The editors

It could hardly be claimed that the Simon name is an unknown one in Manchester in 2024. The main artery running through the Wythenshawe estate is called Simonsway, and many thousands use it each day. Walkers in south Manchester cross the Mersey on Simon’s Bridge. In the city centre, many thousands of sixth-formers study at the Shena Simon Campus, the employer-facing branch of Manchester College in the heart of the city.¹ The University of Manchester marks the family name in the Simon Building, once the Simon Engineering Laboratories, and in the Henry Simon Chair of German (vacant since 2018), as well as in the Simon fellowships and visiting professorships, which still thrive. All that said, in popular consciousness it is just a name: the family commemorated in these ways has largely slipped from memory and their role in shaping the contemporary city is forgotten. The survival of a reputation is not helped by a tendency to confuse Ernest with Sir John Simon, and even, apparently, with the political scientist Herbert Simon or perhaps the politician Sir Herbert Samuel.²

This book has told a story of two generations spanning over a century of Manchester’s history. That story is a diverse one, and the book has explored many themes: the making of an émigré mercantile community, industrial innovation, philanthropy, public service, town planning and housing reform and the building and management of civic, cultural and educational institutions. It is certainly not the story of a homogeneous Simonian worldview. Ernest was clear enough about the things that separated him from his father. While he too was an engineer, Henry, cultured though he was, had no interest in the social sciences, which were to be Ernest’s abiding intellectual interest. Ernest acknowledged his mother’s goodhearted selflessness, but evidently thought that he had little in common with her intellectually.³ The contrast is starkest when we compare Emily and Shena: Emily the staunch anti-suffragist, eager to demonstrate that the suffragettes (or even the suffragists) had no claim to speak for most women; Shena, by contrast, a doughty fighter for women’s political rights. We have seen that there were divisions within the wider family, as Emily’s opposition to women’s suffrage set her at odds with her own sister and, eventually, with one of her own daughters, as well as with Ernest and Shena. When we cast an eye at the wider family, the differences become still more apparent: Ernest eventually became a Labour peer, and his and Shena’s two sons were Communists, but two of his sisters married future Conservative MPs. So the book has tried to depict these four Simons as individuals.

10.1 The Simon family at Pendyffryn Hall near Conwy (1896). From left to right are Henry, Ernest, Ingo, Harry, Emily, Eleanor Margaret, Victor, Eric and Dorothea. From: Henry Simon’s Occasional Letter to Miller’s at Home & Abroad, XXXVII, January 1897. Source: JRL SEGA, 17. Copyright the University of Manchester (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

That said, we hope that the contributors to this volume have done enough to vindicate an approach based on the study of four members of one family over two generations. The salient rationale for this is that there was a powerful family ethos, built around a cult of the ancestor, Uncle Heinrich, and symbolised by the family’s conservation of the official seal of the Frankfurt Parliament. Ernest’s children and indeed grandchildren were brought up on a set of family stories about the hero of 1848, and Heinrich’s early death certainly contributed to the myth-making. Twinned with memories of the ancestral past were values based on hard work, rationality and a commitment to leaving the world a better place than one found it. There was also a commitment to ’doing good business‘ which entailed a kind of business ethics in which the interests of the workforce and their families took a high place, as did the wider interests of society. These were passed on rather self-consciously from one generation to the next: Henry’s Rathschlaege für meine Kinder [Advice for my Children], itself indebted to Heinrich, was the prototype, and Ernest gave his own sons a bound copy when they reached eighteen.⁴ The Simon Calendar, initiated by Henry in 1892 and drawing on Emily’s earlier initiative, was another vehicle for the transmission of the family’s traditions and values, and on Henry’s death Emily arranged for the private printing, under the title Fragments of Thought, of a selection of the edifying and instructive quotations he had used to supply the Calendar’s daily mottos.⁵ Ernest’s diary includes similar sets of guidance for his own children. This was a family with an unusually strong sense of its identity.

