5.1 Shena Simon (c. 1940–50s). Source: private family papers.

In June 1938, Shena Simon wrote to her friend Virginia Woolf congratulating her on her latest work Three Guineas (1938).¹ Shena remarked to Woolf that she was ‘personally grateful’ for the role her writings had in bolstering her own desire to campaign for reform, in spite of the obstacles she faced from a patriarchal society. Tracing her own career so far as a campaigner, Shena first outlined how her role in ‘the suffragette agitation’ had made her rebellious, unconcerned about ‘other people’s opinions of me and my actions’. Later, as Lady Mayoress in Manchester, she explained how she had caused a ‘storm’ of criticism following a simple protest at there being no women managers at a women’s hospital. More recently, on government committees, she had chosen to dissent from her ‘men colleagues’, opting to write minority reports of her own, and now she was making ‘a great nuisance’ of herself in her role advising the Board of Education. Shena confessed she ‘sometimes wondered whether I ought to adopt a different attitude’ but, as she informed Woolf, she resolved that:

In retrospect, Shena’s letter to Woolf encapsulates her character as an independent-minded and strong-willed feminist reformer. Shena’s career, which saw her contribute to significant improvements in health, housing and education nationally and in her adopted city of Manchester, was defined by a radical and autonomous streak. Combined with this streak was a privileged financial independence which meant that deference to custom, public opinion and powerful institutions did not moderate Shena’s work and ideals. She could quite literally ‘afford to be unpopular’. As one friend was to remark on her death, ‘the pursuit of truth was more important than popularity’ for Shena.³ Shena’s work as a free-thinking reformer touched the lives of many Britons during her lifetime and has done so ever since. Yet for all this she remains relatively unknown, despite her national prominence in her lifetime. This chapter therefore aims to shed light on Shena’s historical significance and the influences which buttressed her career as a public servant and reformer.

The chapter follows the writings of historians of education Jane Martin and Hsiao-Yuh Ku who have highlighted Shena’s contribution to reforming education and the intellectual underpinnings of her work. Martin, examining her work on Manchester City Council and as an educationist, argues that Shena followed in the tradition of public duty and active citizenship of nineteenth-century middle-class radicals, centred on the positivist idea of the religion of humanity.⁴ Ku, in her recent volume on the vanguard of British progressives who sought to democratise education in the first half of the twentieth century, has illustrated how the social democratic tenet of ‘equality of educational opportunity’ was the ‘foundation’ upon which Shena’s work rested.⁵

5.2 Shena with her mother Jane Boyd Potter (c. 1884). Source: SSP M14/4/3.

In portraying Shena’s life, this chapter builds upon research by Marian Horrocks as well as the educational historian Joan Simon’s privately printed biography of her mother-in-law and her articles on Shena’s work on the Spens Committee.⁶ It also draws upon her and her husband’s vast array of papers held by Manchester Central Library and the numerous reports, pamphlets and books she wrote. In doing so, the chapter aims to paint a picture of a forgotten reformer who ‘never hesitated to stand up for her convictions’.⁷

Shena Potter

Shena Simon was born in Croydon in 1883. Named Dorothy Shena Potter, she was the second of the nine children of John Wilson Potter (1856–1933) and Jane Boyd Potter née Thompson (1860/61–1946). Both of Shena’s parents came from wealthy shipping families. Her mother was the granddaughter of George Thompson, a radical MP and founder of the Aberdeen line, while her father was a lead partner in a firm involved in shipping to Australia. Their union marked an end to a rivalry as John Wilson Potter had worked on the loading of the ship the Cutty Sark, the nemesis of George Thompson’s ship the Thermopylae.⁸ Shena, as Joan Simon writes, ‘was devoted’ to her parents and was close to her elder sister Millicent. Shena was home educated and spent three years between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one working to apply to Newnham College Cambridge. Shena’s ambition to study at Newnham, something she had resolved to do ‘at a very early age’, was initially contrary to the expectations of her parents, who, having sent her brothers to school, believed that she would live a life of domesticity. Shena’s ambition was most likely bolstered by her governess Theodora Clark. Clark, a Quaker and a supporter of female suffrage and university education, guided Shena through her studies and undoubtedly sowed the seeds of Shena’s free-thinking and feminist outlook.⁹

Shena originally planned to study history at Newnham. It was something she had always been ‘passionately fond of’ and had excelled in. In the end she opted for economics, a subject she developed an interest in towards the end of her schooling as a result of her encounter with John Stuart Mill’s great tome Principles of Political Economy (1848) which she read ‘with avidity’. Enrolling at Newnham in 1904, Shena began studying for the economics tripos and was taught by Britain’s foremost economist, Alfred Marshall. At Cambridge she was to forge lifelong friendships, two notable ones being with Dorothy Osmaston and Eva Spielman (later Layton and Hubback).¹⁰ While Cambridge was, according to Shena’s own recollections, ‘heavily chaperoned’, university life would have no doubt been liberating. Whereas conformity, paucity of autonomy and social interaction would have governed her and her friends’ home lives, university offered new freedoms.¹¹ As Osmaston recalled:

Such freedoms allowed Shena’s friends to join men in political societies at the university, with Spielman and Amber Reeves (later Amber Blanco White) becoming actively involved in the university’s Fabian Society.¹² While Shena was not to follow in their footsteps, she struck up correspondence with principal Fabian Beatrice Webb in 1905 and on her advice Shena decided to study at the London School of Economics after Cambridge.¹³

5.3 Shena (c. 1907–12). Source: private family papers.

At the LSE, Shena undertook research into ‘the underlying assumptions of the emergent Labour Party’ under Graham Wallas and L. T. Hobhouse. Shena loved being a student at the School from 1907–12. It was ‘a most stimulating place’ where students and teachers of different sexes, races and ages mixed.¹⁴ It was here that she got to know Beatrice Webb and her husband, Sidney, further. In 1964, she recalled how they were both ‘so human and so ready to help any student however insignificant’, but Shena’s rapport with them was nevertheless hurt, albeit temporarily, by their defamation of her Newnham friend Amber Blanco White following Amber’s affair with H. G. Wells.¹⁵

Shena’s time at the LSE proved to be formative as she embarked on a lifelong career as a social investigator. As she recollected, her times there ‘were some of the most fruitful of my life’.¹⁶ She took an interest in industrial relations which distracted her from her research. Collaborating with Manchester-born labour activist, James J. Mallon, Shena investigated ‘sweated industries’ and worked on the ‘preliminaries for the setting up of wages boards’, the bodies which would set a minimum wage for those in low-paid and insecure industries. To complement her work, she travelled to Australia and New Zealand to study the machinery there for settling industrial disputes.¹⁷

In travelling to the antipodes, Shena was following in the footsteps of Margaret MacDonald, a prominent figure in the National Union of Women Workers (NUWW). Joining the union and working under Macdonald, Shena came to greatly admire her. In the NUWW, Shena campaigned during and after the passing of the National Insurance Act 1911 to ensure women’s interests were covered by the legislation. Motivating Shena’s campaign was the fear that wives, domestic servants and low-paid women would have little to no protection against illness and unemployment under the act.¹⁸ The challenges she faced while doing so convinced her that without the vote to directly influence politicians, it would be very difficult to improve the status of women.¹⁹ It led her to deeply sympathise with the suffragette movement formed in Manchester by the Pankhurst family. Having to live with her parents in Westminster upon whom she was financially dependent meant she could not join in suffragette militancy, as they were opposed to it. Shena came to an agreement with her parents: they let her engage in marches and make speeches, as long as she did not do ‘anything actively militant’.²⁰ This constraint on her freedom no doubt frustrated Shena and played a part in underscoring her love of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), a core message of which was that, as Shena wrote,

Shena’s desire for women’s enfranchisement was strongly held. Her involvement with the suffragettes went against her prior ‘instincts’ to be rule-abiding and considerate. As she told Woolf in 1938, ‘as a girl’ she ‘was too much too concerned with other people’s opinions’ and was afraid ‘of hurting their feelings’. Likewise, writing to her husband, Ernest Simon, in 1916, she explained how at Newnham she was ‘always most scrupulous about keeping to all the rules – ridiculous as some of them seemed – because I knew I should feel uncomfortable if I broke them, even if I knew no bad results would follow’. Being involved in the movement, however, as she wrote to Woolf, ‘turned’ her ‘into a rebel’ and marked the beginning of a career as an increasingly outspoken and free-thinking reformer.²²

North and south

In February 1912, Shena was invited by her Newnham friend Eva Hubback to a party in Didsbury where she met Ernest Simon. Eva lived in Didsbury in south Manchester and had made the acquaintance of Ernest Simon, a wealthy Mancunian businessman with aspirations to be a social reformer, and thought he would make the ideal match for Shena.²³ While Shena did not suffer from a want of admirers, she had been uncertain about marriage, for although, as she told Eva, she desired a partner, she feared a conventional marriage would confine her to domesticity and the loss of her ability to be a campaigner.²⁴ It was for this reason that a partnership with Ernest seemed so appealing, as together they could pursue their many shared political causes. Five months later, Ernest proposed to Shena in Oxford. The proposal itself was a success, but not without a hitch, since they both fell out of the canoe on which the proposal took place. It was not ‘an ideal place’ as Ernest wrote in his diary.²⁵ They married in November and spent their honeymoon in France, Italy and Monaco, the third destination involving a costly visit to Monte Carlo Casino, before moving to Didsbury.²⁶ While their bond at first rested in large part on shared ideals, Shena and Ernest soon developed a close romantic partnership.²⁷ Together they had three children. Their sons Roger and Brian Simon were born in 1913 and 1915 respectively, and in 1917 Shena’s hopes of having a daughter were realised when Antonia (Tony) Simon was born.²⁸

