From The Jewish Chronicle, 11 May 2017 https://www.thejc.com/news/news-features/esther-simpson-the-unknown-heroine- 1.438317?highlight=Simpson David Edmonds May 11, 2017 Esther Simpson - the unknown heroine The extraordinary story of how one woman offered refuge to philosophers, scientists and musicians fleeing from the Nazis, and in doing so reshaped the cultural and intellectual landscape of the Western World. It’s not clear how Professor Stanislaus Jolles died. The year was 1943 and he was in his mid-eighties. But did he die from natural causes, did he kill himself, or was he killed? He was a Jew living in Berlin, after the systematic extermination of Jews had already begun, so anything is possible. The fate of his wife, Adele, is documented. In the year of her husband’s passing, she was transported south from the German capital to Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. She perished in 1944. She was Miss Simpson to strangers, Esther to colleagues, Tess to some of her close friends. And she had many, many friends, among whom she counted Ludwig Wittgenstein, often described as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. Wittgenstein had been acquainted with Stanislaus Jolles for over three decades, ever since he’d left his palatial Viennese home in 1906 to study engineering in Berlin. Professor and Mrs Jolles had been his hosts. Stanislaus was a mathematician who came to look upon Ludwig like a son; he and his wife called him ‘little Wittgenstein’. During World War I, when Wittgenstein was fighting for the Austrians on the Eastern Front, they furnished him with a constant supply of bread, fruit-cake, and cigarettes. In January 1939, six years after the Nazis had come to power, and two months after Kristallnacht, Wittgenstein posted a letter to her organization about his old landlords. He explained that he’d been contacted by Adele: her husband was desperate to spend the rest of his life in peace in England. Could a benefactor be found to support him, Wittgenstein asked, so that the Jolles would be allowed to travel? “I am well aware that it is practically hopeless to try to find such a benefactor”, he continued, “at the same time I can’t tell these people that their situation is absolutely hopeless, if there is even the smallest possible chance.” Tess Simpson replied almost immediately, as was her practice. This was not the first she had heard about this sad case. “Professor Einstein has already written to us about Professor Stanislaus Jolles, and we wish we were in a position to assist. However, our assistance is limited to the scholars and scientists who are still able to work, and for this purpose alone our funds are inadequate. It is impossible for us to take over cases of scholars who, however eminent in their day, are now of an age when they should be enjoying their pensions”. She was being straightforward. But the rejection sealed the fate of this octogenarian academic and his wife. Tess Simpson, and the organization she served with intense dedication, rejected applicants immediately if they failed to fulfil the basic qualifications or after carefully evaluating their CVs. But many hundreds of lives were saved, of scientists, philosophers, historians, artists, musicians and architects, who would go on to contribute immeasurably to intellectual and cultural life in the US and Britain. ••• Parentage of The Academic Assistance Council (AAC) is disputed. The Jewish- Hungarian physicist, Leo Szilard, deserves much of the credit. Szilard’s numerous accomplishments included being the first scientist to recognize the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. He overflowed with ideas, scientific and otherwise, and buzzed around with so much energy that some people joked he could be in two places at once. Simpson, who met him through a mutual friend, the Viennese economist/sociologist Karl Polanyi, said he was like “an incessant fountain” and that once, after talking to her about the feasibility of an atomic bomb, “he spoke with equal enthusiasm about the prospect of getting fresh peaches out of a tin.” With Einstein, Szilard would persuade President Franklin D Roosevelt to launch the Manhattan Project, to beat the Nazis in the race to build the bomb. Several years earlier, immediately after the Nazis came to power, he conceived the notion of a university for exiles. Nothing came of it, but on a trip to Vienna he happened to stay in the same hotel as a British academic: a Liberal economist and progressive man-of-action, William Beveridge, Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. And that sparked Beveridge into action. Beveridge, who would go on to transform Britain and its welfare system through the recommendations of his report on the reform of social welfare, had a different recollection, in which Szilard’s role is whitewashed. In his book, A Defence of