10.2 Ernest, Shena and Brian and Roger (second from left top row, fourth from left middle row, and third and fourth from left bottom row) at the golden wedding anniversary of Shena’s parents, John Wilson Potter and Jane Boyd Potter (1931). Source: SSP M14/4/3.

The kind of values Henry and Ernest propounded were values of duty and public service, of reticence and self-sacrifice. These are the kinds of values conventionally labelled Victorian. That suggests two historiographical reflections. The first is that ‘Victorian values’ (a much contested term) were not confined to Britain, or to the English-speaking world. In the case of the Simons, the Victorian values they put to work in Manchester were demonstrably inherited from the German Bürgertum, and reinforced by the German mercantile and professional circles in which Henry and Emily moved. So the story of the Simons is an intriguing case study in the transferability of ‘Burgher’ virtues across national boundaries in the nineteenth century; a subject that deserves a more extensive study. That is a point about the spatial mobility of values. But, equally, the history of the Simon family reinforces what is now quite a well-established historiography that has demonstrated that values that we stereotype as Victorian were actually remarkably enduring in the first half of the twentieth century, and did much to shape the public institutions of twentieth-century Britain, from the BBC to the welfare state.⁶ Ernest himself does not quite rank with Reith and Beveridge as one of the architects of twentieth-century Britain, but he is not out of place in that company; a comparison between him and Beveridge (an almost exact contemporary) would make a fascinating study. Much the same might be said of Shena and Eleanor Rathbone.

10.3 Heinrich Simon (1805–60). Courtesy of Eva-Maria Broomer.

10.4 Emily Simon’s obituary in the Manchester Guardian (9 November 1920), p. 8.

The focus on a Simon family ethos risks unconsciously or consciously privileging the male line. This book has attempted to give due weight to Emily and Shena as contributors to the Simon family, both in private life and in public service. In the case of Shena it is obvious that her relationship with Ernest was one of intellectual equals: if he brought great wealth to the partnership, she brought an inimitable strength of will, as well as a personability and charm that he knew he lacked. But we have also tried to rescue Emily from the shadows, uncovering both the significance of the Stoehr family connection and Emily’s active role in the philanthropic work and civic service that shaped the family’s identity.

The German roots were central to the family’s sense of identity, especially up to the First World War. So (for our four Simons) was their allegiance to a progressive political tradition that, in their case, swept seamlessly forward from the liberalism of the Frankfurt Parliament through Edwardian New Liberalism to the Labour Party of the Attlee and Gaitskell years. But, in addition, an important and distinctive feature of the Simons’ identity was the city of Manchester as the focus for the family’s civic responsibilities. Good citizens could only be nurtured in a good city, they believed, which was why civic institution-building was such an important dimension of the lives of all four of our protagonists. Ernest was especially clear on this point, and it underpinned his conscious decision to turn away from a national political career and instead to devote himself to a career within the institutions of his native city. He deplored the tendency of Manchester businessmen to ‘make money & clear out’.⁷ Shena too argued that good municipal government was undermined by a lack of interest in civic affairs: if Manchester in the 1930s was ‘a disgrace to civilisation’, this was in large measure because ‘far too many citizens feel that they have done all that is required of them when they have paid their rates’.⁸ When Ernest’s political career was at its zenith there were other national politicians who had made their reputations in local government: Neville Chamberlain and Herbert Morrison among them. But it was unusual enough to make Ernest’s case intriguing. In making their lives and careers in Manchester, a city then regarded as in decline economically, culturally and politically, Ernest and Shena were self-consciously swimming against the tide. They were also, perhaps, guided by family traditions of civic service that Henry and Emily had laid down. A. J. P. Taylor wrote a famous essay on Manchester in 1957, the year that Ernest finally retired from his service to the university. ‘The merchant princes have departed’, wrote Taylor. ‘They are playing at country life in Cheshire or trying to forget Manchester in Bournemouth or Torquay.’⁹ Certainly, Ernest and Shena’s careers as civic notables marked them out as distinctive in the middle of the twentieth century.