Moving to Manchester meant that Shena never completed her research, but she still remained active in the NUWW and under its auspices she helped to found the Manchester and Salford Women Citizens’ Association. While women could not yet vote in general elections, women ratepayers could vote locally, and so she set up the association to enable women to ensure their interests were represented. By establishing a branch of the association in each ward of Manchester and Salford, the association aimed to organise and educate women so they could ‘realise the power they possess as voters’ and bring their experience to bear upon local government. The association, which inspired similar organisations in other major cities, gathered much support and helped to increase the number of women on the council. A notable victory for Shena and the Women Citizens came when they successfully lobbied the council, with the help of Ernest on its Sanitary Committee, to introduce maternity centres to provide support for new mothers and arrest infant deaths in 1915.²⁹

5.4 Shena with Roger (1914). Source: SSP M14/4/24.

Civic politician

During the course of the First World War, Shena continued to work for the NUWW, and collaborated with C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian and a friend of the Simon family, to set up scholarships for women at the University of Manchester.³⁰ Illness in 1919, however, forced Shena into temporary retirement from public work. During her recuperation, she weighed the conflicting demands of being a good mother and pursuing a career in public service. Given their public work, Shena and Ernest were far from being hands-on parents, with governesses doing much of the raising of their children. Their bond with their children was slightly distant and formal. Shena, according to Joan Simon, struggled to form the closest of attachments with them, especially with her sons. Despite looking after three children under six during her recuperation, Shena doubted her ability as a mother and decided that compromising her public ambitions to be always with her children was not necessarily the best for them, given that ‘the nursery governess had much more to offer than she had’.³¹

Any doubts Shena harboured about a career as a social reformer had dissipated by November 1921, when she became Lady Mayoress of Manchester for a year. From the outset, Shena was anything but a passive adjunct of her husband. She used her status to advance the position of women in the city within the first days of her term when she publicly refused to deliver Christmas presents at a women’s hospital in protest at the fact it had no female senior staff. After her refusal caused a stir in the press, in March the hospital submitted to Shena’s protest and appointed two women to its managerial board.³² In addition to calling upon women to take up public service to practise ‘the religion of humanity’, Shena also used her platform to proclaim her radical beliefs. On one occasion she lamented that the majority of women were enslaved by the tyrannical demands of housework, and on another she asserted that boys should be free to play with dolls to foster paternal instincts, for raising children was not the sole responsibility of women.³³ Shena’s work as Lady Mayoress intensified in February when Ernest developed pneumonia, and she stood in his stead at official engagements until he recovered.³⁴ In 1921–22, Shena developed what would become her lifelong interest in education and Manchester’s schoolchildren, visiting over fifty schools in the space of a year. As she explained, as Lady Mayoress ‘you can ask to see anything you want. I wanted to see schools so … I spent a whole year going round looking and asking questions.’³⁵

After her term as Lady Mayoress, Shena stood for election to the council as a Liberal in the Chorlton-cum-Hardy ward in 1923. A cornerstone of her campaign was the representation of women’s interests. She stressed that far more women were needed on the council. While it dealt with many matters which affected women, from washhouses to nurseries, only three of the 140 councillors were female. Furthermore, she felt that the votes of women were vital in ensuring the welfare of the city’s children. ‘The maternal instinct had to be harnessed for the good of the community, and electing a married woman with children’ would help to realise this.³⁶ Though her preliminary bid to be elected failed in Chorlton, the following year she was victorious, having stood on a platform again highlighting the lack of women on the council and calling for the building of more schools in Manchester.³⁷

In line with her interests in health and education, Shena sat on the council’s sanitary and education committees. As one of the small minority of women councillors, Shena was subject to condescending treatment from older male colleagues. One peculiar anecdote records that during a meeting of the sanitary committee, she had to assess the quality of oats for horses used in waste collection. After she protested that she did not see the point in this,

5.5 Shena during her tenure as Lady Mayoress. Source: SSP M14/4/3.

On the council, Shena began her career in education, attempting unsuccessfully at first to reverse cuts to the council’s education budget in 1925.³⁹ In 1928, however, a victory was won when she campaigned with other councillors from across the political divide to abolish the council’s ban on married women teachers; a ‘simply ridiculous’ ordinance which interfered in the personal lives of women and their partners, as Shena complained.⁴⁰ While on the Education Committee, Shena established a strong rapport with Manchester’s Director of Education, Spurley Hey, with whom she worked to enhance the provision of education in Manchester in the face of major financial constraints during the 1920s.⁴¹ Hey had great respect for Shena’s dedication to work in education in Manchester and correctly predicted that she would become the first chairwoman of the Education Committee. Given their closeness and Shena’s commitment to education in Manchester, Hey confided to her that she was one of the ‘few members who take a keen and intelligent interest in the work of the committee’. He told her he gave her ‘more information [about education in Manchester] than all the other members put together’.⁴²

