A family inheritance

‘If I come to Manchester, I am inclined to make the university my chief job, and try to be chairman.’ So wrote Ernest Simon in his diary in 1929, as he reached the age of fifty.¹ He had recently been elected for a second time as MP for Manchester Withington, and was deliberating about whether he should pursue his public career at Westminster or in Manchester: hence ‘If I come to Manchester’. The electors of Penryn and Falmouth made his decision for him in 1931, although his decision not to fight Withington and to contest a Cornish seat instead already indicated a flagging enthusiasm for a parliamentary career. Only then did he return to the choice between ‘politics’ and ‘education’ as rival vocations. He set out the choice in a number of letters addressed to his elder son Roger and, at greater length, to his old Liberal Summer School colleague Ramsay Muir in 1934. By that time he had been Treasurer of the University of Manchester for over a year, and was impressed with the opportunities it offered him. The Vice-Chancellor, Walter Moberly, was ‘in every way a first-class V.C., an excellent man to work with; nobody could do the academic side better’; that said, ‘He needs somebody to work with on the business side’, and Ernest saw this as his role. He also expected, prematurely as it turned out, that he would soon succeed to the chairmanship.²

It was quite something for a lay (unpaid) governor of a university to contemplate committing to it as his ‘chief job’ in this way. Yet this was how Ernest’s career developed, once he had put an end to his parliamentary ambitions.³ He had been appointed to the University of Manchester’s court of governors in 1915, and six months later to its council, the executive body, and would retain these two positions, more or less without interruption, until his death forty-five years later. He would go on to hold the two senior lay offices for exceptionally long periods, being treasurer from 1932 to 1941 and chairman of council from 1941 to 1957. His twenty-five-year service in senior office was unequalled in the University’s history – and remains so.⁴ He sustained his close involvement in the University’s business even when he was chairman of the BBC (1947–52).⁵ He also interpreted his role capaciously. Rarely did he confine himself to the established responsibilities of lay officers, and the boundary between their role and that of academics was one he overstepped with some relish. He had no hesitation in expressing strong views on chair appointments, which was very much an academic responsibility, and continued to do so even when reproached by the vice-chancellor.⁶ He could be a difficult colleague, and had a strained relationship with Lord Woolton, who was the University’s chancellor for almost the entirety of Ernest’s service as chairman of council.⁷ But he was deeply interested in the University as a force for social good and as an intellectual community, and saw himself as a part of that community. He was a munificent and interventionist donor, notably funding the innovative Simon fellowships in the social sciences. Moreover, his position in the University of Manchester also gave him the standing to make a remarkable contribution to the national conversation on the role of universities: he could even claim to have done more than anyone to initiate that conversation at the end of the Second World War.

Historians of British universities have shown curiously little interest in the contributions of lay governors, who, if they feature at all in university histories, appear cloaked in collective anonymity. Ernest Simon’s relationship with the University of Manchester is illuminating, not because it was typical by any means, but because he was so distinctive. Of all such figures in the twentieth century, he was probably the most influential and certainly the one who thought and wrote most about what universities were for and how they could best serve the community.

In forming such a close relationship with the University, Ernest built on foundations laid by his father. Henry Simon’s relationship with Owens College – the precursor of the Victoria University of Manchester – is opaque, however. When Henry arrived in Manchester in 1860, a graduate of Zurich Polytechnic, he would have found academic life in the city in a rudimentary state. Owens College, founded in Quay Street in the city centre in 1851, had struggled to overcome the scepticism of middle-class parents about the value of higher education, and the Manchester Guardian deemed it a ‘mortifying failure’ in 1858.⁸ The Mechanics’ Institution, which is now commemorated as if it were an embryonic UMIST, really dispensed an elementary education enriched by a smattering of high culture. But Henry arrived at an important moment in educational history. It was in the 1860s that demand for higher education started to take off, and Owens College began to flourish to such an extent that a movement was launched for its ‘extension’ – that is, institutional reform, expansion and relocation to the site on Oxford Road still occupied by the University of Manchester. Central to that movement, which came to fruition in 1870–73, was a new and symbiotic relationship between the college and Manchester’s business and professional communities. Those communities, buoyed by civic pride, weighed in with generous benefactions; in return, a mode of governance was devised which established a subtle balance between academic self-government and accountability to civic notables. It was a structure that worked because it could draw on a strong tradition of civic service among the mercantile classes, or burghers, of Manchester. That structure, which came to be the norm for English civic universities, would provide the setting for much of Ernest’s work.

