and with his BBC chairmanship at an end, Ernest did not retire from public life but continued campaigning. In the 1950s, Ernest became convinced that the future of humanity was imperilled by two threats. The first was overpopulation. The fall in the death rate had led to unprecedented population growth over the past two centuries, and Ernest feared its unchecked increase would outstrip the supply of food, condemning millions to poverty. After initially approaching Max Nicholson, head of the Political and Economic Planning thinktank, to investigate the issue further, Ernest ended up as a chairman of the organisation’s research group into population.¹⁰² Informed in part by a study Ernest undertook into the ‘Population and Resources of Barbados’ in 1954, the group published its report entitled World Population and Resources the following year. It called for more research into, and action regarding, ‘human fertility and methods of regulating it’. In addition to advocating the careful monitoring of population and resources as well as the ecological and social impacts of resource overexploitation, the report also suggested that developing countries receive technological assistance to prevent overpopulation.¹⁰³

Ernest’s fears about the danger of overpopulation led to his support of the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the British Family Planning Association and then his establishment of the Simon Population Trust in 1957. To address global poverty and malnutrition, the trust’s key objectives were to improve

Ernest bequeathed £15,000 to the trust with a further £179,000 given after Shena died. The trust promoted male sterilisation and sponsored projects in contraception as well as postgraduate scholarships and educational material on population and reproductive choice. It also contributed to the 1984 UN Conference on Population before closing in 2001.¹⁰⁴

In addition to overpopulation, the other threat to humanity Ernest feared was nuclear war. The Cold War had sparked a nuclear arms race and in Britain the movement against nuclear weapons became a groundswell in 1958 with the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the executive of which Ernest joined.¹⁰⁵ Ironically, the origins of the nuclear bomb can be traced back to Rutherford’s discovery of the structure of the atom in the physics laboratory at the University of Manchester originally financed by Ernest’s father, Henry.¹⁰⁶

While he was not completely certain about unilateralism, and disapproving of the civil disobedience employed by other CND members, the danger nuclear weapons posed trumped Ernest’s qualms. Ernest believed there were three key objectives to secure: an end to British nuclear tests, a government announcement that it would never pre-emptively strike, and the formation of a non-nuclear club of countries.¹⁰⁷ In 1959, Ernest used his position in the Lords to secure a debate on this third goal. Opening the debate, he outlined this nonproliferation proposal which had been originally formulated by his CND ally Bertrand Russell. As the only other nation to have nuclear armaments besides the USA and the Soviet Union, the UK could, Ernest believed, use its influence to get non-nuclear nations to renounce nuclear weapons in return for Britain’s own disarmament. Furthermore, he believed that Britain should endeavour ‘to persuade the United States and the U.S.S.R. jointly to sponsor a world-wide system of inspection under the auspices of U.N.’. Despite support from Russell and the bishops, the motion was opposed by the Conservative government and the Labour opposition. Nevertheless, as one peer commented, Ernest ‘had a field day’ in pressing for disarmament.¹⁰⁸

For Ernest, the only way to successfully achieve nuclear disarmament was for the populace to understand ‘the true horrors of the H-bomb’.¹⁰⁹ As the president of Manchester CND, he launched a campaign in 1958 to inform the city’s inhabitants about the calamity of nuclear war. The campaign culminated in a packed-out meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester during which an appeal for funds saw donations fall ‘like confetti’ onto the speakers’ stage. The rally allowed Ernest to make clear the devastation of nuclear weapons by presenting how Manchester and its surrounding area would be devasted by a single bomb. In addition to his local educational campaign, Ernest financed the journalist Wayland Young, the son of his former nemesis on housing, Hilton Young, to write a book on disarmament.¹¹⁰

Having been on the University of Manchester’s council since 1915 and an officer since 1932, Ernest had considerable knowledge of, and interest in, higher education, and his postwar campaigning was to shape its future significantly. With the question of university administration left unaddressed despite years of expansion, and with a lack of investment in higher education putting Britain at risk of falling behind technologically, Ernest believed that the whole university system had to be overhauled.¹¹¹ Eager to address these issues, Ernest, in his final appearance in the Lords in May 1960, called on the government to ‘inquire and report on the extent and nature of full-time education for all those over the age of 18’.¹¹² His motion was met with indecision from the government which disappointed him. Ernest’s campaigning was not in vain, however, as in December 1960 the government established a committee under the chairmanship of Lord Robbins, granting all that he had requested.¹¹³ The 1963 Robbins Report laid the foundations for the rapid expansion of higher education, and while the increase in the number of female and working-class students fell short of report’s expectations, it helped to boost equality of educational opportunity.¹¹⁴

Conclusion

In 1959, Ernest was awarded the Freedom of Manchester. A proud Mancunian, he used his speech to reflect upon the achievements of the city and, echoing modern calls for civic devolution, Ernest expounded his belief that Manchester could thrive if it was more independent of central government.¹¹⁵ It was to be an evening honour for Ernest, however. Eleven months later he collapsed following a stroke during a trip to the Lake District. Shena moved him back to a nursing home in Manchester where she remained by his side until he died on 3 October 1960.¹¹⁶

Ernest Simon’s life was as intriguing as it was influential. From a chronically shy child, he went on to help improve the housing conditions of millions and enable the opening of higher education to the masses. Spurred by his ‘religion’, he had a strong work ethic, but his achievements were greatly facilitated by his wealth, his contacts, his assistants and by Shena, who subordinated her political ambitions in order for him to realise his own.¹¹⁷ Influenced by the Webbs, his own sense of self-exceptionalism, and by his career as a self-described ‘autocratic employer’, Ernest endorsed top-down planning and placed his faith in experts to solve societal issues.¹¹⁸ For all his technocratic tendencies, however, he worked for a more egalitarian society which was composed of educated citizens actively engaged in self-government.

Tracing Ernest’s work helps to shed light on key historical moments of the twentieth century, from the proliferation of council housing, to British reactions to totalitarianism and postwar reconstruction. Moreover, his historical activism also speaks to contemporary issues afflicting society today. Indeed, many problems which Ernest sought to address sadly remain. Air pollution is responsible for thousands of deaths and respiratory illnesses, and there is an entrenched crisis of unaffordable housing. Ernest’s ideas about civic education, too, seem tragically more apt than ever in light of the international upsurge of right-wing authoritarianism. And, while many would not endorse Ernest’s neo-Malthusian outlook, sustainable development, particularly for emerging nations, will be a major challenge this century. Finally, the tumult which the climate emergency and the rise of artificial intelligence will cause to the economy will require something akin to the bold new industrial policy Ernest helped to formulate a century ago. For all these reasons, a study of his life furnishes us with resources for thinking about the challenges of the future.

4.13 Ernest in the Lake District. Source: private family papers.