Shena’s career on the council coincided with a personal ordeal which left deep emotional wounds. Two years into Shena’s term, in 1926, her daughter Tony was diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer. In 1927, an operation was carried out to remove the eye, but it only provided a period of remission. A further operation was performed, and Tony was given radium and lead treatment, but the cancer kept reappearing. It became increasingly clear that the disease was terminal and Tony died in September 1929, just after her twelfth birthday.⁴³ The loss of Tony left Shena traumatised. Shena had had such high hopes for her daughter that her loss ‘seemed to remove all meaning from life’.⁴⁴ The pain of Tony’s death affected Shena for decades; its enduring nature is revealed in a memoir written by Shena’s friend, the sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe. When Mitzi was pregnant in the early 1950s, Shena sent her some infant sweaters she had knitted herself. Her husband Marcus wrote to thank Shena, informing her that their daughter was to be called Antonia. Shena replied remarking,

When Antonia Cunliffe was born, Mitzi recalled how Shena

Following Tony’s death, Shena buried herself in work to distract herself from the pain of her bereavement, but would still wake from sleep many years later ‘with ghastly realisation’.⁴⁶

Manchester’s garden city

In the same year of Tony’s diagnosis, Shena and Ernest purchased Wythenshawe Hall and 250 acres of its enveloping parkland and gave it unconditionally to the council to help spur the development of a garden city for Manchester. Much of the housing in Manchester was overcrowded, dilapidated and unsanitary and thus Wythenshawe had been selected as a site to rehouse thousands into modern dwellings amidst green surroundings. In the immediate postwar years, Ernest as a councillor had helped lay the initial plans for the building of a garden city south of the Mersey, and now, in 1926, Shena had been appointed to the council’s Wythenshawe Estate Special Committee to oversee its development. The council employed Barry Parker, a leading garden city town planner.⁴⁷ Shena developed a close working relationship with Parker, as she had with Hey, and indeed, in 1932, Shena would deliver the casting vote on the committee which ensured that Parker’s services were retained by the council so Wythenshawe’s design would still retain its garden city ethos.⁴⁸ A year earlier, in 1931, Shena had ascended to the chair of the committee and aimed to provide good educational provision in Wythenshawe and amenities for social activities.⁴⁹ She also helped to cultivate a sense of community amongst Wythenshawe’s first pioneer residents. In 1933, she opened the inaugural meeting of the Wythenshawe Residents’ Association and the following year presented prizes at the garden city’s first flower show.⁵⁰ Such was Shena’s concern with the new estate, she even took an interest in the minutest of details from the colour of bricks to grass verges. Her work on Wythenshawe, however, led to the loss of her seat.⁵¹ It had become consuming and, having been promoted to the chair of the Education Committee in 1932, Shena felt she had been voted off the council as she could not pay sufficient attention to her own ward in Chorlton.⁵² Furthermore, the development of Wythenshawe was met with accusations of economic extravagance on her part.⁵³

5.6 Shena with Roger, Antonia and Brian (c. 1921/1922).

Alongside her work on the council, Shena sat on the Royal Commission on Licensing in 1929–31. Unwilling to conform to the less radical suggestions of her colleagues, she wrote a minority report of her own which called for the public ownership of pubs to reduce alcohol consumption.⁵⁴ From 1926, Shena also engaged in campaigning to reform municipal finance.⁵⁵ She campaigned for central government to contribute a significant percentage of local authority funding, rather than just giving a block grant, in order to give councils the confidence to expand the provision of important social services.⁵⁶ Her work in municipal finance led to her being appointed in 1938 to a departmental committee to ensure the uniform implementation of the rates across Britain would not ‘cause undue hardship’. Dissenting once again from the majority on the committee, she believed that their measures of relief from hardship were insufficient and that the rates would ultimately put a demanding burden on the poor.⁵⁷ Radical overhaul was needed, and she argued a municipal income tax should replace the rating system.⁵⁸

In 1934, Shena tried to return to the council, standing as an independent candidate in Wythenshawe. During the campaign she was struck by illness and, despite Ernest campaigning in her stead, she narrowly lost.⁵⁹ In 1935, Shena joined the Labour Party, angered by the government’s delay in raising the school leaving age; and the following year she was selected to stand in Moston.⁶⁰ Moston was not a safe harbour for a Labour candidate, and she was defeated. Although Shena’s career as an elected councillor was over, she was shortly afterwards co-opted as a Labour nominee back onto the Education Committee; a position she would hold until 1970.⁶¹

Making a great nuisance

With her career set firmly on the path of working in education in Manchester, Shena was simultaneously shaping the future of national secondary education in the 1930s. In 1931, she had joined the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education, replacing her friend and WEA colleague, R. H. Tawney, who had recommended her as his successor. As a self-professed ‘disciple’ of Tawney, Shena received his valuable advice during her tenure. While the committee was not, as Shena wrote, Tawney’s ‘best milieu’, it was Shena’s natural habitat and so, armed with her experience of work on Manchester City Council, she began her work on the Consultative Committee which would pave the way for universal secondary education.⁶²

