[BITList] Fwd: Rescuer of refugee scholars

[John Feltham]

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Simpson  [formerly Sinovitch],  Esther  [Tess]  (1903-1996), worker for refugee scholars, was born Esther Sinovitch on 31 July 1903 at 33 Lower Brunswick Street, Leeds, the youngest child and only daughter of Ilya (later Ellis) Sinovitch (later Simpson), textile worker, and his wife, Sara Liba (later Sarah), nee Peravosnick. Esther's parents were late nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants from Shtayochisik, in eastern Lithuania. After attending Leeds Girls' Modern School (1914-20), she won one of the twenty city scholarships to Leeds University in 1921, and graduated with a first-class degree in French and subsidiary German in 1924. She then taught herself the Gregg system of trilingual shorthand for English, French, and German, and became a sought-after secretary-cum-translator-cum-interpreter, working first in Germany and France and then for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation in Vienna and, briefly, for the World Alliance of the YMCA in Geneva. It was her brother, a conscientious objector during the First World War, who first introduced her to the Society of Friends, and she related to all she met, believing and responding in the Quakerly way to that which is of God in every one, ever after.

Appalled by Hitler's wholesale dismissal of Jewish lecturers and professors from German universities Tess Simpson asked Leo Szilard if she could be of use to the Academic Assistance Council recently founded in London by William Beveridge, Maynard Keynes, Gilbert Murray, Ernest Rutherford, and others, to help these persecuted scholars. In July 1933 she was appointed assistant secretary-on a third of her previous salary-of the emergency funding centre and international academic labour exchange that the council set up in two small offices of the Royal Society's rooms in Burlington House. This Academic Assistance Council, renamed the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning in 1936, was an organization run by British scholars to rescue other scholars regardless of their race, nationality, political beliefs, or religion. Tess Simpson was to persevere in that endeavour for the next sixty years. When challenged, late in life, about the council's exclusive focus on intellectuals, she replied: 'What was happening [in Germany] ... was anti-human and I wanted to do something to mitigate against that ... Each [refugee organization] could only do so much but of course I felt terrible about the plight of others'  (The Times, 1 July 1992).

At first almost all the refugees were Jews. But after the Nuremberg laws of 1935 German academics could be expelled if they had just one Jewish grandparent or a Jewish wife. Between 1933 and 1940 Tess Simpson became a one-woman reception centre for nearly 2600 refugee intellectuals. They arrived in Britain rejected, nearly destitute, and traumatized by the humiliation and hatred meted out to them by Nazis, and found themselves in a country still suffering massive unemployment, whose popular newspapers were as hostile to Britain's being 'flooded' by foreign asylum seekers as at any other time, before or since. Tess Simpson was almost always the first person to meet each new arrival and she greeted him or her with warm sympathy, high intelligence, and immense practicality, setting them 'on the stairway to survival and success'  (Hampstead and Highgate Express, November 1996). Many of these desperate people were eventually to become among the most eminent thinkers in their fields in the world, but they all started in Britain as Tess Simpson's 'children' for whom she found a new life, often locating work for them in small colleges in the United States or in university colleges in the British Commonwealth, if not at first in Britain.

After the fall of Norway in 1940, the British government, headed by Churchill, panicked about these and other 'enemy aliens' in Britain and decided to intern them all. To her horror Tess Simpson learned that over 500 of 'her' refugee scholars, many of them now doing work of national importance and of course anti-Nazis to a man, were about to be arrested, sent to camps surrounded by barbed wire, and possibly even deported. She made vain protests to the Home Office and had to spend the next year accumulating the most meticulous documentation attesting to the integrity of every single individual case in order to give Professor Archibald Vivian Hill, MP for Cambridge University and vice-president of the executive committee of the society, and Eleanor Rathbone, MP for the Northern Universities, the evidence they required before they could succeed in their joint effort, helped by Bishop George Bell of Chichester, to have all these interned intellectuals released. 'Do you know the story of Bruce and the spider? I am that spider', she later remarked  (Cooper, Refugee Scholars, 134).

