Introduction

The building of his two engineering businesses from scratch was at the heart of Henry Simon’s life in Manchester; and the successful expansion and diversification of the family firms over five decades by Ernest Simon was a central underpinning of his considerable public work. The businesses proudly carried the ‘Simon’ name into the wider world, while the day-to-day work of running the companies would have been an ever-present part of family life. The growing personal income the businesses generated from the later 1880s onwards supported an increasingly comfortable upper middle-class life for the Simon family, including large homes, domestic servants and extensive overseas travel.

Yet, the development of the family engineering businesses has often been overlooked and taken as a given in more recent consideration of the Simons, with the focus being on their philanthropic and political endeavours.² But without the entrepreneurial success in multiple specialised engineering fields, much of the public work and charitable generosity would not have been possible.

There is no detailed scholarly business history of the Simon engineering firms, nor any critical examination of the changing business practices of the firms or the management approach taken by Henry and then Ernest.³ This chapter provides a largely chronological documentation of the businesses from the late 1870s to the early 1960s and the death of Ernest using readily available information, mostly published secondary sources.⁴ The businesses developed through to the 1990s, but do not exist today after multiple takeovers, mergers and reorganisations, although the Simon name and heritage is employed by some descendant companies for branding purposes.⁵

Henry Simon starting out in business in Manchester

Following Henry’s relocation to the city in 1860, aged twenty-four, he worked for others in Manchester, including as resident engineer for Jametal company and as a consulting engineer undertaking projects in Italy and France in 1863. He also acted as a broker in specialised industrial machinery from continental suppliers. As he established himself as a consultant and merchant, he took his own office at 28 Deansgate. During these early years he was perhaps a bit of ‘wheeler-dealer’ in business, a smart man on the make, cultivating useful contacts and creating opportunities, willing to work for others, particularly on railway related projects, but also seeking to forge his own more lucrative engineering contracts. He travelled extensively in Europe on business (also visiting family and relatives) and seems to have built a stable of contacts with specialised machinery manufacturers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In 1867, he devoted a great deal of time to the English participation at the International Exhibition in Paris, where he also won a prize. An entry in a directory for Manchester in 1868 shows his business address as 7 St Peter’s Square, in the city centre, and describes him as a ‘[c]ivil and consulting engineer, contractor, exporter of machinery and agent for foreign patents’.⁶

Through the 1870s, Henry seems to have enjoyed increasing success in business and growing personal wealth, derived from fees and commission. For example, in 1872 he earned a substantial commission of £1,424 from Manchester railway engine manufacturing firm Beyer Peacock.⁷ Around this time, he started to seriously try to bring the best roller milling machinery from Switzerland into wide application in flour mills in England. Although he lacked much in the way of capital or a track-record in the milling field, he had a depth of engineering knowledge, innate energy, focus and wider intellectual ability.

6.1 Title page from Henry Simon Ltd promotional catalogue (1898). Source: Martin Dodge.

Roller milling of flour and rise of the Simon System

Cereal milling to produce flour for bread in the nineteenth century was a vital industry in feeding the nation, but it was largely overlooked by the British public. Henry Simon saw his contribution to milling as wider than technical success in a niche area of mechanical engineering. It would have wider economic significance to Britain by considerably improving the efficiency of flour mills through investment in an expertly designed new system of production. As he noted, ‘[i]t is certainly a subject of national importance that such a vast amount of valuable material [wheat flour for bread] should be treated in the best manner possible, and that all waste in its treatment should be avoided’.⁹ Henry seems to have had something of a secular mission to improve the health and wealth of the nation. Importantly, he was not the inventor of a new way of roller milling wheat into flour, as is sometimes presented, but, by his energy and creativity, he became the best at exploiting new innovations in milling in Britain (and later abroad) to transform the whole industry through the 1880s and 1890s.

The long-established processes of milling home-grown wheat in Britain using millstones was fairly effective but not without its disadvantages. The resulting flour was browner in colour as it contained more of the branny outside of the wheat seed, and also germ which tended to make it musty and gave it a short self-life. The traditional English flour made from this approach also lacked ‘strength’, that is the ability to form dough that would rise into light bread. Consequently, the replacement of traditional grinding stones with the roller milling system offered many possibilities, and decades-long development and improvement, particularly in Hungary, had perfected a system of ‘high grinding’ with grains gradually reduced to flour over multiple stages to produce purer white flour. There were various attempts to implement this gradual reduction approach using roller milling into Britain in the 1870s, but none seemed to have been successful and it was not widely adopted.¹⁰

Henry had observed firsthand in Austria and Switzerland the ‘gradual reduction’ method using linked series of roller machines, and sought to bring such a milling system to Britain. He advocated this way of milling because it could produce a larger percentage of superior flour from the same amount of grain. Moreover, new roller mill machinery was often more compact and lighter than stones and could easily fit inside existing mill buildings. New purpose-built mills using only roller milling could be built to be smaller and cheaper than previously required. They would also be safer. Historically, flour milling was hazardous because of the amount of highly flammable fine dust created; contacts of rapidly spinning grinding stones could occasionally cause sparks that ignited the dust. Roller milling could reduce the amount of dust and thus the risks of explosions. Operation of the new roller machinery also required less horsepower and was cheaper to maintain because traditional grinding stones had to be frequently resurfaced, a costly procedure as it required skilled craft people.¹¹

Henry’s first commercial roller milling installation was for the McDougall Brothers millers in Manchester in 1877. It is unclear whether Henry already knew the company director Arthur McDougall through his previous business activities in Manchester and gained his confidence, or simply approached the firm speculatively because they were a well-known local company.¹² The installation, initially at experimental scale, was deemed a success and by 1878 the whole of McDougall’s mill in Ancoats was using Simon’s roller milling machines to produce flour without any grinding stones.¹³ The reconstruction of McDougall’s mill in 1878 marked the real beginning of Henry’s business success, although much effort would be required over subsequent decades, not least because he was not, at this point, designing or building milling machinery himself.

6.2 The City Corn Mill in Ancoats, operated by Arthur McDougall, where Henry installed his first complete roller milling system in 1878. Source: Excerpt from Ordnance Survey 10-foot plan sheet Lancashire CIV.7.12. University of Manchester Library, ref. JRL1300117.

6.3 The internal layout of the Daverio designed roller milling machine used by Henry Simon in his first installations. Source: Henry Simon, ‘Modern Flour-Milling in England’, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 70 (1882).

For his first few years of mill installations in Britain, Simon’s chosen roller machinery was the Daverio design, manufactured by the Swiss firm Daverio, Siessardt and Geisler. The Daverio design used chilled-iron rollers arranged in an innovative vertical configuration which was efficient as two separate grinding surfaces were created by using three rollers rather than four; this meant a saving on materials and bearings and reduced the power needed to drive the machinery.¹⁴

After the breakthrough work for McDougall’s, Simon quickly undertook further installations with other important millers. This included the first complete roller milling installation in Ireland in 1879 for millers Shackleton and Sons of Carlow. Henry was also invited in 1879 to give a paper to the first meeting of the National Association of British and Irish Millers, ‘On roller-milling’, which prophesied (and promoted) the rapid demise of grinding with mill stones.¹⁵ Henry faced opposition and competition, he was not the only one selling new milling machinery and there were several competing firms in Britain in the late 1870s and into the 1880s, including a long-established Rochdale firm, Thomas Robinson & Son. But empirical evidence indicates Simon was the most successful.¹⁶ He was good at winning new orders, realised the importance of providing ongoing advice and good customer service and was also effective at self-promotion, including with marketing maps. He frequently penned convincing technical articles advocating for the new system in the trade press. His company was still very small at this point; there were only fourteen employees by 1883.¹⁷ Henry had a large responsibility although he was also reliant on a younger lieutenant, Joseph Ingleby, who had a depth of practical experience in milling and an extrovert personality that would have been a useful contrast to Henry’s rather more reclusive character in terms of salesmanship and negotiations with sceptical millers.¹⁸