Precisely because the relationship between the family and the city is at the heart of this book, it does not make sense to take the story backwards or forwards. The German-Jewish roots are fascinating, and the story of Henry Simon’s other children and his grandchildren is absorbing in its way too, as we shall see shortly. But without Manchester at its heart it is essentially a different story. The story of Henry and Emily, of Ernest and Shena, has a unity conferred by commitment to the city of Manchester as well as by powerful family traditions transmitted with a degree of reverence. Because the focus is on Manchester, we have dwelt much more on the Simons’ work in building civic institutions and wrestling with problems of urban planning and development. Ernest’s equally fascinating enthusiasms for other causes, such as population control and nuclear disarmament, have had to be given short shrift.

The kind of world these four Simons inhabited now seems remote. Their Manchester was still one of the world’s great cities. That was the theme of Taylor’s essay: it was ‘the last and greatest of the Hanseatic towns – a civilization created by traders without assistance from monarchs or territorial aristocracy’. But when he republished it in 1976, he thought that Manchester was no more than ‘an agreeable provincial town’.¹⁰ The Manchester Guardian had been central to the Simons’ political, intellectual and cultural networks, but in 1959, the year before Ernest died, it dropped ‘Manchester’ from its title; soon afterwards, its editorial staff moved to London; and by the time of Shena’s death in 1972, it had vacated its Manchester offices altogether.

10.5 Shena and Ernest on holiday (c. late 1920s – early 1930s). Source: private family papers.

But today there is increasing awareness that British (especially English) politics, government and public life are afflicted by an excess of centralisation, with its attendant dangers of apoplexy at the centre and paralysis at the extremities, in the words of a nineteenth-century critic of French over-centralisation.¹¹ Devolution of extensive powers to city-regions and their directly elected mayors is a notable response, and the fact that members of parliament have exchanged their seats at Westminster for mayoral office is an early indication that Westminster is no longer perceived as the only place to get things done. This looks like a reversal of the ‘drift from north to south’ of which Shena Simon in particular was so critical. But whether the mere transfer of powers to plebiscitary mayors will be enough to combat the civic indifference she also lamented is another matter. ‘City deals’ negotiated by elites are no substitute for an authentic sense of the city as a political community. It may be that the Simons’ great cause of education for citizenship is due for a return: as, indeed, it enjoyed a brief moment in the sun a quarter of a century ago, when David Blunkett as education secretary invited his old mentor Professor Bernard Crick to devise a citizenship curriculum for schools.

Legacies

The end of the engineering empire

The twin engineering businesses of Henry Simon Ltd and Simon-Carves Ltd were an essential thread running through the Simon lives from the 1880s to the 1960s. The two companies formally merged into the Simon Engineering Group (SEG) Ltd just before the death of Ernest in 1960. The SEG seems to have enjoyed a good deal of success well into the 1980s and was a sizeable company; in 1981 it had a turnover of £339m and made a profit before tax of £20m. Five years later the turnover had increased to £503m but profits before tax had only grown modestly to £28m. Growth was coming primarily by acquisitions and the risks of over-diversification with a large burden of debt would cause subsequent problems when the company hit choppy waters. The last Simon family member involved in senior management, Michael Napier (descended from Susan Napier, Emily Simon’s younger sister), retired in 1986. A consequential and symbolic structural change occurred a couple of years later when the SEG decided to sell its milling subsidiary to Thomas Robinson and Son. We can imagine how Henry would have been shocked and dismayed at this turn of events, as this was the firm that engaged in a bitter patent dispute with Henry, fought all the way to House of Lords, in 1894 that caused him such consternation. The combined business was called Robinson Milling System Ltd. In 1991, the business was acquired by the Japanese firm Satake Corporation, to form Satake Robinson UK Ltd, later Satake UK Ltd. Satake made the decision to form a UK division which relocated to Bredbury, greater Manchester in 1998.