Manchester’s German community made an important contribution to the formation of the city’s distinctive burgher spirit. This community had strong links with the reformed Owens College, supplying academics (Schorlemmer, Schuster), governors (the Behrens family in particular) and some of its greatest benefactors, including, most importantly, the railway engineer Charles Beyer. It was through the German community that the Simons first established their connection with the College. Henry Simon recalled as much in his speech on laying the foundation stone for the new Physics Building at Owens College in 1898. His connection with the College stretched all the way back to the early 1860s, when his friend Carl Schorlemmer introduced him to Henry Roscoe in the Quay Street building. Roscoe was professor of chemistry, a doctoral graduate of Heidelberg, and the intellectual visionary behind the college’s extension. Schorlemmer, who like Roscoe had studied under Bunsen at Heidelberg and then moved on to work with Liebig at Giessen, was at this time working as Roscoe’s assistant, but as the College expanded he was himself appointed professor of organic chemistry in 1874. Henry does not appear on the list of significant donors to Owens College at this time, no doubt because he was still establishing his business career and his local roots. His own contributions came much later, in the 1890s, when he endowed the Henry Simon Chair of German (1895) and then made the largest single donation towards the Physics Building, the building that would soon house Rutherford’s laboratory.⁹

9.1 The foundation stone of the Physics (now Rutherford) Building laid by Henry Simon in 1899. Photo by Margaret Littler.

The origins of the chair of German are little known. Eda Sagarra wrote a short history of the chair to mark its centenary in 1996, but her focus was on the chair’s occupants rather than its founder.¹⁰ Correspondence between the professor of Latin, Augustus Samuel Wilkins, and the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C. P. Scott, suggests that Wilkins and other professorial colleagues made the case for the chair out of concern for the situation of the lecturer in German, Herman Hager, who happened to be Wilkins’s brother-in-law. Hager was a distinguished scholar, and well known in academic circles as a member of council of the Victoria University. But he was underpaid for the work he did: £400 a year for twenty hours’ teaching a week. Wilkins suggested to Scott that the answer was to seek subscriptions from ‘the wealthier Germans in Manchester’, and he specifically identified Henry Simon as the man who ‘could more easily than anyone carry it through’, if he could be interested in the plan.¹¹ Since Hager taught German at Withington Girls’ School as well as at Owens, his qualities were known to Simon, who was evidently taken by the plan. In the event Hager died, quite suddenly, early in 1895, after the gift had been offered but before the chair was filled, and the chair went instead to a lacklustre first incumbent.¹² But it subsequently attained considerable prestige as one of the leading German chairs in the country.

Still, Owens College was only one of the public causes that Henry Simon supported, and far from the most important: he never, for instance, served on the court of governors. He was more committed to the Royal Manchester College of Music, Withington Girls’ School and the Hallé Orchestra. Ernest inherited from his father a sense of the public obligations that wealth entailed. But the fascination with universities, and the commitment to the University of Manchester in particular, was Ernest’s.

The Burghers of Broomcroft

One factor that made Ernest opt against national politics in the 1930s in favour of Manchester and education was that he was looking for a vocation that he could share with his wife. He was profoundly attracted, as Shena was, by the Webbs’ model of a partnership between husband and wife grounded in work they pursued in common.¹³ While both were of the stature to pursue parliamentary ambitions, it would have been difficult to reconcile family life with two parliamentary careers. Instead, they devoted themselves to public service in Manchester, both with a focus on education, although Shena’s main interest was secondary education, pursued though the education committee of the city council, whereas Ernest was chiefly drawn to higher education.¹⁴

The nature of Ernest’s work for the University up to the Second World War has been fully described by Alex Robertson and Colin Lees.¹⁵ They are especially good on his conduct of business in the University, and his contribution to material questions of University development, such as marketing, fundraising, expansion and the improvement of the campus, areas in which he was closely involved as treasurer from 1932. They recognise that he was much more than an archetypal businessman in his relations with the University, but nevertheless the side of him that comes out most strongly in their account is the man of action who was frustrated by some of the formalities of university life and wanted to cut a swathe through some of its inefficiencies. He favoured specialisation, arguing that the University should concentrate on doing some things outstandingly well rather than trying to do everything competently: it was better to fund Rutherford generously, he argued in 1918, than to have chairs in Russian, Italian and Spanish.¹⁶

During his long tenure of the senior lay offices in the University, Ernest always interpreted his role expansively. Deeply involved as he was in questions of university policy, in Manchester and nationally, he was never simply a policy-maker. He and Shena were immersed in the social and intellectual life of the University, and he used his position to make contact with a wide range of members of the University community and to facilitate intellectual exchange. Always a man of method, he kept files of notes on all the important conversations he had, typically over lunch or dinner, whether at the University or at Broomcroft, their Didsbury home. These notes are an unusually rich source for reconstructing a picture of the University as an intellectual community, something all too easily lost from institutional histories.¹⁷