The company strove for continuous improvement in machinery and the integration of various stages in the milling process and more practical experience was gained in designing new mills for a number of companies in different places. A notable achievement in this regard in these early years was the design of a new mill in Chester for large local firm F. A. Frost and Sons that was described as being the first automatic flour mill in the world. It used a sequence of mechanical handling devices to move the grain and middlings between the separate machines without manual labour; ‘[t]his was a major step in transforming a slow, laborious, and costly “batch” process into an automatic continuous process’.¹⁹ In 1882, Henry read a substantial forty-one-page paper, packed full of empirical evidence as to the potential of roller milling, to the Institution of Civil Engineers, the leading professional body for engineers in Britain; the paper’s publication in their August proceedings would have been a key marker of credibility for the Simon company. The paper called for a systematic approach to milling through careful planning, close integration of machinery for gradual reduction milling and automation to raise the quality of output and improve productivity (partly by a reduction in skilled labour). This became known as the ‘Simon System’, and would feature throughout the company’s marketing for years to come. In the 1882 paper, Henry claimed there was ‘£7 15s. extra in profit in every 5 tons of wheat ground, or 5s. on every sack of flour produced by the Simon systems’ compared to conventional low grinding mills using stones.²⁰ The paper also recorded the successes of the Simon firm, with twenty-five different milling companies in Britain and Ireland having fully or partially adopted his roller technology. As he asserted ‘[t]he principal advantage of roller-milling is that the bran or husk, and the germ of the grain, are flattened out by the action of rolling, and can consequently easily be sifted out by proper application of dressing machinery’ and the resultant reconfiguration of the milling industry on a national scale meant that ‘[t]he number of second-hand millstones and appurtenances for sale in England is consequently considerable and daily increasing’.²¹

The success of Simon’s campaign for rolling milling to replace traditional stones can be seen in the marketing maps he published periodically. The first such map from 1883 shows fifty-two complete installations across many key markets in Britain and Ireland, in mills ranging from Exeter to Kirkcaldy. The major concentration for the Simon company at this point was unsurprisingly in Lancashire and Yorkshire, with weaker penetration in the London area. Some mills were only partial installations with older stones kept to carry out part of the process alongside new machinery from Simon (shown by the ‘+’ symbol on the map, Figure 6.4). The key London market dominated by Seth Taylor, who had been strong advocates of milling by stones, converted completely to the Simon roller system in 1884.²² An increasingly rapid growth in the number of mill contracts won by the Simon company was evident, and in 1886 the company distributed a substantial marketing catalogue with an extensive introductory essay by Henry and detailed exposition of flour mill layouts for different scales of production, along with a forty-page listing of the full range of machinery sold by the company. The catalogue also included the fourth edition of the marketing map (Plate 1), demonstrating the extent of sustained growth. With 113 total dots in Britain and 37 in Ireland, in 1885 there were 53 new installations of ‘Simon’s complete roller plant’. Interestingly there were still considerable number of mills that were combining new roller milling machinery with existing stones, demonstrating a degree of inertia in the industry to the change.

6.4 The first marketing map Henry published (1883). Source: Mills Archive ref. GJON-IMG-02A.

There were other macro forces during the 1880s encouraging British millers to adapt new machinery and techniques, including a copious supply of hard wheat from US farmers that was better processed using gradual reduction on rollers; the need to compete against cheaper, better quality flour from large American mills and, importantly, a growing consumer demand for white bread.²³ As Henry noted in 1882, ‘an increasing demand for superior well-cleaned and white flour has thus gradually been established, which it is as yet difficult for most English millers to respond to’.²⁴ Through the 1880s, there also was change in the milling industry with a concentration of production into a smaller number of larger firms, with new, much larger, mills being built adjacent to key ports. These changes tended to favour capital intensive investment in new machinery and more efficient production processes; Henry Simon’s company clearly benefited.²⁵

In 1887, Henry was successfully nominated to be a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a marker of his prestige in the field. He was by that time already an active member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institute of Iron and Steel in Britain, as well as belonging to the Society of Civil Engineers of France and the Society of Engineers and Architects of Austria.²⁶

Henry Simon seeks to transform coke making

As well as the struggle to get flour millers to adopt his Simon System, in the early 1880s Henry was also devoting considerable time and energy to get another technical innovation accepted in a quite different industrial field. In 1881, he worked to install his first by-product coke ovens, using a design he had seen successfully in use in France during a field trip with fellow engineers in 1878 organised by the Iron and Steel Institute.²⁷

Conventionally coke, the vital fuel for iron making, was obtained by burning raw coal in open kilns, nicknamed ‘beehives’ because of their shape. This was effective but the burning process gave off tarry gases and ammonia that were simply left to pollute the surrounding area. The improved process, which Henry wanted to promote, turned raw coal into coke by controlled heating in airless retorts with the gas and tar gradually siphoned off and stored. These by-products had value as input for other chemical processes and could be sold, thereby improving the overall profitability of coke production. The use of similar airless retorts to carbonise coal was becoming common in Britain to generate methane gas (‘town gas’) for lighting and other uses. But many colliers and iron masters were much more sceptical about airless ovens to make coke suitable for their needs.²⁸

6.5 Diagram of a Simon System gradual reduction roller milling installation from the early 1880s showing the sequence of grinding and sifting out of impurities to obtain the maximum amount of top-quality white flour. Source: Henry Simon, ‘Modern Flour-milling in England’, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 70 (1882).

As was Henry’s preferred business strategy, he strove to introduce the by-product coke oven to collieries and steel plants in Britain by going into partnership with François Carves, a well-established French engineer specialising in coke oven design. A joint company, Simon-Carves was set up in 1880. Henry’s entry into the coke oven business was signalled to people in the industry by his May 1880 paper read before the Iron and Steel Institute, with a strongly argued economic case for the profitability of its by-products. But the paper also advocated on the grounds of efficiency and environmental protection.

The first installation of the Simon-Carves by-product system, replacing traditional beehive coke ovens, was at the Pease & Partners colliery at Crook, Co. Durham in 1881. A bank of twenty-five coke ovens was precisely built, using fireclay bricks, each 23 ft long and 6 ft 6 inches high, surrounded by flues to carry hot gas to bake the coal within. Each oven was charged with 4.5 tons of coal at a time. Each cycle took six hours and then the oven doors were opened, and mechanical rams pushed the red-hot coke out and fresh coal was loaded. In a reciprocal manner, some of the coal gas given off was burnt to provide the heating of the ovens and waste heat from the flues was fed to steam boilers to provide the energy needed to drive the fans and pumps to handle the by-products. It was an energy efficient and continuous production process. The overall efficacy and cost effectiveness of the new by-product coke ovens at the Pease & Partner’s colliery was reported in the press in the summer of 1883, prompting Henry to write a letter to the Manchester Guardian pointing out that they were ‘the first constructed in England under my license and according to plans furnished from my office’. Careful comparison of the earlier beehive oven process and the new Simon-Carves system at Bankfoot showed a 15 per cent increase in yield of coke.³⁰ Some critics claimed the quality was not as good and a number of established and vocal iron masters in this period asserted that beehive produced coke was best for their operations.³¹

With the entry into the coke oven field and the formation of Simon-Carves company, Henry’s expanding business operations needed more office space. In 1884, the company took space in an imposing five-storey office building, 20 Mount Street next to Central Station and a stone’s throw from Manchester Town Hall. It is not clear how much of the building the company occupied initially, but in later years large signs promoting both Henry Simon and Simon-Carves companies were displayed on the outside.