Free Learning, written a quarter of a century later, he claimed that the idea for the Academic Assistance Council came as he was sitting in a Viennese coffee house in 1933, with fellow economists, including Ludwig von Mises. Hitler had become German Chancellor just a few weeks before. Von Mises read out the names, published in the evening paper, of a dozen Jewish academics sacked by the new German government. Outraged, Beveridge determined that something must be done. Back in the UK, he immediately got to work, raising money by appealing to faculty members of the LSE, many of whom donated generously. He also contacted other top scholars beyond his own institution. On 24 May, 1933, a letter, signed by renowned academics, among them seven Nobel laureates, was published in The Times. It announced the launch of the Academic Assistance Council, stating that its objective was “to raise a fund, to be used primarily, though not exclusively, in providing maintenance for displaced teachers and investigators, and finding them work in universities and scientific institutions”. One of the signatories, and one of the first to write a cheque in support, was John Maynard Keynes. Another was the New Zealand-born physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Ernest Rutherford who, after some vigorous cajoling by Beveridge, became the Society’s President. They deliberately excluded Jews from the executive, worrying that that might be off-putting to potential supporters. On 3 October, Einstein helped raise more funds when he addressed a packed Albert Hall on the subject of “Science and Civilisation”, urging the crowd to “resist the powers which threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom”. Beveridge was in no position to run the AAC on a day-to-day basis, though he evangelized for its mission in many talks delivered up and down the country. Two full-time officials were appointed. One was the Secretary, Walter Adam, a historian who would go on to become the director of the LSE. The second held the lowly status of Assistant Secretary. Secretaries tend not to be acknowledged in history books. This latter appointment was the more momentous. Her name was Tess Simpson. ••• Tess Simpson was born on 31 July, 1903 and grew up in Leeds, the youngest of four siblings; her father worked in the garment industry. She won a scholarship to study modern languages at Leeds University and gained a first. After graduating she spent a short period in Germany as a governess for a rich but tedious family, then had a spell in Paris before, in 1928, accepting a job at the International Fellowship of Reconciliation in Vienna, a body promoting reconciliation between former warring countries. She was in the Austrian capital until 1933; in her own words, she had “a marvellous few years”. She indulged in a life-long passion, music. She was an extremely gifted violinist, regularly joining in chamber music ensembles which in Vienna, she would later recall, was taken so much for granted that “it was like cleaning your teeth”. She described a Vienna Philharmonic concert of Mozart’s G Minor Symphony, conducted by Bruno Walter as the most memorable musical event of her life. In mid-1933, after she had moved to Geneva and a job at the World Alliance of YMCAs, a telex was wired to her at Szilard’s behest: “ACADEMIC COUNCIL HELPING GERMAN SCIENTISTS NAMELY SZILARDS WORK WANTS SECRETARY STOP IMPORTANT START NEXT MONDAY.” The position was back in London as Assistant Secretary of the Academic Assistance Council. She accepted, though unable to quite accommodate the ‘Next Monday’ directive. Her existing Swiss job was hardly well-remunerated; nevertheless, the AAC post, at 2 pounds 10 shillings a week, represented a massive pay cut. She began work on 17 July, 1933. For the AAC it was an inspired appointment, as Beveridge would write, “of lasting and growing importance”. She had a rare talent for organization, for friendship and for persuading people to do what she asked without provoking resentment. She also had the most astounding reserves of energy, resilience and patience. She would routinely work until 10pm when the gates outside their office were locked. After the Anschluss in March 1938 her workload increased further; she took no holiday for 13 years. All her life, said one of her future colleagues, “she worked preposterously hard”. The AAC initially operated out of two small rooms in the attic of a large house in Piccadilly, in central London. Although it was always short of money, it had a pot of funds to disperse, giving annual grants of £182 for single refugee academics and £250 for married ones. But the more important function was to act as a conduit between academics displaced by the Nazis and the British university sector, finding out their expertise and whether there was a university with a suitable department and a vacancy.