In the early 1990s, the SEG struggled and in 1993 almost went bankrupt under a £150m debt burden. A new strategic direction, under chief executive Maurice Dixson, saw many assets and long-established subsidiaries sold off to pay the debts. The business became more focused on docks and logistics and acquired substantial land on Humberside to develop new industrial port facilities. While the company dropped the ‘Engineering’ part of its name to become the Simon Group in 1997, the memory of Henry and Ernest was still present. As Brian Simon reported at the end of the 1990s, the company’s London office still had Clara von Rappard’s portrait of Henry Simon (Plate 7) hanging in the boardroom and in the foyer the ‘striking [Jacob] Epstein black marble bust of Ernest greets the visitor on arrival’.¹² The second of the founders’ engineering firms, Simon-Carves Ltd, would be sold for £12m in 2001 to SembCorp Industries of Singapore. They continued to operate under the Simon-Carves name from the Cheadle Heath site for several years before relocating to the Atlas Business Park in Wythenshawe. The company was subsequently brought by ECI Inc. in 2016.

10.6 Bust of Henry Simon. Photo courtesy of Andrew Simon.

10.7 Bust of Ernest Simon. Photo courtesy of Andrew Simon.

In more recent years, some of the descendant companies have consciously employed the heritage and name of the Simon family as part of their branding.¹³ These claims are more nominal than actual, given the numbers of takeovers and mergers they have been through. The milling machinery business in Bredbury, in particular, now uses ‘Henry Simon’ branding, and sports on its logo the strapline ‘Manchester 1878’ to signal a direct connection back to the origins of the firm.¹⁴

Places of legacy

Many of the houses that the various branches of the Simon family occupied at different times are long replaced or radically altered. The most significant, Lawnhurst, does survive and is largely intact. The exterior still features the ‘HS 1891’ signature plaque proudly in place over the front door and the stained-glass windows with various mottos remain too (Plate 12 and Figure 10.8). Ernest and Shena’s house, Broomcroft, also still stands nearby. For some years, the official residence of the vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester, it remains on trust for the university’s use.

10.8 The signature plaque above Lawnhurst. Photo by John Ayshford.

10.9 Lawnhurst and Broomcroft shown here on the Ordnance Survey 10-foot plan (1893). Source: Martin Dodge.

In addition to Lawnhurst and Broomcroft, another physical reminder of the Simons is a substantial family memorial at the entrance of Manchester Crematorium. Henry is literally depicted as the head of the family with a carved portrait in the centre (finely delineated by the sculptor Conrad Dressler). It records in plain text the lives of Henry and Emily Simon, their three sons Harry, Victor and Eric killed in the First World War, along with Ernest, Shena and their daughter Antonia.

The best monument, we would argue, for Ernest and Shena is conspicuous yet overlooked. It is the Wythenshawe housing estate. Without the Simons’ imagination, campaigning and work on the council in the 1920 and 1930s it might not have been realised. The purchase of the land and building of thousands of council homes transformed the map of Manchester forever and improved the living conditions of tens of thousands of Manchester’s citizens. The Simons’ great personal gift of Wythenshawe Hall and surrounding parks to the people of Manchester remains at the centre of the place; it is a vital green lung for Wythenshawe residents. Tucked away on one wall of the hall is a blue plaque commemorating Ernest and Shena’s gift (Plate 13).

10.10 The Simon memorial. Photo by John Ayshford.

The family legacy

The story of the Simons of Manchester may have ended in 1972 when Shena died, but the family story certainly did not finish then. A brief sketch can give a sense of how this creative and energetic family has continued to make its impact.