Simon-Carves undertook further installations in the early 1880s but progress in convincing established interests in the coking sector to adopt a new process was tough-going, particularly in comparison to the Henry Simon company’s rate of success in flour roller milling. A paper read by Henry to the Iron and Steel Institute in 1885 documented the progress, including large projects for fifty by-product coke ovens for Bear-Park Coal and Coke Co. in Durham.³² To encourage more collieries and steel makers to switch to the Simon-Carves by-product coke ovens, Henry offered capital financing of construction in return for a share of revenue from selling the chemical by-products.³³ This shifted the risk from the owners onto Henry’s shoulders, but strongly demonstrated his confidence in the superiority of this new process over the conventional ‘beehive’ oven. He was proved right in the value of chemical by-products, and the experience Simon-Carves gained in processing different chemicals would subsequently help the company expand into the design of complex chemical facilities, including ones manufacturing sulphuric acid and ammonia. This specialised field proved a profitable one, particularly during the First World War and subsequently.

6.6 The original ‘beehive’ coke ovens at Pease’s West colliery are shown on the left of this painting, W. Wheldon, ‘North Eastern coalfield: colliery pit-head and coking ovens in England’. (c. 1845). Source: Science Museum Group Collection, ref. co521755.

6.7 Letter from Henry Simon to the editor of the Manchester Guardian about the installation of the Simon-Carves Ovens at Pease’s West Collieries. Source: Manchester Guardian (27 July 1883), p. 7.

6.8 The Mount Street offices. Source: title page of Flour Mill Machinery, Henry Simon Ltd, 1923.

The coke oven business continued to be more challenging than flour milling for Henry’s companies. Production statistics, for example, show that even in 1905 the sector was still dominated by the traditional beehive oven process. Only 15 per cent of coke produced in Britain came from the by-product system, and of this, Simon Carves had a 13 per cent share, some 726 ovens, which was a fraction of the market leader, which had 2,233 operating ovens.³⁴

Henry’s successful management of a growing engineering enterprise

As the 1880s was drawing to a close, Henry had succeeded in building up two large engineering companies, promulgating the Simon name proudly into the wider world. He had put a tremendous amount of time and energy into cultivating these specialised businesses, winning new customers and gaining repeat orders, developing and refining the technical processes, beginning to design his own machinery and taking out patents. His philosophy for business success, codified in 1888 formed part of a small book, Rathschlaege für meine Kinder [Advice for my Children], written for his children and repeated down the years by his son Ernest, focused firstly on the intrinsic value in taking a synoptic view of scientific and technological developments, and looking to synthesise and practically apply innovations. As Henry noted ‘for my boys’ in the booklet, ‘[y]ou must keep your eyes open for a speciality. A new system or patent to achieve better results in some large industry.’³⁵

Henry cultivated wide scientific knowledge in his participation in learned societies locally, such as the Manchester Geographical Society, along with his membership of important national institutions like the Royal Geographical Society, the Society of Arts (now the RSA) and professional engineering bodies in Britain and Europe. Again, in his book of advice, he tutored his sons, ‘read good periodicals in different languages and remain posted in all that is going on in science’. Henry himself was fluent in French as well as German and English, travelled frequently in Europe and maintained wide contacts with leading engineering firms on the continent. As noted above, his ‘discovery’ of the Carves design of coke ovens had happened on a study tour of France in 1878.

A second element in Henry’s approach to business was a sense of due caution and seeking sustainable growth through partnerships to spread the risk. The goal was to use capital generated by profits for reinvestment into growing the company, rather than rapid expansion using debt finance. As Henry wrote in the Rathschlaege für meine Kinder, ‘[d]o not risk your capital until you are as certain as possible of success. Rather begin by working with or for others, to divide the risk until you can afford to risk alone.’ Ernest also later reflected in the 1940s, ‘[a]mong the few notes my father left for his sons was one urging us, if in business, always to be in a position to send for our bankers rather than letting the bankers send for us’.³⁶ As the companies became larger, this approach remained possible as major shareholders were family members who were supportive and willing to forgo dividends to support endogenous growth.

A drive for quality and cultivating customers for the long term was the third strain of Henry’s business acumen. In an age of exaggerated promises and companies that failed to deliver, Henry Simon Ltd was reliable and evidently built a strong reputation for honest dealing, delivery of machinery and plant designs that worked as advertised, along with evident depth of technical expertise in what they were selling. This necessitated forging a small and dedicated cadre of engineers at his companies that over the years built up real experience in what they were doing. Decades later this was described as Henry’s ‘consistent refusal merely to compete on price and his determination to offer nothing but the best milling system, the best machinery and the best technical service’.³⁷ In this the two companies succeeded in being recognised as leading centres of practical knowledge and experience in specific fields of mechanical and chemical engineering. This translated into decades of healthy profits.

In 1889, Henry read a major paper to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers with the aim to draw ‘attention to the very extraordinary revolution … in progress in the manufacture of flour by the substitution of the roller system for the ancient method of grinding by stones’.³⁸ The paper demonstrated the positive impact of the re-organisation and wholesale automation of processes from raw wheat to finished flour that had raised productivity and reduced costs. Henry asserted in the paper that his company had completed over 200 mill installations since 1878, some costing up to £40,000. Interestingly, the case study chosen to illustrate the paper was not an example close to home, but a major new mill and granary installation in Rio De Janeiro, demonstrating very directly how the company was gaining international success and prestige. The winning of overseas contracts would be increasingly important to business growth and was a major source of pride and used in marketing. The tenth edition of the marketing map (1892) (Plate 2) featured an inset to show ‘some of foreign & colonial plants on the H. Simon’s system’, including multiple installations in Southern Africa, India, Australia and New Zealand.³⁹ The company had a permanent branch office in Sydney by this point and, given growing success in the country, established a separate Australian subsidiary in 1893. The Henry Simon company introduced their roller milling system to the Japanese market in 1892 when they built a plant in Nagasaki, their first in Asia. The most remote milling contract undertaken in this period was in New Caledonia, in the South Pacific, built under special commission for the French Government as it was still a penal colony. It is noteworthy that Henry was not pursuing milling contracts in Europe at this point, presumably because some of his patent licenses with key machinery companies in German precluded his entry into this market. It remains unclear why the company did not pursue contracts in North America at this time.

The Henry Simon milling machinery catalogue from 1892 gives more statistics on the expansion of the Simon System, noting that by June that year the company had installed 394 roller-mill plants. The Simon company dominated major clusters of large flour mills in key British port cities: ‘in Liverpool 13 mills with an aggregate output of about 1.5 million sacks … have been erected on the Simon System’.⁴⁰ Other evidence of the prominence of the company in the field cited in the catalogue were the thirty-seven complete roller mills using competitors’ machinery that had been ‘remodelled and reconstructed on the Simon System’.⁴¹

Henry was reliant on a small but first-rate staff of engineers, draughtsmen and sales agents, but was evidently a ‘hands-on’ manager and fully engaged with the technical detail as well as charting the strategic course for the two companies’ growth. In today’s parlance, he might be described as a ‘workaholic’. Throughout his early career he seems to have been effective at juggling competing projects and consulting jobs, as well as taking an active interest in different innovations. For example, in 1877 he read a detailed paper to the Iron and Steel Institute which demonstrated his technical knowledge and active interest in exploiting a novel construction technique based on the ideas of Belgian mining engineer Joseph Chaudron; and then the following year Henry was taking out a patent (with Charles Fairbairn) for a ‘machine for impressing screw threads on bolts, etc.’.⁴² Besides activities in technical engineering disciplines and demanding everyday business tasks, into the 1890s Henry was becoming ever more engaged in civic work in Manchester. Such high levels of intense work and accompanying stress had an impact on his long-term health and likely contributed to his worsening heart condition.

