The Centenary Of The Henry Simon Chair Of German At The University Of Manchester (1996): Commemorative Address

The following is the edited version of a lecture given in the University of Manchester in December 1996 to commemorate the founding of the Chair of German one hundred years earlier. The Chair was endowed by and named after the prominent Manchester steel magnate, Henry Simon, who came from a Silesian Jewish immigrant family with a distinguished record of public service and deeply‐held liberal principles. The main focus of the article is on the chairholders, particularly in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and they included Leonard Willoughby, Barker Fairley, Elsie Butler and Ronald Peacock. Reference is also made to the remarkably large proportion of prominent twentieth‐century British Germanists who, as it were, served their time in the Manchester Department. However, the present article is also a contribution to the broader history of our subject in Great Britain. It indicates the important role played in the past by British German scholars in Anglo‐German relations both before and after the Second World War and stresses the potential influence which German scholars can still exercise in this area today, as well as the need for them to do so.