A sense of what Ernest contributed to and derived from university life as a life of ideas can be explored through his relationship with Michael Polanyi. Polanyi was a figure of towering importance in the intellectual history of the twentieth century, yet one who is curiously lost from the institutional memory of the university in which he served for a quarter of a century. Born into a family of secular Jews in Ukrainian Hungary, he held a chair of chemistry in Berlin at the time of the Nazis’ accession to power in 1933, whereupon he moved to be professor of physical chemistry at Manchester. Eminent as he was as a chemist, he was also profoundly interested in the philosophy of knowledge and in wider questions of social and political philosophy, and in 1948 moved to a specially created chair of social studies, almost a research professorship, which he held until his retirement from Manchester in 1958. Intellectually he had affinities with Cold War liberalism, but combined with a deep religious sensibility too: he was a Catholic convert, and also had a profound love of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Polanyi was a passionate opponent of planning, both of the economy and of science, and a central pillar of his thought was a belief in the importance of the ‘tacit dimension’ of knowledge: we know much more than we can articulate, and much of our knowledge is embedded in and transmitted through traditions and practices. This aspect of his thinking has had a profound influence on the history of science as a discipline.¹⁸

Polanyi and Simon were not natural allies. Ernest was profoundly convinced that what the universities needed was planning through a national system; Polanyi thought what they needed was freedom.¹⁹ Still, they became close friends who retained a deep admiration for each other. When Ernest finally relinquished the chairmanship of the council in 1957, Polanyi wrote effusively: ‘Time has robbed me of most of my earlier compagnons at the University, but none of these departures has changed the physiognomy of the university so much as yours will.’ He added that he must have been to Broomcroft a hundred times in the twenty-four years he had spent in Manchester: ‘You and Lady Simon have made us feel at home in Manchester from the first day. Your superhuman patience with my wretched tennis has left a specially soft spot in my heart.’²⁰ Ernest was almost equally warm when Polanyi retired in 1958 and left Manchester for Oxford: ‘I have very much enjoyed and, I think, in spite of the difference of our outlook, got a good deal of stimulus from our occasional talks.’²¹ The ability to seek stimulus in spite of, or perhaps from, difference of outlook was very much part of his personality.

Polanyi’s correspondence makes it clear how important Broomcroft, and hence Shena too, were to Ernest’s relationship with the University. Shena’s significance to the University tends to be overlooked, since her own focus was on primary and secondary schooling, as a member for many years of Manchester City Council’s education committee and as a nationally known advocate for the cause of comprehensive schooling.²² But she is important in this story for three reasons in particular.

Shena certainly reinforced Ernest’s passionate interest in the social sciences. He was an engineer by educational background and by profession, though one who soon turned in a sociological direction; whereas she read for the economics tripos at Newnham before starting a research degree at LSE under Graham Wallas and L. T. Hobhouse.²³ He jestingly called her ‘My Sociological Wife’.²⁴ Ernest was persuaded by the case for social science with a practical orientation to actual social problems; Shena shared that conviction, and in particular made the case for a kind of economics more geared to the problems of industrial society than was the discipline she had encountered at Cambridge.²⁵ She had, however, a stronger commitment to fundamental social research too. This was the recollection of Max Gluckman, professor of social anthropology, whose department benefited hugely from Ernest’s largesse towards the social sciences: ‘Lady Simon quickly saw the point of studying everything human. I think Lord Simon was a little more taken aback at the amount of work on small societies in Africa that the Fund was assisting; but for him too, nihil humani illi alienum erat, and he quickly became fascinated by the account of what was common, and what were the variations, in those societies and our own.’²⁶

Second, Shena was herself a member of the University’s council for an extraordinarily long period, from 1920 to 1966: longer even than Ernest.²⁷ Before she joined council, she was vice-chair of a committee chaired by C. P. Scott to raise funds (the ‘1918 Fund’) for scholarships for women, and Ernest recorded in his diary that she presided over her first meeting ‘with business-like firmness (even putting Tout in his place) and irresistible charm’.²⁸ Subsequently she sat on the governing body of Ashburne Hall, the oldest of the women’s halls.²⁹ She was also a governor of the College of Technology and then UMIST; and also of several of the colleges that eventually came to join Manchester Polytechnic, including both Didsbury College of Education and the Domestic and Trades College (Hollings College).³⁰ She belonged to the University community almost as much as Ernest did. As an ordinary member of council, and not an officer, she is mostly invisible in the archival record, but it is clear that some causes were ones in which she took a passionate interest over many years. These included the position of academic staff on temporary contracts, the tutorial relationship between academic staff and students and the nurturing of the student community, especially through the halls of residence.³¹ She was tenacious in pursuing the causes she thought worth fighting: Sir Bernard Lovell recalled that it was she who insisted that the University should buy sufficient land at Jodrell Bank for the development of the radio astronomy facility.³² She was especially important in acting as a bridge between the university and the city council, and in identifying ways in which the University could contribute more to the life of the city. Jodrell Bank was one of example of this: she was among the first to see the possibilities it opened up for a new kind of public engagement with the university’s research, and the opportunity for the university ‘to do something rather dramatic which would impinge on the citizens of Manchester and make them proud of having the University at their doorstep’.³³