In October 1892, Henry started the ‘Circular to his clients and others’ in the milling business, a publicity bulletin designed to flag new developments, celebrate major contracts won and build the ‘Simon’ brand.⁴³ Some of the content was evidently personal, written in the first person, especially in the early years. Part of his successful salesmanship was based on his own character and trustworthiness. Included with the December 1892 Circular was a ‘motto calendar’ for the coming year; the issuing of such calendars, created by family members, became a longstanding tradition of the company.⁴⁴ In due course the Circulars would also be produced in French, Spanish and German to better communicate with international clients, and thousands of copies were despatched across the world. Also, in 1892 a branch milling machinery production outfit was established in Germany – Simon, Buhler and Baumann company. Growing business success was reflected in his personal circumstances, with his family having moved into Lawnhurst, a large mansion on the edge of Didsbury, by 1893.

A key part of Henry’s business success was based on the use of patents. He was keen-eyed in finding useful patents by other machine makers and innovators to exploit. He also spent considerable time and money taking out new patents on his own ideas. Significantly, by the mid-1890s he was also involved in litigating against infringement of patents. Some of these legal battles were costly and a major drain on his time that could have been more productively applied. But evidently Henry thought it important to win in terms of business operations and perhaps more so for his professional reputation. In early 1893, Henry (and others), who held the patent rights for the UK and European market for the ‘Cyclone’ dust collector (it was invented in the USA by the Knickerbocker Company, of Jackson, Michigan), went to court claiming infringement of by the manufacturer Pieter Van-Gelder and his machine called ‘The Tornado’. Henry won the case and substantial compensation. In the next year, Henry was the defendant in an infringement lawsuit brought by Messrs Tom and George Marsden Parkinson, flour millers from Doncaster, concerning his patented purifier machine. The plaintiff’s legal action was backed by Robinson & Sons Ltd of Rochdale, who were the major rival to Henry Simon in the milling machinery sector. The Parkinson v. Simon case was decided in the High Court in Henry’s favour in March 1894, but the plaintiffs appealed, and the case eventually was heard in the House of Lords. The verdict in July 1895 affirmed the judgement of the Court of Appeal and the case was dismissed without Henry’s barristers being called to present evidence. The costs were high in financial terms – estimated at £10,000 including fees to expensive legal representation – but also a ‘waste of time and brainwork’. Henry attended court and was called as a witness, and the stress seemingly contributed to his worsening health at this time.⁴⁵

It was evident that by the mid-1890s the Simon System in flour milling was dominant across key cities in Britain and, crucially, by this point this included London. The large mills which the company had equipped were producing two-thirds of the total flour manufactured in London by mid-1895.⁴⁶ The business was also moving beyond milling machinery to become a recognised design consultancy for large grain silos for storage and distribution. This kind of high value-added design services work would generate an increasing share of profits in the future. In 1897, Henry changed the business structure into a limited liability company with shareholders (many of whom were in the family) to provide Henry Simon Ltd with a more stable financial footing going forward.

The scale of success of Henry Simon Ltd was noted in the Occasional Letters in the later 1890s, with a roll call of major mill and granary projects delivered and record order books. This was clearly not an unbiased source of information, but one can gain a sense of the extensive geography of the milling business by comparing the company’s marketing maps from 1892 and 1898 and what was achieved in those busy six years (Plates 2, 3). There were burgeoning numbers of installations across the UK, particularly in the key port cities, but also multiple contracts won in Australia, southern Africa and across India. Some of the export success was facilitated by strong colonial connections and the primacy of the English language in commerce favouring British companies in places like India and South Africa. More unexpected was the strength of business ties Henry Simon Ltd developed with South American countries, with many large mill and granary contracts won in Argentina in particular. Within the UK, a signature project for Henry Simon Ltd during this period was the design and equipping of a completely new double-mill on the docks at Birkenhead for W. Vernon and Son’s, the most important millers in Liverpool and one of the leading firms nationally. The mills represented a major capital investment of over £200,000 and could produce 12,000 sacks of flour per week. The mills were celebrated as the pinnacle of efficiency, due in large part to the design expertise of Henry Simon Ltd, which the company had refined over the previous twenty years:

Sadly, Henry would not live to see the full operation of Vernon and Son’s state-of-the-art Simon System mill, as he died in 1899.

The 1900s and the second-generation family firms

Henry was cremated in July 1899, in a facility he had been instrumental in founding and using furnaces he had designed. His professional contribution to engineering was recorded in lengthy obituaries published by the journals of the Institutions of Civil Engineers and Mechanical Engineers and the Iron and Steel Institute.⁴⁸ His death marked a period of transition for the businesses but did not disrupt their growth and prosperity unduly. While Henry had been the driving force and source of ideas, he had been, particularly from the later 1890s, supported by loyal and talented lieutenants in both Henry Simon Ltd and Simon-Carves Ltd. His death was also not unexpected, as he had suffered several years of ill health and substantial periods away from day-to-day business to recuperate. At an Extraordinary General Meeting in November 1899, Joseph Ingleby, who had worked with Henry since 1871 and been the key business partner through the years of struggle in the 1880s and contributed to the success enjoyed in the 1890s, was appointed chairman. Two other long-serving senior staff, William Mehlhaus and George Huxley, were made directors.⁴⁹ The companies enjoyed enviable reputations in their fields for quality and innovation and were operating debt free.

Despite the changes in senior management, Henry Simon Ltd continued to do brisk business. As documented in the March 1901 Occasional Letter, during 1900 Henry Simon Ltd had managed the construction of forty new flour mills as well as reconstruction and extensions of existing mills. The company installed grain preparation plants for eighteen clients and supervised the building of seven large new storage granaries. Moreover, ‘complete new roller plants have been erected at many places abroad [including] Cawnpore, India; Lima and Buenos Ayres, South America; Port Elizabeth, South Africa; Tamwork, Laggan, Pittsworth, Australia; Ulverston, Launcheston, Tasmania’.⁵⁰

Ernest Simon was still a student at Cambridge University, undertaking an engineering degree, when his father Henry died. Ernest did not much enjoy student days by all accounts, but successfully completed a first-class degree, despite the shock of the loss of his father. Upon graduation in 1901, he began to work in both family businesses, and from a young age of twenty-two, he gained experience quickly and enjoyed the confidence of senior staff appointed by Henry.

Ernest was clearly intelligent, diligent and with a real aptitude for the engineering business, but he had much to learn. He missed the guidance of his father and felt the heavy burden of responsibility being the senior Simon son involved in running the companies successfully and supporting the wider family financially. Mary Stocks’ biography of Ernest reports that he found the period 1901–11 the worse decade in his life. Yet he acknowledged in 1953 that the continued growth and development of the family firms had not ‘been as difficult as the work accomplished by my father in laying the foundations of the business’.⁵¹

With the support of shareholders, composed largely of his family, in less than ten years he was beginning to run the businesses himself; as he reflected later in life: ‘my father’s trustees appointed me as Governing Director at the age of twenty-nine [1908] partly because they thought me competent, mainly because I was my father’s son. It would have been very difficult to remove me if things had gone wrong.’⁵² Ingleby retired as chairman of Henry Simon Ltd in 1908 but remained chairman of Simon-Carves Ltd for several more years. By 1910, Ernest had assumed the role of governing director of both Henry Simon Ltd and Simon-Carves Ltd. The companies had 350 employees by then, up from just fourteen in 1883.⁵³

By the early 1910s, Ernest was also becoming active in politics as a local councillor. The businesses were expanding and undertaking extensive contracts abroad. In 1912, Henry Simon Ltd also signed a large contract for the Manchester Ship Canal Company to design and equip a massive new granary in the middle of Salford docks. In 1912, Manchester docks imported 528,000 tons of grain and the existing grain elevator on Trafford Wharf could not handle further growth. Granary no. 2 was a huge 160-ft tall steel-reinforced concrete edifice comprising 260 storage bins capable of holding 40,000 tons of grain when full, along with the means to select and weigh it, and discharge it into barges, rail wagons or trucks for onward distribution.