Tess Simpson continued to work for the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, often in a voluntary capacity, from the end of the Second World War until her official-but not actual-retirement at the age of seventy-five. She gave help to refugee scholars fleeing Czechoslovakia in 1948, Hungary in 1956, apartheid South Africa after 1960, Czechoslovakia again in 1968, and Poland, Chile, Greece, Brazil, Argentina, Bangladesh, Zambia, Rhodesia, Iraq, Persia, and China-in fact wherever and whenever a brutal regime targeted independent-minded, critical intellectuals. It was said of her phenomenal 'computer' brain that all her refugees and their families lived inside her head and that she was forever working out the right contacts-and possible sources of funding-for each of them that would enable them to survive and fulfil their potential. The list of her refugees from Nazism alone included at least sixteen future Nobel laureates and many other outstanding thinkers and artists (including Karl Popper, Hans Kornberg, Ernst Gombrich, Nikolaus Pevsner, Marie Jahoda, Geoffrey Elton, Ludwig Guttmann, Otto Deutsch, Max Rostal, Peter Schidlof, and Rudolf Peierls-among many, many others). 'Yours was a truly personal success, the giving of yourself and your friendship unstintingly in a way that literally changed the cultural history of the world' was the tribute to her from Sir Walter Adams, former director of the London School of Economics and general secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, in 1966  (Cooper, Refugee Scholars, 235). In addition, between 1944 and 1966, Tess Simpson worked as secretary of the Society for Visiting Scientists, which was in fact a one-woman band, sponsored by the British Council and supported by fellows of the Royal Society.

Small, dynamic, austere in her personal spending, Tess Simpson lived mostly on bread and cheese, fruit, and vegetables; the luxuries she indulged in were good talk and the playing of music. She was a dedicated and immensely talented violinist and viola player until deafness struck her in her seventies. In 1949 she was given the ordre des Palmes Academiques of the French government; in 1956 she was made an OBE; she received honorary doctorates from the universities of London and Leeds, in 1984 and 1989 respectively; in 1991 she was elected an honorary member of the Royal College of Physicians; and in 1995 Austria gave her the Oesterreichische Ehrenkreuz fur Wissenschaft und Kunst. Four years before her death from a heart attack in Hampstead, London, on 19 November 1996 (she said she had too much work to do to go into hospital), the Nobel laureate Max Perutz said of her: 'I cannot think of anyone else with the same combination of warm affection for the individual scholars and iron toughness in the face of officialdom'  (report of reception at the Ciba Foundation, 2 July 1992). At her request, her body was donated for medical science.

Sybil Oldfield 

Sources  R. Cooper, Refugee scholars: conversations with Tess Simpson (1992) + The Times (1 July 1992) + report of reception at the Ciba Foundation, 2 July 1992 + The Times (30 Nov 1996) + The Independent (24 Dec 1996) + Hampstead and Highgate Express (Nov 1996) + Jewish Chronicle (13 Dec 1996) + Yorkshire Post (25 Nov 1996) + Daily Telegraph (3 Dec 1996) + The Guardian (21 Dec 1996) + R. Cooper, Retrospective sympathetic affection (1996) + b. cert. + private information (2004) [Dr Vivian Simpson] + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1997)
Archives Bodl. Oxf., MSS + U. Leeds, corresp. and papers | Bodl. Oxf., Society for the Protection of Science and Learning archive SOUND IWM + U. Leeds, Brotherton L.
Likenesses  J. Kramer, portrait, 1929, U. Leeds; repro. in Cooper, Refugee scholars · H. Schiff, portrait, 1933, Vienna; repro. in Cooper, Refugee scholars · photograph, repro. in The Times (1 July 1992) · photograph, News International Syndication, London [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in Yorkshire Evening Post (1989)
Wealth at death  £587,639: probate, 1997, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



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