Third, after Ernest’s death in 1960, she was the guardian of his legacy, not least in taking a close interest in the Simon fellows: in their work, in their welfare and in their life after Manchester. Broomcroft Hall (as it was now to be known) was made over to a trust for the University’s use, in the first place to accommodate the Simon fellows; and Shena had a house for herself (this took the name Broomcroft) built in the gardens. She was living alongside the fellows, and liked to entertain them in order to welcome them to the university and the city. Curiously, it is ingrained in the university’s mythology that Ernest, by a quixotic final act, made it impossible for it to sell Broomcroft by stipulating that if it did so the proceeds would go to Cambridge. But in fact he left the property absolutely and unconditionally to Shena. It was she who offered the house to the university for its use (though it was certainly his hope too); and she who stipulated that were it to be sold the beneficiaries should be her own residuary legatees, two of the three women’s colleges at Cambridge.³⁴

9.2 Shena receiving her honorary degree from the University of Manchester (1966). Source: SSP M14/4/3.

Citizenship and the social sciences

That Ernest and Shena devoted so much time and attention to the university was a manifestation not simply of a sense of public duty, but also of a passionate commitment to the idea of the university. But what kind of intellectual vision inspired them? They absolutely did not want to turn the university into a business, but were passionately interested in the university as an intellectual community; and they were interested in that intellectual community above all for its ability to foster leadership in a democracy.

‘Education for citizenship’ had been a significant preoccupation for British public intellectuals since the university extension movement of the late-Victorian period, but it reached the peak of its influence in the interwar period.³⁵ The WEA, the linear descendant of the extension movement, was an important incubator of the idea that democracy required an educated citizenry: Ernest started supporting it in 1910, when he called it ‘a splendid organisation for giving university training to working class leaders’; the following year, he hosted his fellow Rugbeian, the future archbishop William Temple, at Lawnhurst when Temple addressed a WEA meeting.³⁶ In July 1912, he and Shena went to the WEA Summer School in Oxford, where they got engaged, appropriately enough, while attending lectures on ‘The Biological Study of the Home’ by the Unitarian minister and eugenicist Dr J. Lionel Tayler: Ernest thought Tayler an ‘idiot’, but found his ideas interesting.³⁷ Undeterred, Shena subsequently became even more closely involved in the WEA.³⁸ From a different perspective, James Bryce’s magisterial Modern Democracies (1921) – a work that was a recurrent point of reference for Ernest – helped entrench the idea that democracy flourished in those societies, like Switzerland, that both through schooling and through practical experience provided an effective education in citizenship.³⁹ These were the intellectual traditions on which the Simons drew in launching their Association for Education in Citizenship in 1934.

We should add another tradition to this eclectic mix: a religious one. Conventional religious practice, whether Christian or Jewish, did not attract Ernest, but he was strongly drawn to the ‘religion of humanity’.⁴⁰ His idea of a religion grounded in service to others seems to have been drawn eclectically from John Stuart Mill, the Webbs and H. G. Wells, as well as from Auguste Comte, the progenitor of the religion of humanity.⁴¹ The idea of a quasi-religious duty of service to humanity preoccupied Ernest, especially in the years just before his marriage to Shena. ‘My religion is getting stronger’, he recorded in his diary in April 1912, three months before his engagement:

Then, a week or so before his engagement, he reiterated that ‘one’s whole duty is to work for the common good’, and that while the development of one’s own personality mattered, it nevertheless ‘must be subordinated to the good of the community as a whole’, and the point of any religion must be to ensure that subordination. Prayer, by which Ernest meant reflection on one’s aims in life, was ‘most essential’ to one’s development of ‘a real religion, an active faith’.⁴³

But to understand how Ernest got from the religion of humanity to education for citizenship, we have to attend to his engagement with the world of classical antiquity. A civic spirit was the way in which the ethic of service to others was brought down to the realm of practicality. It was not practically possible to be a good cosmopolitan or humanitarian without being a good citizen.

