Flora Solomon

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Flora Solomon OBE (1895–1984) was born Flora Benenson in Pinsk, Imperial Russia, in 1895. She was known as an influential Zionist.[1] She was the first woman hired to improve working conditions at Marks & Spencer in London.[2] Solomon was the mother of Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International.

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[edit] Personal life

Solomon was born in Pinsk, in what is now Belarus. She was a daughter of the Jewish Russian gold tycoon Grigori Benenson and related to the Rothschild family. She was married to Harold Solomon, a member of a London stockbroking family and a career soldier who was a brigadier-general in the First World War. She had one child, Peter Benenson, who would become the founder of Amnesty International.

She was widowed in 1931 and raised Peter on her own. In the 1930s, prior to World War II, she helped find homes for refugee children who fled to London from continental Europe.[3] During World War II she organized food distribution for the British government and won an OBE for her work.[4]

Solomon was also the founder of Blackmore Press, a noted British printing house.[citation needed]

Her life was described in her autobiography A Woman's Way, written in collaboration with Barnet Litvinoff and published in 1984 by Simon & Schuster.

[edit] Marks and Spencer

Solomon is also remembered for improving employee conditions at Marks & Spencer stores in the UK,[5] which had a profound impact on later government policy in the UK in relation to health care and the welfare state.

In 1939, over dinner with Simon Marks, the son of a founder of Marks & Spencer, she complained to him about the company's salary policies. She learned that staff often did not eat lunch there because they could not afford it. She said to Marks, "It's firms like Marks & Spencer that give Jews a bad name". Marks immediately gave Solomon the job of looking after staff welfare.[6] In her new position, she "pioneered the development of the staff welfare system" (including subsidized medical services). These practices directly influenced the Labour concept of the welfare state and the creation of the British National Health Service in 1948. As a result, Marks & Spencer acquired the reputation of the "working man’s paradise".[7]

[edit] Relation with Kim Philby

Solomon was a long-time friend of British intelligence officer Kim Philby. In 1962 she confided in Tel Aviv that she believed Kim Philby to be a Soviet spy. Not long afterwards, the MI5 confronted Philby with the allegation, and Philby broke down and confessed.[8]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Hopgood, Stephen (2006). Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International. Cornell University Press, 272 pages. ISBN 0801472512. 
  2. ^ Gall, Susan B. (1997). Women's Firsts. Gale Research, 564 pages. ISBN 0787601519. 
  3. ^ Peter Benenson hero file. moreorless : heroes & killers of the 20th century. www.moreorless.au.com (March 11, 2005).
  4. ^ Rabben, Linda (2001). "Amnesty International: Myth and Reality" ([dead link] – Scholar search). AGNI 54. Boston Unversity. 
  5. ^ Smith, Gerald Stanton (2000). D.S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, 1890-1939. Oxford University Press, 424 pages. ISBN 0198160062. 
  6. ^ Seth, Andrew; Randall, Geoffrey (1999). The Grocers: The Rise and Rise of the Supermarket Chains. Kogan Page, 331 pages. ISBN 0749421916.  p. 120
  7. ^ Rogatchevski, Andrei (August 3, 2007). "Marks, Not Marx: The Case of Marks & Spencer". Cultural Studies Panel -- The East in the West: Imports into European Mass Culture, Berlin, Germany: ICCEES Regional European Congress. 
  8. ^ West, Nigel; Tsarev, Oleg (1999). The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives. Yale University Press, 384 pages. ISBN 0300078064. 

[edit] Publications

  • Solomon, F. & Litvinoff, B. (1984). A Woman's Way. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0671460021 (also titled Baku to Baker Street: The Memoirs of Flora Solomon)

[edit] External links