6.9 Cover of a promotional booklet for a new grain elevator designed by Henry Simon Ltd for the Manchester Ship Canal Company (c. 1915). Source: Martin Dodge.

Simon businesses at war, 1914–18

The First World War was a testing time for the Simon engineering companies and deeply tragic personally for the Simon family. The companies had to take on much specialised war work at short notice and with initially a diminished roster as staff volunteered to serve in the military. Ernest lost three of his brothers during the conflict and took up the additional burden of supporting their surviving families.

Henry Simon Ltd engineering works in Bredbury and Stalybridge were placed under the direction of the Ministry of Munitions and were enlarged to handle more urgent war work. Over the course of the war, they turned out hundreds of thousands of casings for explosive shells for the army artillery and the Admiralty. The conscription of many existing workshop staff meant the company had to employ about 1,000 more unskilled workers, about half of which were female. The demand meant that for many months a three-shift system was necessary at the Stalybridge works.⁵⁵

With the reduction of available manual labour at docks and warehouses, Henry Simon Ltd was called upon to produce new pneumatic handling systems and portable conveyor systems to help keep goods flowing into the country. The assemblage of large floating grain elevators was an important aspect of their war work, some of which were supplied for use in French ports. The Simon-Carves company, given its relevant expertise, was commissioned by the government to design and supervise the construction of sulphuric acid chemical plants that were deemed vital to the war effort. By 1918, the range and intensity of war work meant its staff trebled in size.⁵⁶

Ernest also grappled with a dilemma on how best to serve his country at the start of the war and rued the fact that the government did not provide ready guidance. In the end, Ernest believed he could contribute more by staying in charge of the businesses rather than signing up for military service, like his three younger brothers. ‘He felt that his continued presence was absolutely necessary to both companies, though it is clear that this conclusion did not leave him with a quiet mind.’⁵⁷

Making their own machinery and the Cheadle Heath factory

For the early decades of the milling business, when Henry was in charge, the company had not manufactured its own flour milling and processing machinery. Instead, it had licensed and resold other companies’ machinery – typically putting a ‘Henry Simon’ badge on the cover – or it had its own patented designs for milling machinery built under contract by other firms (usually in Germany). Henry also contracted with Seck Bros Company in Dresden and used their ‘Reform’ brand name in Britain. He was involved as a financial partner in Buhler, Baumann and Co. in Frankfurt, from 1892, that built milling machinery for him. The Henry Simon company had a small workshop in Manchester on East Street, but this seems to have been for the testing and maintenance of machinery.

Henry Simon Ltd began producing its own machinery in its first UK factory in 1902, when it acquired a direct interest in the Eagle Ironworks in Stalybridge operated by Messrs Bailey & Garnett. In 1906, it acquired the factory outright and over subsequent years it was enlarged. The manufacturing capacity was further enhanced in 1915 when Henry Simon acquired the milling engineering business and existing factory of Briddon and Fowler in Bredbury. Simon-Carves always remained a specialist in design and supervision of installations; it never manufactured the components of the coke ovens, coal washers or steam boilers itself.

Following the return to civilian work after the war, the Simon companies enjoyed full order books, in part because competitors in Europe, particularly skilled engineering firms in Germany, had been so disrupted. But the company was aware of the threat of competition from continental firms in the milling business, particularly well-organised German machine makers, which would reappear in due course.

There was a strategic decision taken in the early 1920s to bring together all the milling machinery manufacturing into a large, purpose-built new factory and associated administrative offices. Initially, the site for a model factory was sought in Fallowfield, Manchester but the planning application faced strong opposition from local residents and the company shifted focus and acquired a greenfield site south of the city at Cheadle Heath on which to build.⁵⁸ The facility was carefully designed for efficiency of manufacturing and to be a good place to work. It was also conveniently located for Ernest, being a short drive south from his home in Didsbury. He was also proud that the works had been financed internally from accumulated profits over ten years rather than through borrowing.⁵⁹

The factory, covering about four acres, was a conventional single-storey building, comprising a specialised wood-working shop, sheet-metal shop, machine and fitting shop, erecting bays, and painting and packing shops. There were also offices, a laboratory, a large staff dining-room and an experimental bakery, and finally ample outside space for sports of various kinds. The factory was formally opened in 1926 and production ceased in Stalybridge and Bredbury. Within a year, around 400 workers were in the factory and in later years the facilities would be expanded, including large drawing offices and space for research and development for both the Henry Simon milling business and Simon-Carves, and subsidiaries. Office staff were moved out of the Mount Street building, which was fully vacated by 1930. The works were gradually surrounded by residential development and other light industry due to the interwar suburban sprawl of Manchester and Stockport.

6.10 The new factory for Henry Simon Ltd on Bird Hall Lane, Cheadle Heath. (c. 1927). Source: SSP M14/6/4.

By the mid-1920s, the early postwar boom had faded, and the British economy was struggling with large-scale unemployment and much industrial unrest, culminating in the General Strike. In these conditions the Simon business struggled to secure new orders domestically, but profits were buoyed by international success. In 1926, Henry Simon Ltd had orders for over £900,000 from different parts of the world, the best in the company’s history.⁶⁰ The milling and silo department were winning many orders in South America. For example, in 1927 the company won a contract in Argentina from the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway Co. valued at £800,000 to construct a huge new granary at the port of Bahia Blanca capable of storing 80,000 tons of grain.⁶¹ The business opportunities proved to be so strong in Argentina that the company decided to create a branch office in the country rather than rely on a separate agent. Business in Australia was also booming, and the company decided to expand its subsidiary with more manufacturing capacity to keep its prices competitive in the face of high import tariffs from the government.

Ernest Simon’s style of management and the nature of the family firms

How did Ernest drive the Simon businesses forward and achieve sustained growth and diversification, and also – in parallel – build a successful career in public campaigning and political office? After the first decade of the 1900s of full-time work in business, Ernest consciously stood back from the daily running of the Simon engineering companies and sought a more ‘hands-off’ approach, to spend time only on high-level strategy and on the appointment and promotion of key management personnel. ‘In 1912 I joined the Manchester City Council, and from that time on I never gave more than half my time to the business; at certain times, as for instance when I was in Parliament … much less.’⁶² Certainly he seems to have been able to stick to this strategy and to carve out vital time for public work, which became more pressing in the 1920s when he was made Lord Mayor of Manchester in 1921–22 and was also seriously ill for several months with tuberculosis (and yet still also found time to publish his first book, The Smokeless City!) and during his first spell as an MP in Westminster in 1924.

Following his father’s lead, Ernest believed success for large organisations and commercial firms depended on the brains and drive of a few men at the top of the management. As chairman and governing director he was prepared to delegate a lot of power to managing directors and the key people running separate departments in the Simon companies, granting them a lot of operational independence and responsibility for contracts and thus also carrying the risks. This approach seems to have generated the reward of a motivated senior staff and scope for innovation. As Ernest reflected in 1947: ‘It is far better to err on the side of giving too much responsibility than on the side of too much interference.’⁶³ This was clearly in marked contrast with Henry’s much more ‘hands-on’ approach to business management.