In his educational thinking, Ernest started off with a strong animus against the classics. When, back in 1909, he first envisaged getting involved with the university, he was attracted by ‘opportunities of encouraging scientific & social education as against classical’.⁴⁴ But his position softened over the next few years as he came to appreciate how much support the cause of citizenship education received from classicists. Two books in particular helped arouse his interest in the classical world. One was The Greek Commonwealth (1911), by the young Oxford classicist Alfred Eckhard Zimmern. It no doubt helped that Zimmern was a nephew of Henry Simon’s executor (and Emily’s brother-in-law) Gustav Eckhard, as well as the cousin of Ernest’s Manchester friend Willie Zimmern.⁴⁵ Ernest said that the book gave him for the first time ‘real interest in & admiration for the Greeks’, because it ‘shews that humanity can, given the right conditions, rise above their baser selves, & live for something higher than cash & comfort’. He looked in vain for comparable ‘civic spirit’ in modern England, except perhaps in Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham. Manchester was in a ‘deplorable’ state, since the business and professional classes aimed to make money and flee to Cheshire, taking little interest in the city other than ‘subscribing to a hospital or two’.⁴⁶

The other book that made him more sympathetic to the case for the classics was by another Oxford classicist. Richard Livingstone’s Defence of Classical Education (1916) was inspired by the need to respond to newfound wartime militancy on the part of advocates of scientific education, such as Ray Lankester and H. G. Wells. Ernest regarded Wells as one his intellectual heroes, but now he found himself agreeing with Livingstone that the central focus of education should be the human mind, and that natural science did not provide a suitable foundation.⁴⁷ Significantly, Livingstone later served as president of Ernest’s Association for Education in Citizenship.⁴⁸

Ernest remained convinced of the superiority of a modern over a classical education, but his position was now more nuanced. We can gauge the extent of the ‘classical turn’ in his thinking by the fact that by 1920, Pericles’s Funeral Oration (as recorded by Thucydides) had become his and Shena’s favourite text. Ernest recommended it to their children, an extract was hung on the wall of the children’s room at Broomcroft, and it was included on the Simons’ Christmas cards to the schools of Manchester during Ernest’s mayoralty. Ernest’s fascination with Pericles almost certainly came from Zimmern, for whom Thucydides was the fundamental source. For Zimmern, the Oration was ‘that highest expression of the art of life in the City State’.⁴⁹

The Simons’ longstanding commitment to education for citizenship is well known, but what is less well understood is just how important the universities were to their vision of democratic citizenship. Although Ernest wrote in the 1930s chiefly on citizenship education in schools, his association had universities very much in its sights from the outset. ‘It should hardly be necessary to stress the importance of the universities as a training ground for citizenship’, wrote his collaborator, Eva Hubback, in 1934. ‘Here we find those who are to constitute the future leaders of thought, both in practical affairs and in research.’⁵⁰ Ernest’s interview notes with academics show him starting to focus on this problem from around 1933, which was obviously a significant date for anyone concerned about the fate of democratic citizenship.⁵¹ At the founding of the Manchester branch of the association at Broomcroft in 1935, he recalled that his interest in citizenship had come from his parents, and from the influence of works by H. G. Wells and Sidney Webb; his education at Rugby and Cambridge had left him ‘completely ignorant of the modern world’.⁵²

A particular interest of Ernest’s was in questioning the concept of ‘transfer’: the idea that citizenship could be sufficiently fostered indirectly through the teaching of other subjects, including the classics. In his notes on an interview with the distinguished philosopher Samuel Alexander in 1933 he recorded that Alexander ‘does not seem to have considered the problem of transfer seriously’.⁵³ The good scholar did not necessarily make a good citizen.⁵⁴

This was the subject on which he wrote in the association’s 1936 volume, Education for Citizenship in Secondary Schools. He commissioned papers from a number of psychologists to help him think through this problem: Dr R. H. Thouless of Glasgow and later Cambridge, Professor Godfrey Thomson of Edinburgh, and the now notorious Professor Cyril Burt of University College, London.⁵⁵ They confirmed him in his belief that ‘Transfer of training from one subject to another takes place on a much smaller scale than used to be believed.’ Hence, the best way of training young people for citizenship was through subjects directly relevant to the life of the citizen.⁵⁶

9.3 A satirical sketch of Ernest as an Athenian statesman. From Manchester Evening News (30 December 1921). Source: SSP M14/6/7.

One of the lessons Ernest drew was that civic education required a greater focus on modern (not medieval) history, on modern rather than classical languages, on ‘area studies’ and above all on the social sciences. He had long been working for the expansion of the social sciences at the university: with Ramsay Muir (professor of modern history at Manchester, 1914–21) he pressed for the establishment of a chair of political science, and hoped that Henry Simon Ltd would contribute towards the endowment. Muir and Simon envisaged at Manchester something comparable to the honour school in philosophy, politics and economics (‘Modern Greats’) that Oxford was just setting up, but financial retrenchment at the end of the First World War proved an insuperable obstacle.⁵⁷ Instead, Ernest personally and anonymously funded Henry Clay’s salary as professor of social economics, to enable him to engage in practical economic research focused on the problems of the regional economy.⁵⁸ For Ernest, applied social research was a natural complement to civic education focused on understanding the contemporary world.

