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Between 1933 and 1940, Manchester received between seven and eight thousand refugees from Fascist Europe. They included Jewish academics expelled from universities in Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy. Around two hundred were children from the Basque country of Spain evacuated to Britain on a temporary basis in 1937 as the fighting of the Spanish Civil War neared their home towns. Most were refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. As much as 95% of the refugees from Nazism were Jews threatened by the increasingly violent anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. The rest were Communists, Social Democrats, Pacifists, Liberals, Confessional Christians and Sudeten Germans. There have been several valuable studies of the response of the British government to the refugee crisis. This study seeks to assess the responses in one city—Manchester—which had long cultivated an image of itself as a ‘liberal city’. Using documentary and oral sources, including interviews with Manchester refugees, it explores the work of those sectors of local society that took part in the work of rescue: Jewish communal organisations, the Society of Friends, the Rotarians, the University of Manchester, secondary schools in and around Manchester, pacifist bodies, the Roman Catholic Church and industrialists from the Manchester region. The book considers the reasons for their choices to help to assesses their degree of success and the forces which limited their effectiveness.
reported that Rose Hill, which had been a nursing home for two decades after Olive Shapley sold it in 1981, had become the first Didsbury property offered for sale for one million pounds. Austerity baby Lawnhurst, Didsbury, Manchester Henry Simon and family outside Lawnhurst, 1898 hH Lawnhurst is one of several mansions in Didsbury, built as family homes by wealthy industrialists and businessmen in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ernest Simon, later Lord Simon of Wythenshawe, was thirteen years old in 1892 when he moved with his parents and seven siblings
in England in the early nineteenth century, factories and housing jostled for space and clean air in green open space became a luxury for urban mill workers. In America, early industrialists attempted initially to avoid the poor conditions of British factories, but as industrialisation accelerated following the end of the Civil War in 1865, little attention was given to architectural or landscape a n d sc a p e p ai n t i n g s ‘The pleasant manufactory’15 1.1 View of Humphreysville (later Seymour), Connecticut, as it was in 1812. This model mill village was
, Third Republic-inspired resistance par excellence. In this period, notables included Gambetta’s couches nouvelles: the middle classes of the petite bourgeoisie, petite paysannerie, landowners, members of the liberal professions, functionaries and even industrialists. They formed the backbone of the Third Republic, as voters and politicians, and tended to have radical political leanings.9 Following contemporary usage, ‘notables’ here means those in positions of authority who were theoretically respected by their fellow countrymen and the Germans. This included
to myths about the commodities they produced? What approaches and methods of image-making did industrialists employ to exploit the symbolic, metaphorical and allegorical meanings of gardens, recreation grounds and plants, to present their enterprises as places of status, community, opportunity, health and hygiene and their products as authentic and modern? We know they arly twentieth-century ‘The Most Beautiful Factory in the World’143 were effective, because the advertising and packaging images from the early twentieth century of the companies discussed here are
planning reforms taking place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in this chapter I discuss the significant roles played by industrialists in driving forward and funding environmental reform. The First World War and its aftermath catalysed the importance of healthy, high quality environments to industrial stability and progress, and the ‘Factory Garden Movement’ accelerated in the 1920s, inspired by a need to attract and to satisfy a more independent and demanding workforce and by a growing belief of the value of an attractive environment to health
features of factory villages and towns from the late eighteenth century. However, by the late 1800s, many industrialists not building factory villages were looking for ways of improving employee welfare at work for altruistic and commercial purposes, and one of these was to offer outdoor, as well as indoor, recreational facilities. Sports grounds began to appear more often in the corporate landscape, either beside, or a short distance from factories and offices and by the 1920s and 1930s, sporting facilities for larger workplaces became almost essential. A small but
. Industrialists seized these beliefs and through garden and landscape design and a programme of outdoor activities, exploited the physical, aesthetic, mythical and symbolic positives of the idea of a garden or park, to shape their image and to influence, and to an extent to control, their employees. The factory garden for status: shaping the image of a community By the end of the nineteenth century, gardens and parks at factories were playing an increasingly important role in providing healthy recreation for factory and office workers and in moulding the physical and symbolic
diaries they published in retrospect. However, unfortunately there was initially a marked tendency to read these new sources merely as invaluable confirmation of the older analysis already derived from the far left in the period. William Beveridge’s memoirs, Power and Influence, for example, were used to show that government war-time labour policy developed in a distinctly coercive direction in order to serve the interests of industrialists. Particularly relevant seemed to be his statements about the 9780719081033_2_C09.qxd 180 1/20/10 9:08 Page 180 Leadership and
call from MH (which he accepted in preference to a similar call from Antwerp), while Altman’s acceptance of the Communal Rabbinate might also be seen as part of an escape plan for himself and his family. Refugee academics and industrialists, trainees supported by Isidore Apfelbaum’s ‘private’ operation, German domestic servants placed by the Ladies Lodge of B’nai Brith, the two or three foreign students accepted by the Yeshiva, the two German ’refugee’ rabbis, and the handful of pacifists and Jewish ‘Friends of Friends’ supported by the Quakers represented the only