Moreover, Ernest believed himself to be a good judge of a person’s capacity and character and was demonstrably willing to promote younger people he believed capable in the businesses and give them authority and responsibility at a time when many organisations were rigidly hierarchical and seniority was earnt by years of service rather than latent abilities. As Stocks writes about Ernest in the 1910s, he clearly recognised ‘his power to deal with men’. In 1910, he wrote in his diary: ‘I feel sure that the extensive reorganization of the business I have already carried through has come just in time. We are in for a real hard fight, but I feel that I am a much better man than any of my English competitors anyway.’⁶⁴ Along with the willingness to delegate power and leaving daily decision-making to trusted lieutenants was a ruthless pragmaticism to remove people who failed to deliver. In this respect he characterised himself as having an autocratic style of management, despite his philosophical commitment to democracy.⁶⁵

Another vital element in Ernest’s successful management was that he was evidently extremely hardworking. His work approach was also highly productive – he had mental focus, an ability to compartmentalise and decisiveness in action – common traits in successful people. ‘Nature and heredity have endowed [Ernest] with unusual gifts, which he has sedulously cultivated. His mind moves with exceptional speed and incisiveness and his powers of concentration is formidable; no one wastes less time; no one more swiftly grasps essentials or more ruthlessly casts aside irrelevance and triviality.’⁶⁶ His early affluence meant he also had ample help from diligent assistants, secretaries and researchers. His son Brian commented that ‘I fully recognised the efficiency of his office arrangements only when dealing with his papers after his death. There were two highly skilled and devoted secretaries of long service, one for business affairs, one for personal activities.’⁶⁷ He had a private chauffeured car at his beck and call and travelled in first-class comfort, so was able to work on frequent train journeys to London and longer overseas trips on steam ships.

Ernest’s work ethic was allied to a genuine interest in engineering – his membership of the Institutions of Civil and Mechanical Engineers was not for show – demonstrated by his ability and willingness to keep up with technical developments in milling, and giving learned papers on these, whilst also pursuing politics and public work so intensely. This was evidenced in 1930 when he published a technical book The Physical Science of Flour Milling,⁶⁸ while he was MP for Withington and pushing for housing reform off the back of his book How to Abolish the Slums (1929).

In early 1934, he consciously stepped back further from the businesses when he formally resigned as chairman of Henry Simon Ltd (although he remained on the board as governing director; and also a major shareholder), noting ‘owing to the very difficult times through which the country is passing, I have decided that it is desirable to give more of my time to public work in order to render any help that lies in my power’.⁶⁹ While he sought more vital time for political engagement, one gets the sense that his imprint on the direction and ethos of the companies was by then firmly set.

A key part of the ethos, where Ernest followed Henry’s ‘guiding policy’ of keeping up with scientific developments and new methods, was a willingness to invest significantly in applied research and later more formalised R&D strategies at the companies. Allied to this was the value in investing in employee training, particularly as it was difficult to recruit new staff with specialised skills: ‘the necessary experts are simply not available; it can only be built up over a period of years by a process of skilled and continuous selection, training and promotion’.⁷⁰ From the 1920s onwards, the companies also saw the value in recruiting more university science graduates, but a lack of a degree was no barrier to the promotion of the most capable people to senior positions. Ernest was also proud of the working conditions provided to both office staff and shop floor workers and sought to offer good salaries, security of employment and to develop good labour relations. The Simon businesses were benevolent employers, and they expected the best from the staff and were rewarded for it.

The Simon name was proudly embedded in the company names, but how much were they ‘family’ firms after Henry’s death and during Ernest’s tenure? In terms of ownership, they were strongly controlled by the family; for example, by 1953, around twenty of Henry Simon’s immediate children and grandchildren were the majority shareholders.⁷¹ In terms of senior staff, this topic was one upon which Ernest felt it necessary to elucidate in his introductory essay in the 1947 promotional book The Simon Engineering Group, perhaps fearing accusations of nepotism and favouritism. As he asserted:

Of Henry’s five sons, interest in the engineering businesses was shown only by Ernest and Harry. Harry Simon (1880–1917) studied engineering at Cambridge, like Ernest, and joined Henry Simon Ltd and made significant contributions in developing the grain silo engineering department into a successful counterpart of the existing milling machinery business. He became a director in Henry Simon Ltd by the 1910s. One can only speculate about what he might have contributed to the businesses had he not been killed in the war. His influence on the business did live on, however, through his sons Anthony and Christopher who went on to hold senior roles in the firms.

Several senior staff and company directors were also from the immediate family through marriage rather than birth. This included Ernest’s brother-in-law Tufton Beamish who had married Margaret Simon in 1914. He had a distinguished career in the British Navy reaching the rank of rear admiral. In 1919, he was appointed to the board of Henry Simon Ltd.

Rupert Potter (1899–1970), Shena’s younger brother, joined the Simon-Carves firm straight from completing an engineering degree at Cambridge University in 1921. He learnt the business initially in the boiler department and his ability meant he rose in the company, being appointed a director of Simon-Carves in 1931 and then chairman in 1939. He eventually became chairman of the newly merged Simon Engineering Group (SEG) in 1960.

The Second World War and the Simon businesses

The engineering expertise across the Simon businesses was pressed into war service from 1939, with much of its activities controlled by the Ministry of Supply. The large machinery workshop at Cheadle Heath, for example, was directed by the government to make armaments of all kinds. The Occasional Letter of June 1946 explained that ‘owing to the difficulty of adapting a works like ours to mass production … most of our output consisted of highly skilled jobs in limited quantities’. This included parts for tanks and components for anti-aircraft guns. The workforce increased by about 75 per cent and employed a large number of new women workers.⁷²

There was little work for the milling department of Henry Simon Ltd beyond necessary repairs to bomb-damaged mills, but the conveying department was called upon to produce all manner of mechanical handling solutions for the ports to keep the food flowing and to speed up production at critical industrial plants. The pressure to grow more food domestically meant an increase in grain harvests, and the Ministry of Food needed more storage and drying capacity and commissioned Henry Simon Ltd to build and equip eight new silos.

The experience of chemical process engineering in Simon-Carves Ltd departments meant the company was commissioned by the government to build seventeen new plants to produce ammonia and eighteen plants to manufacture toluene, in addition to over twenty sulphuric acid plants, including at seven explosives factories.

During the Second World War, Ernest’s depth of experience in management and engineering was put to use to help better organise workforces and the allocation of material and speed up aircraft production. From 1940, he was the area officer for the Ministry of Aircraft Production in the north-western region and was made regional advisor to the ministry a year later. He was also served on the board of Bristol-based firm Parnell Aircraft to reduce their overheads.⁷³

In October 1944, Ernest turned sixty-five, and to mark the occasion staff at all the Simon companies subscribed to buy a birthday gift of a large oil portrait by the one of the leading artists of the time, Thomas Cantrell Dugdale (Figure 6.11; Plate 8). This was formally presented to Ernest in March 1945 after the Annual General Meetings of Henry Simon Ltd and Simon-Carves Ltd.⁷⁴ In a speech at the ceremony, leading shop steward Mr Mallard expressed the ‘wonder and admiration felt by all who knew Sir Ernest at his astonishing capacity to combine the energetic control of two large firms and several subsidiaries with an amount of public work that most men would regard as a full time occupation in itself’.⁷⁵

6.11 Presentation of the birthday portrait to Ernest by J. Mallard, Shop Stewards’ Convenor, Henry Simon Ltd (1945). On the wall behind Ernest is the portrait of Henry Simon by Clara von Rappard. Source: SSP M14/4/24.

Postwar growth and the emergence of the diversified Simon Engineering Group

The Simon firms won a great deal of new work in the immediate postwar boom as their engineering skills were in demand for reconstruction and re-equipping factories, mills, collieries, power stations and chemical plants in Britain and abroad, as well as the broader economic realignment to civilian production after six years of war. The Simon companies had just under 4,000 employees and in 1946 and they booked £10.5m in new orders.⁷⁶ There were few competitors in some of their specialised fields of engineering and consulting, given the shattered economies of major European countries.

