In April 1894, Michael, Hannah and their three children (Simon, Rebecca and Miriam) moved from Wigan to Manchester. In the same month, Tom Spencer invested his life savings of £300 in Michael’s business, establishing the partnership of Marks and Spencer.
The Marks family lived above the Marks and Spencer Penny Bazaar at 20 Cheetham Hill Road, in an area with a thriving Jewish community with synagogues, a Jewish school and lots of Jewish businesses. Michael made weekly visits to the Jewish Working Men’s Club, where he would distribute money to the poorest and most needy members.
To six-year-old Simon, the family’s home at 20 Cheetham Hill Road, an end-of-terrace shop with rooms above, was warm and comfortable. He would always view Manchester as:
“…my home town. It is here that I spent the formative years of my life, where I married, and where I helped to lay the foundations of a new Marks & Spencer”’.
Simon attended the Manchester Jews School in Derby Street, just off the main Cheetham Hill Road and close to his home. The curriculum was non-religious and the essence of the school, which had separate sections for boys and girls, was to help young Eastern European immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants settle into, and become part of, English society. Emphasis was placed on English language, culture, games and songs, and Yiddish (the only language spoken in many of the pupils’ homes) was strongly discouraged.
Hannah encouraged Simon to attend synagogue on Friday night and Saturday mornings, although Michael could rarely accompany his son as these were the busiest trading periods for his business. Michael only attended synagogue during High Holidays, which included Rosh Hashanah (Jewish new year) and the solemn fast day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. These services were conducted in Hebrew, in which young Simon had special lessons but found difficult – he was able to read the language but virtually unable to understand it. In 1901 Simon was 13 and his bar mitzvah took place in one of Manchester’s elite synagogues.
In 1895 the family moved to a larger house in a wealthier area, at 118 Bury New Road in Manchester. In 1901, Michael and his family moved further along the same street, to 396 Bury New Road. Michael ordered the existing house to be demolished and built a new home called ‘Knoll House’, it had eight bedrooms, a garden summer house, and a large drawing room which contained a piano and a collection of stuffed birds displayed under glass covers. There was also live-in accommodation for a cook and a maid, and even a telephone, a recently invented luxury that few homes had. This is the only one of Michael’s various homes that still survives.
Michael was keen for Simon to attend Manchester Grammar School. Founded in the 1500s, it was one of the best schools in the country and, unusually, there was no bias against Jewish children – the first Jewish pupils had attended the school in 1827 and in 1879 the school had declared that it was ‘open to all classes and creeds in the Kingdom’. To Michael, the school represented educational opportunities for his son that had not been available to him as a boy in Russia.
On first moving to Manchester, Michael kept some goods under tarpaulin in the back yard of the Cheetham Hill Road penny bazaar, but soon needed a warehouse. The first Manchester warehouse for Marks and Spencer was in Robert Street, but it wasn’t large enough to serve the requirements of (by 1900) 36 Penny Bazaars across the north of England and Midlands, south Wales and London.
Michael arranged the building of a new, much larger warehouse in Derby Street – almost opposite Simon’s school. The warehouse still stands today. This was the company’s registered office from 1903 to 1924 and featured proudly on the company letterhead.
The business was doing well, and Michael was now able to receive a larger salary for his work; in 1907, his annual salary was £300 (equivalent to £30,285 in 2024, Bank of England Inflation Calculator).
See supporting links (in Resources section) for an external source featuring a Memory Map of Jewish Manchester.
Glossary
- Tarpaulin - a large sheet of strong, flexible, water-resistant or waterproof material.
- Salary - a fixed regular payment from an employer to an employee.