Esther Simpson

Esther Simpson – Tess to her friends – devoted her life to resettling academic refugees, whom she thought of as her family. By the end of her life, Tess could count among her ‘children’ sixteen Nobel Prize winners, eighteen knights of the realm, seventy-four fellows of the royal society, thirty-four fellows of the British academy. From a humble upbringing in Leeds to Russian immigrant parents, Simpson took on secretarial roles that saw her move to London, then Vienna and finally Geneva. But when Hitler came to power she found her calling and joined the Academic Assistance Council for a salary that paid a third of what she was previously earning. Her work over more than five decades seeking refuge for many thousands of displaced academics had a profound impact on twentieth-century physics, philosophy, architecture, art history and molecular biology to name just a handful of disciplines.