The seventy years of the Simon businesses, spanning the era of Henry’s pioneering leadership and then Ernest’s direction and diversification, had given rise to a substantial cluster of separate but allied companies involved in a range of fields of mechanical and chemical process engineering. The original key companies of Henry Simon Ltd and Simon-Carves Ltd had separate senior management and boards of directors but were pooling resources (such as HR and accounting) and sharing facilities on the expanded Cheadle Heath site. They were both still owned and controlled by the same small cadres of family shareholders. After the war, this collection of companies, and distinct contracting and consulting departments, began to be referred to in official documents and publicity as the Simon Engineering Group (SEG). The growth and diversification of the businesses was captured in a substantial self-published 170-page promotional book in 1947 that gave some historical details and was full of photographs of mills and plants the group’s companies had recently built or equipped. In the late 1940s, there was a centrally directed campaign of brand advertising in relevant trade magazines and to an industrial business readership to imprint the notion of the Simon Engineering Group – although it was not a set of companies with a profile in the wider public imagination as they produced no consumer goods or services. The marketing tagline in the adverts that the group ‘serves the fundamental needs of civilisation’ was seemingly a rather grandiose claim but clearly resonated with Henry’s ethos (Figure 6.13).

The details in the 1947 Simon Engineering Group book make it clear how far the original two companies focused on flour milling and coke-oven design founded by Henry had expanded and diversified into relevant specialties. The Henry Simon milling business had diversified into mechanical and pneumatic handling in the 1910s and this proved to be a major success for them, which was particularly evident in the two world wars. In 1911, it formed a separate conveying department based on years of experience building grain silos for flour mills and kitting them out. They further developed pneumatic systems of handling for other bulk materials like coal, ash and oxides and had installed many pneumatic plants of various types for use at ports, mills, power stations, gas works and breweries.

6.12 The span of the SEG companies and departments by the start of the postwar period. Source: Anthony Simon, The Simon Engineering Group (1947).

6.13 Example of brand marketing for the SEG in the postwar period. Source: The Economist (9 April 1949).

Simon-Carves’ core was initially based around chemicals derived from coal, so it was logical – and proved profitable – to diversify into heavy machinery for collieries and specialised design of chemical plants, and later into coal-fired steam boilers for power stations. From 1900, a separate department exploited the Baum coal washer patent from Germany for use in British collieries. The First World War saw the birth of the chemical plant department, the product of wartime contracts for the building of sulphuric acid plants. The department grew significantly during the Second World War, constructing most of the sulphuric acid factories erected in Britain during the conflict.⁷⁷

The growth in the SEG was not solely endogenous from the original two companies, as there were several significant external acquisitions and moves into new lines of business. In 1931, Turbine Gears Ltd was purchased, in part to keep work flowing in the economic troughs of the early 1930s when Henry Simon Ltd and Simon-Carves Ltd struggled to gain new contracts and suffered from bad debts and greater competition from efficient German firms. Acquisitions for supply chain security were made with controlling stakes taken in Thomas Adshead & Son Ltd and the Dudley Foundry, who made metal castings and components for the machinery assembled at the Cheadle Heath works. The Dudley company would become Simon Engineering (Midlands) Ltd in the 1950s and enjoyed considerable success designing vehicle-mounted hydraulic lifting platforms, including the celebrated Simon Snorkel firefighting appliance.⁷⁸ In the early 1930s, the Simon firms also acquired the patent rights from America for Tyresoles, a novel technique to retread old vehicle tyres for resale. This was a distinct new line of business but a justifiable direction, as the SEG book noted: ‘It seemed to be precisely the kind of speciality that Henry Simon had once advised his sons to search for – “a new system or patent to achieve better results in some large industry”.’⁷⁹ After an initial struggle to convince customers and build a market, the Tyresoles Ltd company was making a sizable profit by the 1940s. A decision was taken in 1953 to sell the UK business to Dunlop and use the capital gained to strengthen Tyresoles operations in international markets.⁸⁰

Ernest’s role in the SEG gradually changed after the war as he became solely the ‘governing director’ of the companies, stepping further back from management decision-making. He was approaching his later sixties and past formal retirement age. He seemed confident in a strong cadre of managing directors and executive boards that he had hand-picked and promoted in previous decades. It is clear, though, that Ernest remained connected with what still felt like the Simon family businesses – particularly when he was present in Manchester and able to visit Cheadle Heath or meet senior staff at Broomcroft. And undoubtedly, given his dominant personality and decades of commitment to the companies (plus his substantial shareholdings), he was a powerful figure in their overarching philosophy. The companies proudly acknowledged him as Lord Simon after his peerage in 1947. He also provided sage council to senior directors even though he devoted himself full time to the chairmanship of the BBC from 1947 to 1952. His position as something of an ‘elder statesman’ was, for example, visually resonant in a group photograph of Henry Simon Ltd managers published in the company newsletter in 1951 (Figure 6.14). The wider family still had a strong influence in terms of management positions, directorships and share ownership, with the rise to power of Ernest’s nephews Anthony Simon and Christopher Simon, along with Shena’s much younger brother Rupert Potter, which represented the passing of the reins of management in the running of Simon Engineering Group to a third generation of Simons.

An example of Ernest setting some of the strategic directions in this period was his alertness to the significance of the nationalisation of the coal industry and what that might mean for the family businesses, with it particularly changing the customer base for Simon-Carves Ltd and its subsidiaries. At the time, coal was the dominant source of energy in Britain and security of supply vital to the national economy. During the interwar period, the coal industry was widely viewed as inefficient due to its fragmented structure, with numerous small private mining companies unable to invest sufficiently to raise productivity. Labour relations were poor, and the sector suffered numerous strikes. But the hundreds of separate collieries had proved to be a good market for Simon-Carves Ltd. In these interwar decades, Ernest had a liberal view of economic matters and had long been wary of what he considered to be a dogmatic commitment of the Labour Party to the public ownership of key industries, including the collieries. In conjunction to running the risk of alienating customers for the Simon engineering businesses, this was a main rationale for him not to follow Shena in joining the Labour Party in the interwar years, despite it being largely otherwise aligned to his social and political objectives.⁸¹

By the early 1940s, and with his experience in wartime state-planning of production in the national interest, he came to see the benefits of the nationalisation of the coal mines for more economical operation for wider public benefit rather than private profit. Ernest joined the Labour Party in 1946, and in his maiden speech in the House of Lords in March 1947 spoke strongly in favour of nationalisation as the best way to raise the productivity of the miners. The debate was taking place just after the ‘fuel crisis’ in the harsh winter of 1946/47 when shortages of coal were acute. As Ernest said in the debate:

6.14 Ernest was still symbolically at the heart of the Henry Simon Ltd company, as illustrated in this publicity photograph from 1951. Seated next to him is his brother-in-law, Patrick Hamilton. Also pictured is Christopher Simon, Ernest’s nephew. Source: JRL SEGA, 22, Occasional Letter, 214, October 1951. Copyright the University of Manchester (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

In the end, Simon-Carves found plenty of profitable business opportunities with the newly constituted National Coal Board as a single, large customer when the board embarked on an ambitious investment programme to raise the productivity of existing coal mines and develop new high-output ‘super’ pits. Simon-Carves cultivated this sector to bring technical know-how in mechanical handling to improve coal washing and grading plants at collieries (Plate 4). Simon-Carves was also winning large orders with other domestic nationalised industry, including steam boilers for the power station plant for the British Electricity Authority and coke ovens for new steel works for the Iron and Steel Corporation of Great Britain.