Henry’s son, and Ernest’s half-brother, Ingo Simon (1875–1964) and his third wife Erna (1894–1973) won acclaim as internationally renowned master archers. According to Mary Stocks, Ernest admired Ingo and even mimicked his tastes, but unlike Ernest, Ingo did not play a part in the family business and instead led a career as an international opera singer. Enjoying sailing, big game hunting, music and art, and studying the history of bows and firearms, he largely lived a life of leisure in contrast to Ernest’s and Henry’s work ethic. On Ingo’s death, his vast collection of bows from across the world was donated to the Manchester Museum. He and Erna spent much of their married life in Devon, and Erna passed her remaining nine years there. She sponsored and organised charitable work to provide holidays for disabled and deprived people.¹⁵

Other notable Simon family members included Sir Patrick Hamilton (1908–2002) and his wife Winifred Mary, Lady Hamilton, known as Pix (1913–2000). Patrick was the son of Eleanor Simon, the second daughter of Emily and Henry who married the Conservative MP Sir George Hamilton. In 1941, Patrick married Pix Jenkins, who, having studied economics at Cambridge, served in the Ministry of Economic Warfare during the Second World War. The paralysis of Patrick’s sister, Lindisfarne, in 1949 had a profound effect on the couple and they subsequently worked to improve the lives of thousands of disabled people, volunteering for, managing and financially supporting disability charities and organisations. Pix also collaborated with Wythenshawe MP Alf Morris on his landmark Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act (1970) and co-founded the Disabled Living Foundation with him. In a separate vein Patrick had a notable career as a businessman, serving as chairman of both Henry Simon Holdings Ltd and Henry Simon Engineering Ltd, as well as director of Lloyds Bank. He also invented the Simon snorkel which is a key component of modern fire engines, having been inspired by cherry-pickers in Canada.¹⁶

Patrick’s obituary was authored by his cousin Christopher Simon (1914–2002), the son of Patrick’s uncle Harry Simon. Having read economics at Cambridge under John Maynard Keynes, Christopher worked for the British Council until 1948, with a break for war service, and then for the next twenty-eight years for the Simon Group, for most of that time as a director and company secretary. He served on the Council of the University of Manchester and in a number of other public roles, in Greater Manchester and beyond, as a magistrate and school governor, and in the NHS. He was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Manchester.¹⁷

Two of Christopher’s other cousins, Roger and Brian, the sons of Ernest and Shena Simon, became two leading left-wing intellectuals. Having been educated at Gresham’s, the historic public school in Norfolk, Roger and Brian each spent a year at Salem School in Germany during the twilight and destruction of the Weimar Republic, before they both went to Cambridge University. At Cambridge, Roger and Brian were introduced to the works of Karl Marx and subsequently joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. Soon afterwards, during the Second World War, the siblings served in the Royal Signals. After the conflict, Roger, having qualified as a solicitor, continued his career as a civil servant in local government and in 1958 he joined the Labour Research Department (LRD) of which he became secretary in 1965. His work in the LRD proved influential, but his most marked contribution was his role in propagating the ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in Britain. Roger and his brother Brian both died in 2002. Brian worked as school teacher in Manchester and Salford before becoming an academic at the University of Leicester. As a scholar, he established a reputation as a renowned Marxist historian of education and campaigned against intelligence testing and for comprehensive education. He rose to a senior position within the Communist Party, becoming chairman of its National Cultural Committee in 1962, and used his role to help steer the party towards accepting multi-party democracy and the adoption of humanist values in the 1960s. His life and work have been covered extensively in a 2023 biography.¹⁸ In 1941, Brian married Joan Peel (1915–2005). A fellow Communist, Joan worked as a historian and education journalist. Part of the famous Communist Party historians’ group, she won acclaim with her study of Education and Society in Tudor England (1966). In the 1950s, she and Brian developed a rapport with Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria following a trip Brian took with his mother to the USSR in 1955. Influenced by his work, she translated his works into English to popularise his ideas and those of his mentor, Lev Vygotsky, to inform educational psychology and support the campaign against educational selection in Britain. Her work has been unduly neglected, but her life and contribution to the study of history were commemorated in a lecture by historian of education Jane Martin in 2013, eight years after her death.¹⁹