5.7 Shena (c. 1930s). Source: SSP M14/4/3.

At the time of Shena’s appointment, education was highly segregated. After the age of eleven, children were taught at senior elementary, technical or grammar schools. These schools were under different codes of regulations which favoured grammars. While children at grammar schools could stay until they were eighteen, most children at senior elementary schools left at fourteen. Under these various codes, grammar school pupils benefited from smaller classes, better-paid teachers and superior amenities. Furthermore, the majority of grammar school places were fee-paying, with a fraction of places available for free.⁶³ For Shena, this system of education ultimately meant that access to grammar school education was inaccessible for many working-class children whose parents could not afford fees. Even when working-class children won scholarships, insufficient economic means often forced parents to send their children to work rather than to grammar schools. With most children having to leave education at fourteen, Shena was also critical of the loss of regular health checks and exercise for children and ‘the sympathetic help of teachers with many problems connected with their physical and emotional development’. She lamented how upon leaving school most children ended up in ‘a factory, workshop or blind alley occupation, often working long hours in bad atmospheres; and into a world where, instead of consideration for the individual being of prime importance, the financial success of the firm has to be the criterion’.⁶⁴ To equalise educational provision, ‘a common code of regulations for all post-primary schools’ was needed; it was, as Joan Simon writes, ‘the key to realising secondary school for all’.⁶⁵

In 1933, the Board of Education tasked the Consultative Committee to investigate ‘the framework and content’ of education for children over eleven, and Shena saw this as an opportunity to push for an equal code for all schools and universal secondary education.⁶⁶ However, she had to overcome the ambivalence of the chairman of the Consultative Committee, William Spens, master of Christi Corpus College, Cambridge, towards a single code. Given his astute chairmanship of past committees, combined with his conservative leanings and connections with elite education, Shena feared that the board had placed him as chairman to check any progressive proposals suggested by the committee. Shena even initially fretted that he might try to water down the goal of the committee’s 1926 report calling for the raising of the statutory leaving age to fifteen.⁶⁷

Spens’ hesitancy became evident in 1935. Despite the committee having decided it was necessary to consider raising the leaving age and creating parity between the different types of schools for children over eleven, Spens backtracked from this position, arguing that the board should decide whether it was in the committee’s remit to do so. This caused uproar among his fellow committee members, and the issue was shelved until 1936, when Spens arranged a meeting with the permanent secretary to the Board of Education to discuss to what extent the committee could make proposals regarding a unified post-primary code. Leaping upon this opportunity, Shena swooped in with her allies, Sir Percy Jackson and E. G. Rowlinson, to secure the formation of a sub-committee to consider the question of a single code. With Shena as its chair, the sub-committee assembled the evidence which lay behind the Consultative Committee’s final report in 1938 recommending a single code for an equalised provision of secondary education, organised into grammar, secondary modern and technical high schools, all with a leaving age of sixteen.⁶⁸ With similar tact, Shena, without the support of allies, singlehandedly wore down Spens’s opposition to abolishing fees for grammar schools, too.⁶⁹ Through her influence, the final report resultingly called for places in grammar schools to be free or at a reduced fee according to parents’ means (with the ultimate aim of making all places available without charge).⁷⁰ As she wrote to Virginia Woolf in June 1938, she had made ‘a great nuisance’ of herself ‘on the consultative committee’ and won.⁷¹ While the 1938 report of the Consultative Committee was not immediately endorsed by the government, it directly informed R. A. Butler’s momentous 1944 Education Act which introduced universal secondary education and a higher leaving age.⁷²

Alongside her work on the Consultative Committee in the 1930s, Shena found the time to combine her love of the past and her attachment to civic government in writing a major book on local government in Manchester since 1838, published in 1938.⁷³ Outside the committee, Shena established herself as a well-known voice on education in the pages of national newspapers and educational periodicals, calling for greater equality of educational opportunity. In one article, discussing what she would do if made ‘educational dictator’, she told readers she would not only make all secondary and university education free, but would even ‘abolish all private schools except those that are carrying out genuine educational experiments’.⁷⁴

5.8 ‘If Lady Simon became Educational Dictator’. From Teachers’ World (31 October 1934). Source: SSP M14/2/3/2.

Shena’s campaigning for greater equality in education was bolstered by a 1936 trip to study education in Moscow. Her investigations revealed to her that the Soviet Union had realised ‘complete equality of opportunity’. Unlike in Britain, where many children began work at fourteen, she observed how in the Soviet Union there was free education from eight to university age, with adolescents only allowed to work limited hours from sixteen. Despite the great strides it had made, however, Shena was critical of the Soviet educational system. For while there was equal educational opportunity, the object of education in the USSR was at odds with individual freedom. Shena asserted that while in Britain the aim of education was to develop children’s potential as individuals, in the Soviet Union the tight control of the curriculum and information alongside ubiquitous propaganda moulded children into the ‘instruments’ of ‘the rulers of the U.S.S.R.’.⁷⁵

The Children in War-Time

In 1938, with a war with Nazi Germany looking increasingly likely, Shena began training as an air raid warden. Angered at appeasement and Nazi oppression of women, Shena wrote that if ‘standing up to Hitler risked war … it was only logical for me to be ready to take my part in it’. Her training, however, instilled a fear of what air attacks could unleash:

Written in 1940, Shena’s admission was in a letter to her friend Virginia Woolf. Shena’s and Woolf’s relationship had begun when Woolf refused an honorary degree from the University of Manchester in 1933, something Shena, as an admirer of her work and member of the university’s council, was keen for her to have. Nevertheless, in her letter of refusal an invitation was extended by Woolf to Shena to visit her in London, which was accepted. For Shena the invitation represented, as she wrote in her reply to Woolf, ‘a reward’ for the ‘severe self-restraint which prevented my writing to you like any enthusiastic school girl, when “A Room of One’s Own” appeared’.⁷⁷ Meeting about twice a year after their first encounter, they became close friends. In addition to corresponding regularly with each other, Shena would travel to Virginia’s home in Bloomsbury where they exchanged ideas and sought to learn from the other’s experiences. ‘Every time I saw her,’ Shena wrote, ‘I came away feeling stimulated and exhilarated. She made me look at problems from a new angle – even those pertaining to the relations of men and women which I thought I had studied thoroughly.’⁷⁸ Likewise, Woolf ‘had a particular affection for’ Shena and sought to absorb Shena’s knowledge and ‘imbed’ her ideas in what she wrote.⁷⁹

Woolf’s writings were a fount of inspiration for Shena; she even carried a copy of A Room’s One’s Own with her everywhere she went. Woolf’s work bolstered her determination to campaign for reform and unashamedly advocate her own beliefs.⁸⁰ Years later, it is fascinating to deduce from research by Peter H. King that, unbeknownst to either Shena or Woolf, they were relatives. Both were descended from a Scottish smuggler, James Stephen, born in 1670, the 3× great-grandfather of Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen.⁸¹ Their friendship was thus complemented by distant cousinhood. Woolf’s suicide in 1941 was saddening for Shena. ‘Knowing Virginia,’ she wrote to Woolf’s widower, Leonard, was ‘one of the best things that has ever happened to me.’ ‘Her death,’ Shena added, was ‘the worst fatality of the war.’⁸² She wrote a eulogy of her and her work, concluding her piece with Woolf’s belief that war and exploitation could only be brought to an end by the inculcation of feminine virtues in men.⁸³

With the onset of the Second World War, the fears Shena had conveyed to Woolf about the danger air raids posed to children were at the forefront of her mind. At the beginning of the conflict, compulsory education was suspended, with hundreds of schools closed in areas susceptible to bombing. While numerous children had been evacuated, many had never left or were returning from evacuation, with the result that nearly a million children remained in Britain’s cities. For Shena, the situation was intolerable. Touring Manchester to survey the state of education, she summed up the problem in a letter to the Manchester Guardian:

Notwithstanding the peril of air raids, Shena was also concerned that without compulsory education, children’s welfare was being jeopardised. In a pamphlet published by the WEA entitled The Children in War-Time (1939), Shena outlined how, without education, many children were ‘running wild’ and others as young as twelve were in work. They were missing out on the provision of milk and on medical inspections which were vital to ensuring the health of many children. Furthermore, Shena complained that the Board of Education were hastily reopening some schools without sufficient protection against bombing raids. To redress these issues, Shena outlined in the pamphlet how the educational system could be rebuilt. In addition to calling on the Board to survey and requisition more buildings to allow more children to be evacuated, she argued for the urgent reintroduction of compulsory education, along with the raising of the leaving age to fifteen, which had been agreed but deferred, and the setting of a firm date for further evacuation.⁸⁵ Shena’s pamphlet proved an influential intervention, and the board announced soon afterwards the partial reintroduction of compulsory education for April 1940 and greater air-raid protection for schools.⁸⁶

Three Schools or One?

During the war years, Shena worked as a housing officer for the Ministry of Aircraft Production in the North West, organising the billeting of workers who were manufacturing warplanes.⁸⁷ In late 1942, Shena took a break from this work when she and Ernest travelled to America on the invitation of the Ministry of Information to undertake a lecturing tour there to improve ties with Britain’s ally. Speaking on British local government and education, Shena took the opportunity to study the school system in the US.⁸⁸ In America, she examined the system of comprehensive education in which all secondary school age children in the locality were taught together in one school. Impressed by the American spirit of equality of opportunity in education, she praised the American system for extending free secondary education to a far higher proportion of children than in Britain. She noted how as a result class distinctions were far less marked than in Britain. Shena, however, still believed that a tripartite system of specialised schools would get more from each child’s aptitudes than the American comprehensive model.⁸⁹

5.9 Shena with her grandson Alan and her daughter-in-law Joan (1943). Source: SSP M14/4/3.

Having campaigned successfully for an equalised tripartite system during her tenure on the Consultative Committee, Shena mostly welcomed Butler’s 1944 Education Act and was pleased to see Mancunian Ellen Wilkinson take over the Ministry of Education following Labour’s 1945 electoral victory.⁹⁰ In line with the act’s professed aim of ensuring parity of esteem for schools of different types, Shena was anxious that schools in Manchester were brought up to equal standard – with proper basic amenities such as hot water, playing fields and a separate dining room – as rapidly as possible.⁹¹ For Shena, the act most of all symbolised a real step towards equality of educational opportunity:

By 1948, however, Shena had come to see the three-way division of secondary education as flawed. Making her case in her book Three Schools or One? (1948), she called for its replacement with comprehensive schooling. Shena argued that grammar schools still benefited the well-off. While fees had been abolished, working-class children who were eligible to attend a grammar school could often not do so because their families had limited means; and therefore they would likely be sent to a Secondary Modern instead, where they would leave school at fifteen to work due to the necessity of having to earn. On the other hand, middle-class children faced no such difficulties, with their more affluent parents able to keep them in education up to eighteen.⁹³ Secondly, and crucially, Shena had come to realise that children could not be simply categorised into three types ‘corresponding with three types of schools’. Individual children had varying aptitudes and interests, many of which they developed after they had been selected at eleven to go into a specific school. In making her argument, Shena considered her own educational development. Shining at history from a young age, she also developed a keen interest in economics, but at the same time she was not one for mathematics, English literature or French. The answer to creating an educational system which allowed children to be taught according to their aptitudes, therefore, was to teach all children together in one school and to place them in different sets for each subject, so that they could be taught alongside others who had similar capabilities. The additional benefit of teaching children together would be to redress ‘the bitter class division’ post-primary education had augmented in Britain. It would help instead to build a society, like the one she had witnessed in America, which was more democratic and in line with the spirit of postwar reform. Comprehensives would help to build the new Jerusalem.⁹⁴

5.10 The cover of Three Schools or One? (1948). From Lady Simon of Wythenshawe, Three Schools or One? Secondary Education in England, Scotland, and the U.S.A. (London: Fredrick Muller Ltd, 1948).

Final decades

In 1947, Ernest was ennobled as a Labour peer; and so he and Shena became Lord and Lady Simon of Wythenshawe, a title which celebrated the garden city they had both helped to create. In the same year, Ernest was also appointed chairman of the BBC, and he and Shena therefore spent much of their time during the early postwar years in London. At their flat at Marsham Court, they hosted social gatherings to learn more about the corporation and foster ties with its senior administrators. As the director-general of the BBC during Ernest’s tenure, William Haley, recalled:

Shena herself was unremittingly forthright as ever in her public work and was still an active campaigner as her eighth decade approached in the 1950s. Shena continued to press for equal educational opportunity. Berating the ‘two nations in school’, she criticised how richer parents could send their children who did not win a place in a grammar school to private schools, which did not suffer from overcrowding and unsanitary buildings. To overcome this division in society, she called for local authorities to do more to improve educational provision and for private schools to be taxed out of existence. Comprehensive schooling, however, was the crucial keystone to creating ‘a real democratic system giving equal opportunity for all our children’.⁹⁶

Shena’s deep passion for comprehensive schooling was captured in a heated debate in 1951 with Dr Eric James, high master of Manchester Grammar School, at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. The debate was based on James’ book Education and Leadership (1951) and concerned how Britain’s future politicians were to be educated. James believed that grammar school children should form the intelligent elite who would govern over society, an idea, as Shena made clear in the debate, she considered anathema:

Shena, in contrast, argued that every child had to have ‘an equal chance in education’, adding that while ‘Dr James despises the masses’ it was ultimately ‘the masses who settle who our leaders are going to be!’ In his rebuttal, James argued that Shena’s ‘common culture’ approach was wrong and, in contrast, asserted that some people were inherently intelligent and others were not: ‘some people like to read Proust, others the Sunday Pictorial’. For James, leadership in the future would be grounded on ‘high intelligence’, so children who possessed the ‘pre-requisite of intelligence’ could ‘break into the charmed circle of old Etonians and political power’. Future working-class politicians in the mould of the late Ernest Bevin and Shena’s WEA colleague George Tomlinson, who had managed to rise to office through merit, having received little education, would now ‘go to the grammar school’, an assertion which was met by Shena exclaiming ‘No!’⁹⁷ Shena’s campaigning for comprehensive education finally started to bear fruit when, in 1956, the Manchester Education Committee, after much wrangling with the Ministry of Education, oversaw the opening of Manchester’s first comprehensive, Yew Tree School, in Wythenshawe.⁹⁸ A decade later, Shena was actively involved in preparing for the transition to introduce comprehensive education in the city from 1965 to 1967.⁹⁹

Shena’s position as a leading progressive educationist saw her invited to the USSR in 1955 to once again investigate education there. Reporting on her visit, she was struck by the expansion of education and the regard citizens felt for education, albeit ‘the result of continuous propaganda’. Her findings led her to believe that the Soviet Union would soon ‘have the most highly educated population in the world’.¹⁰⁰ In light of this, Shena believed education was just as important as defence in the context of the Cold War, as developing nations would soon start to see ‘knowledge’ as ‘indistinguishable from Communism’. The trip confirmed to her once again ‘that equal educational opportunity’ was ‘more nearly achieved in the Soviet Union than elsewhere’ and she was pleased to see that many girls studied science and engineering. Shena was also intrigued by the state’s provision of leisure activities and extracurricular education through the Young Pioneers. While far from condoning the state’s overbearing control over children’s lives, it led her to ponder if more could done to afford children in Britain ‘much more stimulating and worthwhile occupations for their leisure time’.¹⁰¹