The Simon companies seem to have enjoyed a robust and growing order book into the 1950s and expanding profits. For example, annual profits before tax in Simon-Carves Ltd grew from just £154,000 in 1946 to over £1m in 1954.⁸³ The longstanding Simon ethos of investing back into the business for continued improvement and sustainable growth was reflected in the expansion of the Cheadle Heath site into what might be regarded in contemporary terminology as a corporate campus. In July 1951, a new R&D centre was opened for use across the SEG. This included a prominent tower containing a working model flour mill on which new machinery could be tested; it also served as a technical showroom for prospective customers. Keeping the companies ahead of the competition through investment in applied research and development of techniques was an approach that would have been familiar to, and approved by, Henry Simon. The size of the company in terms of staff numbers had also more than doubled in less than a decade, growing from 3,605 at the start of 1946 to over 7,800 by the beginning 1953; of these around 9 per cent were engineers and senior managers, 11 per cent were draughtsmen; the bulk were classed as skilled manual workers (59 per cent).⁸⁴

The extent of investment in Cheadle Heath also signified the depth of connection to the greater Manchester region, despite the growing pressure on successful firms to join the drift of high-value engineering away from traditional northern strongholds to what were seen by many as more productive and modern sites in the south-east of England. Ernest was not tempted:

The company did open a larger London office – Simon House on Dover Street in 1956 – but it was at that time still a branch office and not a headquarters. Likewise, Ernest and Shena were spending a lot of time in London in the 1950s, but they always saw their private apartment at Marsham Court as a working base and home remained at Broomcroft, Didsbury. The majority of staff were based at the Cheadle Heath site, but the SEG was truly international by the 1950s, winning contracts in wide range of countries, and also had a permanent presence in Australia, Argentina and South Africa.

Atomic power, stock market profits and mergers

From the mid-1950s, one innovative area pursued by Simon-Carves was that of atomic power engineering. This was in partnership with General Electric Company (GEC) Ltd and was a logical development for the company given their work on steam boilers for power stations, along with their strength in complex contracting, and practical experience in designing chemical plants that had to efficiently and safely process hazardous substances. Britain was at the forefront of civil nuclear energy with the opening of the Calder Hall power station in 1956. The company was willing to devote significant resources of skilled engineering staff and capital (£100,000 was invested in 1956) to get into this new field.⁸⁶ It was in line with the ethos originated by Henry Simon to exploit new technical processes, but was not without its controversy, particularly given how closely civil atomic electrical power generation was bound to the secret world of nuclear weapons production. The new field also had invisible and unquantified dangers of radiation, which was exposed by the fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor in Cumbria in 1957. Nonetheless, the Simon-Carves Nuclear Power Division were successful in winning a major part of the construction of the Hunterston magnox power station in Scotland in 1957; and keeping up the export-oriented work, they were in the consortium awarded a contract to build the first atomic power station in Japan in 1959.⁸⁷ Quite how Ernest viewed this commercial pursuit of atomic energy work by the Simon-Carves’ subsidiary is unclear, but what we do know is that he did become concerned about the wider scale threat of nuclear weapons and began to actively support CND in 1958. He chaired a high-profile CND rally at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, acted as the president of the Manchester branch and one of his last speeches in the House of Lords in 1959 was on disarmament.⁸⁸ However, by this point his formal involvement with the companies was as honorific president, having stepped down from the chairmanship of Simon-Carves Ltd in 1954 in favour of Rupert Potter.

6.15 The expanded SEG site at Cheadle Heath (c. 1954). Source: Steam Power Plant, Simon-Carves Ltd (1955).

6.16 The tower containing a working model flour mill at Cheadle Heath topped off by a prominent ‘SIMON’ sign. Source: JRL SEGA, 23, Occasional Letter, 225, June 1953, p. 3. Copyright the University of Manchester (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

In the previous year, the holding company for Henry Simon Ltd subsidiaries seems to have become more avaricious with a significant public share offering on the stock market. This followed a similar share offering by Simon-Carves Ltd in autumn of 1955.⁸⁹ Some 20 per cent of the Henry Simon (Holdings) Ltd company were offered for sale, for the first time to the wider public, at 16s 9d per ordinary share.⁹⁰ The sale proved successful and increased the shareholder base from around 300 to over 1,200 – including some 280 SEG employees.⁹¹ The power of longstanding family shareholders was diluted, but at the same they enjoyed a significant boost in financial value from the public share offerings and the increased stock market transactions. The unearned nature of this wealth troubled Ernest’s conscience, ‘but pride in the enterprise founded by his father and cherished by himself outweighed the thought that such enterprise was enabling a number of people, much as he loved them, to live in affluence on the labour of others’.⁹²

In what turned out to be Ernest’s final year, the Simon Engineering companies were significantly reorganised financially with the formal merging of the two major parts – Henry Simon and Simon-Carves. The announcement of the merger in March 1960 seemed to initiate a strange attempt to thwart the process, with a surprise takeover bid launched by EMI (Electric and Musical Industries company) to purchase Henry Simon Ltd outright. At the time the chairman of EMI was Joseph Lockwood, who had worked for Henry Simon Ltd since the 1930s, was chairman in the 1950s and was still a board member. (He is pictured sitting directly alongside Ernest in the 1951 photograph, Figure 6.14.) The company’s board recommended shareholders reject the takeover, and it was subsequently withdrawn.⁹³ Ernest was on holiday with Shena in Cornwall while these events unfolded, and it seems he was not consulted, perhaps because he would not have been in favour of the financial ‘wheeler-dealing’.⁹⁴ Rupert Potter, chairman of Simon-Carves Ltd, recommended the merger deal in his May 1960 annual report, ‘I am convinced that the shareholders ... will benefit in the future from this landmark in our company history.’⁹⁵ The merger took effect in July 1960, unlocking the capital of the combined group – valued at £30m (which would be about £574m today) – and, again, there were unearned profits flowing to shareholders, which Ernest recorded as a ‘most deplorable aspect of capitalism’.⁹⁶ Ernest died in October 1960. In their first year, the new Simon Engineering Group Ltd booked revenues of over £41m and a post-tax profits £2.8m.⁹⁷ It was controlled by Rupert Potter and the only Simon family member on the board was Christopher Simon, who also served as company secretary.

6.17 Simon-Carves Ltd advert celebrating their awarding of the Hunterston atomic power station contract. Source: Financial Times (13 November 1958).

Conclusion

In the eight decades from late 1870s to 1960, the two Simon generations, father and son, had built a large, successful and well-regarded set of engineering companies. Henry’s real success came from being a systems integrator, and also evidently from being a good salesman and self-promoter. In the initial two fields of flour milling and coke production, his ingenuity and drive meant he convinced companies to reorganise through all stages for efficiency of output using the Simon System.

The importance of Ernest’s role through the first half of the twentieth century in steering the businesses forward should not be underestimated either. Despite taking a consciously ‘hands-off’ approach and devoting a great deal of time and energy to public work and politics, particularly after the First World War, his undoubted intellectual capacity and genuine interest in the technicalities of process engineering meant he had a significant positive impact on the steady growth of the family businesses. According to his biographer Stocks, ‘there can be little doubt that his continued policy direction was a major factor in the spectacular expansion of both companies and their final evolution into the Simon Engineering Group with commitments for the installation of engineering plant[s] in four continents’.⁹⁸

They were specialised firms and were little, if at all, known to the general public as they produced no consumer goods or services. However, they seemed to have enjoyed a strong reputation within their respective industrial engineering fields for quality, and as prudent and well-managed businesses within financial markets. Locally, in the Manchester area, the Simon firms were well known as excellent companies to work for.⁹⁹

Importantly, they largely remained family businesses through to the 1960s which embodied the ethos of Henry, inherited and promulgated by Ernest, in doing ‘good business’ and deserving of the rewards of success because they were also creating wider benefits to society by improving the efficiency of key industrial processes. Furthermore, a good deal of the profits were purposefully reinvested into the business (often to the benefit of clients and staff ahead of the directors and shareholders). Moreover, much of the personal wealth flowing to Henry and Ernest from the business was directed into philanthropic projects and supporting their public work.

They were doing good business in several senses of economic value and social values:

The Simon family engineering businesses were evidently that.