The engagement between academic research and the outside world was important to Ernest’s vision. So, in parallel, was a broad rather than narrowly specialist university education. In the summer of 1936, he addressed the Council of the Association of University Teachers, giving the title of his talk ‘A Citizen Challenges the Universities’. He urged the universities to do more to help build ‘a better social order’, notably by providing leadership for public opinion. That meant producing graduates with skills in critical and disinterested thinking, but also with ‘a knowledge of public affairs’. He approved of what the LSE was doing, and he also thought that Modern Greats at Oxford was an ‘outstanding’ attempt to create ‘a course in citizenship’. Ernest returned again to the problem of transfer: he insisted that citizenship must be ‘learnt by the direct study of the thought and life and actions of men in society’. What did that mean in practice? History had long been regarded in Britain as offering the ideal school for citizens and statesmen. Ernest agreed, but asked: what sort of history? He distinguished between ‘pure history, based on an interest in the study of the past for its own sake’, and ‘history for life’, a somewhat Nietzschean expression, by which he meant ‘the study of history in order to enable the student to understand the world of to-day’. The former – embodied, he thought, in the mediaevalism of the Manchester history school – was an indulgence; the latter was wholly vital for the future of humanity.⁵⁹

It was the commitment to education for citizenship, as well as to applied social research, that inspired the Simons’ most important single contribution to the university, the establishment in 1944 of the Simon Fund to support fellowships and visiting professorships in the social sciences.⁶⁰ The arrangements for this gift were set out in a letter to the vice-chancellor in December 1943, whereby Ernest donated to the university shares in both of his engineering businesses: 15,000 ordinary shares in Henry Simon Ltd, and 5,000 pre-preference shares in Simon-Carves Ltd. These produced an original dividend income for the scheme of something more than £3,000 per annum (in 2024 values, more than £100,000).⁶¹ The terms of the gift did not restrict how the university spent the income, but Ernest made his wishes very clear. His intention was that the dividend income be used for the provision of fellowships for ‘men and women of mature years’ to pursue research and teaching in the social sciences, defined as consisting of sociology, social psychology, economics, political science, philosophy, public administration, jurisprudence and education. Specifically, he was keen to promote ‘work which is likely to prove of practical importance’.⁶²

Ernest was also unusually explicit about the intellectual purposes that motivated his gift. Government and public opinion were interested in universities only for the scientific research they produced, and Ernest fully agreed on its importance; but the most urgent problem for the postwar world was ‘our failure to control the democratic state’, and that failure was due above all to inadequate education in citizenship. He saw it as a core postwar mission of universities to educate leaders of public opinion, and hence to support democracy through wider knowledge and understanding of political, social, economic and industrial affairs.⁶³ ‘My object in creating the Simon Fund,’ he recalled at the end of 1957, ‘was to encourage education for citizenship in the University.’⁶⁴

In seeing the social sciences as key disciplines for postwar Britain, Ernest was hardly unique. The Clapham Committee on Provision for Social and Economic Research, appointed by the wartime coalition government, reported in July 1946; and while it stopped well short of recommending a research council, it urged a major expansion of provision for the social sciences in the universities.⁶⁵ Its members included three close associates of Ernest: Tawney, Clay and Moberly. Clay was by now warden of Nuffield College, Oxford, endowed in 1937 as a graduate and research college specialising in the social sciences, and with a particular remit to pursue research in conjunction with practitioners, especially in the field of public policy. A. D. Lindsay, the Oxford vice-chancellor who was chiefly responsible for persuading Lord Nuffield to give the money for this purpose, stressed the need to remedy the ‘divorce between theory and practice in the study of contemporary society’ by nurturing collaboration between scholars and ‘practical men’.⁶⁶ This vision was close to Simon’s.

