Margaret Bayne Todd was born in Glasgow on the 4th of January 1906 but is more usually associated with Liverpool as a political and social campaigner. She was educated at St Paul's girls' school, West London, where she sat in class with Churchill's daughter. She arrived in Liverpool aged 18, when her father became principal of the College of Commerce in Tithebarn Street. It was the start of a lifelong love affair with the city, and particularly its working class. She became the first female graduate in social science from Liverpool University in 1928.
After she married Tom Simey, the Charles Booth Professor of Social Science at Liverpool University, they spent most of the war years in the Caribbean as part of a small team of experts on social and economic development. This experience, and their other international interests, gave them both a deep respect for the Afro-Caribbean and Chinese communities in the hinterland of the Liverpool docks.
From the mid-1940s Margaret became involved in many of the fields of voluntary service which have flourished in Liverpool for more than a century. She traced the origins of this tradition in her book 'Charitable Effort In Liverpool' in 1951. Later she and her husband wrote their definitive study of Charles Booth in 1960, who first recognised its limitations there and elsewhere. Margaret, as a Labour city councillor for the Granby Ward, Toxteth from 1963, demonstrated both the depth of her local knowledge and her impatience with many of the structures of local government. She realised that, despite all the community institutions, poor people were losing out further as Liverpool went deeper into economic decline. Well aware of the local tensions over the preceding decade, when use of police powers to stop and search had increased and the police had begun to close nightclubs frequented by black youths, she had foreseen that this would cause tension and predicted that the closure of one club in particular would lead to a riot. She was proved to be correct.
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| Kenneth Oxford and Margaret Simey |
When local government was re-organised in 1974, she was elected to the Merseyside County Council and in 1981 became chair of the Merseyside County Police Committee at the time of the Toxteth riots, when she frequently came into conflict with Kenneth Oxford, the then Chief Constable. In this respect she gained a reputation for being outspoken about topics in which she believed, usually championing the cause of the underdog against the establishment. The eventual breakdown of relations had come soon after, especially among the increasingly segregated black communities. At the time, she said of those local people involved in the confrontation with the police that "they would be apathetic fools ... if they didn't protest."
When, from 1986, the county council was abolished and she had been succeeded as local councillor, to her great delight by a young black woman, she continued as an informal counsellor, working with family groups, youth clubs, voluntary organisations and ecumenical enterprises. She was much sought after as a public speaker throughout the country. Margaret also served as a magistrate in Liverpool and, in 2003, was awarded freedom of the city, an honour which she declined. She told the Liverpool Echo, "If I accepted this, people would say: 'Look at our Margaret pretending to be a lady' and I'm not having that. I'm not superior to anyone else. And anyway, the whole people of Liverpool should be honoured. It should not be personalised." Her husband, who died in 1969, had been made a life peer by Harold Wilson, but she preferred to be known simply as Margaret Simey.
With over more than 60 years of social activism, Margaret Simey became the best-known of local figures, tall and purposeful, as she urgently strode the city streets, fearless for herself and indomitable in her support of local people, urging them to speak and act for themselves and identifying with them in good times and bad. Her style, and the strength of her convictions, were such that, to many in authority and in the media, she invited contention and misunderstanding. "I am," she would say, "a dogged woman. I never condoned violence but I warned of it. I saw people being neglected and disenfranchised: a community being subjected to dependence." Her work became legendary.
Later in life she was awarded an honorary doctorate of the University of Liverpool for her services to the community. In her eighties she was an Honorary Senior Fellow of the university, still actively learning, teaching, writing and speaking. Margaret Simey is a woman who could fairly be described as a Liverpool legend - a rights campaigner, academic, magistrate and general thorn in the side of the establishment, and when she died in 2004 aged 98, tributes poured in from across the city and beyond.
see also:- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2020/11/a-liverpool-exemplar-john-moss.html
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