In 1960, Ernest died following a stroke. With Ernest gone, Shena deliberated whether to return to London to be nearer to friends and family or to stay in Manchester and continue pressing for better educational provision there. Opting for the latter, she departed Broomcroft, making room for Simon fellows, academics sponsored by Ernest’s endowment, and moved into a slightly smaller house a few yards opposite with the same name.¹⁰²

The 1960s saw a flood of honours for Shena in recognition of her and her late husband’s work. In 1961, she laid the foundation stone for the new Simon Engineering Laboratories at the University of Manchester (now the Simon Building).¹⁰³ In the same year, she also opened Simon Court, a municipal multistorey block of flats in Wythenshawe for older people.¹⁰⁴ Still taking much interest in Wythenshawe’s inhabitants, she became the honorary chairman of the court’s residents’ association and, in 1969, she was pleased to witness the laying of the foundation stone for Wythenshawe’s long-awaited civic centre.¹⁰⁵ In 1965, she was awarded an honorary fellowship by the LSE, an institution which had proved formative in forging her career as a social reformer, and in 1966, following her retirement from the Council of the University of Manchester, she received an honorary degree from the university. These awards were complemented by the conferring of the Freedom of the City of Manchester upon Shena in 1964. Only the third woman to enjoy the honour, she took the opportunity in her acceptance speech to advocate her feminist ideas by highlighting the ‘wastage … in not developing the resources of women power’. She criticised how, in Britain, there remained a stubborn belief that women should still not go out to work and that there were inadequate provisions to enable them to do so. Furthermore, she called on women, especially teachers, who had received a grant while in higher education, not to give up working when they had a family, for in her eyes they owed the community for their training. She also used her speech to praise the hard work of teachers in Manchester. Shena spoke of how, when she was frustrated on the council, she would visit schools in the city, and her witnessing of how well-run and cheerful the classrooms were would spur her to continue her work.¹⁰⁶

5.11 Shena at the laying of the foundation stone at Wythenshawe civic centre (1969). Source: private family papers.

In 1970, Shena retired from public work. Ending her decades of service on the Manchester Education Committee, she was interviewed by a journalist from The Times Educational Supplement. Surprised by her eagerness not to reminisce but to look to the future, he noted Shena’s combination of ‘Edwardian style with a most modern and enquiring mind’. Retirement allowed her to indulge in her favourite pastimes. Owning a full collection of Agatha Christie’s works, she delved into reading detective novels. She frequented the cinema and also watched Coronation Street as it provided her, with her privileged position, an insight into the lives of ordinary people in Manchester.¹⁰⁷ Two years after retirement, she died in July 1972 at the age of eighty-eight.¹⁰⁸

Conclusion

Shena Simon was resolute and meticulous in her work in social reform. Her reluctance to compromise on what she thought was right often placed her in a minority position, and her focus on the tiniest details could, as in the case of Wythenshawe, hurt her career. Simultaneously, her integrity, proficiency in handling great amounts of information and political shrewdness enabled her to forward reforms which improved the lives and opportunities of people in Manchester and Britain.

Shena’s main contribution to society was in equalising and expanding educational provision. Her devotion to reforming education originated out of her great interest in Manchester’s children, something that grew following the loss of her daughter.¹⁰⁹ Inspired by schooling in America and the USSR, the driving force behind her work in reforming education was to equalise opportunity so that each child could benefit from an education suited to their aptitudes in order to realise their potential. Her efforts to tackle historic educational disparities, however, still resonate with contemporary challenges to inequalities in educational opportunity. Alongside education, feminism was an intrinsic component of Shena’s life. Given the Simons’ reliance on domestic servants, Shena was never in a position to fully comprehend the challenges most women face in pursuing a career and raising children, but her ideas about the family and women’s position in society are still pertinent today. From adolescence to old age, Shena challenged customary thinking that women should largely lead lives of domesticity, and instead believed that their interests and that of the community could only be properly realised if women had an equal sway over public affairs. Shena’s influence and radical ideas, alongside her intellectual exchange with Virginia Woolf, demonstrate her intellect and significance as a feminist, and she is more deserving than the scant attention given to her in past histories of women in social reform and politics in twentieth-century Britain.¹¹⁰

5.12 Shena (c. 1960s). Source: SSP M14/4/15.

While much of Shena’s career involved bureaucratic work and took place behind the doors of committee rooms, her efforts were underscored by a real concern for ordinary people, especially those in Manchester. She cared deeply for the welfare of the city’s mothers and infants and wanted its women to take their place as equal citizens. She took pride in the residents of Wythenshawe, and was inspired by the city’s teachers and pupils. She was a Simon of Manchester.