Ernest expected to be consulted about the purpose to which the university applied the Simon Fund, and to be involved in the administration of the Simon fellowships.⁶⁷ Such a role was possible as he held the unusual position of being both donor and chair of the body (the council) which had control over how the money was spent. Ernest’s interventionist approach was evident from the outset. When academic departments tried to stretch the definition of the scheme they were swiftly rebuffed, as when the geography department sought funding to support young postgraduate researchers, and when the dental hospital asked whether dentistry could also fall within the scope of the scheme.⁶⁸ Ernest also expressed some impatience with the slow development and administration of the fellowship scheme. He told the vice-chancellor in December 1946 that only two of the fellowships awarded had fully met the criteria for the scheme as set out in 1943. He suggested that a ‘very small committee’ be established (consisting of just the vice-chancellor and himself) to undertake a preliminary review of all fellowship applications before deciding which were to be submitted to the main Simon Fund committee.⁶⁹ Eight years later, Ernest was still dissatisfied with the applicants the Simon Fund was attracting: ‘I think the applications [this year] are a very disappointing lot; there is only one person who seems to be first-rate.’⁷⁰ Nor was he averse to more direct criticism of the committee’s decisions, especially when he was displeased with the kind of research topics that the Simon Fund was supporting. The proposal to award a fellowship to Dr Bernice Hamilton for research on Spanish political thought of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries antagonised him. Hamilton’s research, he argued, could not meet the criterion of practical importance as set out in the terms of his 1943 gift. A robust defence of the committee’s decision was provided by the philosopher Dorothy Emmet, the university’s sole woman professor. Emmet argued skilfully that Hamilton’s proposed research was not remote in time, but actually had clear contemporary relevance, by calling attention to the liberal democratic tradition of political theory in Catholic thought.⁷¹ Hamilton was duly appointed to the fellowship; but Ernest continued to express disappointment that fellowships were being awarded for work ‘of historical and academic’ rather than practical importance in addressing contemporary social problems.⁷²

For the first half-century of its existence, the Simon Fund was used primarily to finance fellowships and visiting professorships intended for ‘mature’ scholars, who were usually established academics working on a major project, or in some cases people with professional experience in other fields (public administration, business, the professions) who wanted the opportunity to bring their experience into dialogue with academic researchers.⁷³ While Ernest may have had his own questions about the operation (and even success) of the scheme, it was nonetheless clear that its recipients held it in very high regard. One Simon fellow, Professor Max Marwick of the University of Witwatersrand, assured Shena that ‘the Simon Fellowships are a live, lasting and socially useful reminder of your late husband’s foresight and generosity’.⁷⁴

The Simon Fund had a profound and positive impact on the university, and on the wider academic world; but not always in the way that Ernest had intended. Two disciplines in which Manchester was a leader exemplify the impact of the Simon Fund. Under Max Gluckman, social anthropology at Manchester established a global reputation; in fact, not social anthropology alone, but social anthropology and sociology, for his department embraced both. He was quite open about the key role the Simon fellowships had played in enabling him to build up the ‘Manchester School’.⁷⁵ The list of names is a roll-call of the stars of the discipline: John Barnes, Elizabeth Colson, Clyde Mitchell, Hilda Kuper, Victor Turner and Max Marwick.⁷⁶ Often they progressed from Simon fellowships to permanent positions at Manchester, as did Colson, Mitchell and Turner, who finished their careers at Berkeley, Oxford and Chicago respectively.

Gluckman was exceptionally entrepreneurial in seeing and exploiting the opportunities presented by the fund, but there were other instances in which the fund was used to help get round bureaucratic obstacles to desirable outcomes. It was Simon funding that made it possible for Polanyi to transfer to a chair in social studies, for example. Even more striking was the importance of the Simon Fund in the creation of new academic fields such as American studies. Manchester was the first university in the United Kingdom to set up a department of American studies after the Second World War: very much in line with Ernest’s sense of the importance of area studies to the development of world citizenship. But the story of how this happened is intriguing. The first professor of American studies was Isaac Kandel, who held the chair from 1948 to 1950.⁷⁷ But he had essentially no background in the field. His field was educational studies, which he had studied at Manchester under Michael Sadler, the future vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds and a longstanding proponent of civic education. Sadler encouraged Kandel to go to Columbia University for his PhD, and he went on to make his career in the United States. In the 1930s, he became interested in education for world citizenship, and it was probably this work that brought him to Ernest’s attention, possibly through Richard Oliver. In any case, Kandel contributed to The Citizen, the organ of the Association for Education and Citizenship, before the war.⁷⁸ At its inception in 1946, Ernest’s Universities Quarterly listed Kandel as a future contributor; the following year he came to Manchester as a Simon fellow, apparently with Simon’s active involvement in making the financial arrangements for this appointment.⁷⁹ During his fellowship, Kandel advised on the creation of an American studies programme, and was appointed to the chair. The premature death of his wife in his first summer vacation led him to resign earlier than hoped, though he was sixty-nine at the time. In recording its appreciation, the university council (chaired, of course, by Ernest) wrote that ‘to a University which for years has been searching in vain for a Professor of American Studies, Professor Kandel provided the ideal answer’. Simon told him that ‘you have set a very high standard for future Simon visiting Professors’.⁸⁰

The cases of Polanyi and Kandel tell us much about the way in which Ernest envisaged the operation of the Simon Fund. He wanted the university’s academic leaders to have some discretionary income that would enable them to seize opportunities to attract and retain exceptional academic talent. That was what Gluckman appreciated, and even if Ernest was surprised to find himself funding so much research on ‘small societies in Africa’, Gluckman operated in exactly the kind of enterprising manner that Ernest applauded.

The future of British universities

In stressing the key role that universities had to play in sustaining democratic politics and defending modern civilisation, Ernest was of one mind with an important strain in intellectual opinion at the end of the war.⁸¹ His former Manchester colleague Sir Walter Moberly made the case from a Christian point of view in his Crisis in the University (1949), while Ernest’s own son Brian, already a member of the Communist Party and a recent president of the National Union of Students, wrote along curiously similar lines in A Student’s View of the Universities (1943).⁸² It was in this context that Ernest Simon launched the Universities Quarterly in 1946. In 1949, this carried a symposium on Moberly’s book, including an article by Ernest himself entitled ‘University Crisis? A Consumer’s View’. This argued that British universities had been successful in doing what the government wanted and was prepared to pay for, and had expanded the number of graduates in the areas the government had prioritised. They had been less successful in addressing either the productivity crisis in industry or the moral crisis facing Western democracies; the latter being Moberly’s concern.⁸³

Ernest wrote that ‘The Universities Quarterly was originally founded by the Association for Education in Citizenship in the hope that it might do something to help in the directions which Moberly desires.’⁸⁴ The association was, indeed, the formal proprietor: its ownership of the journal functioned to allow Ernest to maintain control without seeming too egotistical. It had a national editorial board to give it weight and credibility, but its members included several with connections to Manchester or the Simons, and in practice the journal was run by a Manchester editorial board. This was chaired by Ernest and included a galaxy of notables: Stopford, the young Bernard Lovell, and the Langworthy Professor of Physics, Patrick Blackett. Ernest’s key collaborator, however, was R. A. C. Oliver, professor of education at Manchester from 1938 to 1970, an educational psychologist who had made his name devising intelligence tests for use on Africans; significantly, his Edinburgh mentor and supervisor Godfrey Thomson was on the national board.⁸⁵ Oliver later reminisced about the role of the editorial board of Universities Quarterly: ‘to some of us members our chief and delectable duty must surely have been to be his guests at dinner, discussing future issues’.⁸⁶ He suspected that Ernest ‘had his own unorthodox methods of balancing the budget of a non-profit-making publishing venture’: that is, he met the deficit from his own pocket. Oliver seems to have formed an inner group with Ernest and Eva Hubback.⁸⁷ Richard Oliver wrote prolifically on the kind of subjects that interested Ernest, such as ‘general education’ in universities and indeed in sixth forms, and ‘Liberal education in a technical age’.⁸⁸ Significantly, he was drawn towards American experiments in a common curriculum: ‘Western Civ.’, as it became.⁸⁹ He and his wife, Anna, a junior lecturer in English, were notably close to the Simons: Richard Oliver addressed him ‘Dear Ernest’, which was well nigh unknown among the university community.⁹⁰

Ernest’s aim in establishing the Universities Quarterly was primarily to help shape opinion about higher education policy. He was a leading proponent of the view that universities should be considered as a system – and managed as a system. He welcomed the rapid growth of student numbers in the postwar period, but saw that it was entirely changing the character of existing universities and the kind of education they could offer: in particular, it threatened to erode their character as communities. Towards the end of his life, he became the foremost advocate of a systematic investigation of the future of higher education; and as the instigator of a major House of Lords debate on the subject, he could be regarded as the main architect of what became the Robbins Committee.⁹¹

Conclusion

It is in the nature of the role that lay officers rarely steer university strategy. That is the role of vice-chancellors, whereas chairs of council and the like have the job of oversight to ensure effective governance. The Simons were different. They (both Ernest and Shena) formed part of the university community as few counterparts have done; they had an intellectually serious vision for the university; and Ernest had the resources to make strategic donations to influence policy. Ernest and Shena both relished the life of ideas, but their particular aptitude was for the translation of intellectual visions into realisable plans for action. In that sense it is appropriate that their most important contribution to the University of Manchester was the endowment of a fund to support social research with the potential for practical application.

The Simons’ vision for universities encompassed both education for citizenship and social research geared to addressing real-world problems. These two conceptions of universities have very different intellectual lineages: the first is usually thought to be rooted in Hellenism, and transmitted via Oxford Greats; the second depends on a more instrumental conception of universities as serving the needs of modern industrial societies. The early history of the Simon fellowship scheme exhibits the tension between the two: the fellowships were demonstrably successful in nurturing social research, including much with a practical focus; but whether they ever did much for civic education is much more questionable.

9.4 Ernest having received his honorary degree from the University of Manchester (1944). Source: SSP M14/4/24.