[3] Due to the family's financial difficulties following the Great Depression, his opportunities for a career in his family's businesses disappeared, whether the iron industries of Coalbrookdale, or the cotton industries of Manchester (his relatives were partners in the prosperous firm of Simpson and Godlee which ran mills in Swinton employing at one time some 1,500 men women and children.
[9] An intriguing account by the writer Ernest Raymond is given in his autobiography[10] of an encounter with Simpson as a Constable whilst at Bow Street: But most helpful and most able of all was a P.C.
At his suggestion I wrote to Scotland Yard for permission to go all over Bow Street Police Station, and in no great while I received a courteous reply granting my request and stating that P.C.
As I write now I turn over a letter in which he sketches for me an elaborate diagram like a genealogical tree, explaining police hierarchies, detective methods and delegated activities not only in his Metropolitan area, but in all parts of the country.
[16][17] Simpson was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1946 New Year Honours for his services to civil defence.
[23] During this appointment he visited USA and Canada, with the Transport Minister Ernest Marples who subsequently introduced parking meters in London.
[2][25] In 1967, Simpson oversaw the move of New Scotland Yard from the Victoria Embankment to 10 Broadway, close to St James's Park station.
[26] Charles Hasler, writing in NARPO[27] Millennium Magazine recalls, ‘Joe’ Simpson as we all knew him never forgot his early years on the beat and was always happy to talk to any of the rank-and-file officers he happened to meet.
In his quiet way Sir Joseph was a bigger innovator than the majority of his predecessors and certainly ranks with Lord Trenchard as a moderniser of the Metropolitan Police.
It was not until the Race Relations Act 1968 became law in October that year, several months after Simpson's death, that this issue was decisively addressed by legislation.
[42] However, in History & Policy,[37] it is acknowledged that Simpson's decision regarding recruitment of Black Special Constables was made 'in the aftermath of racial disorder in 1958 and the murder of a West Indian immigrant the following year'.
Simpson and his colleagues would also have fresh in mind the 1962 race riots[43] which lasted for a week in Dudley, in the West Midlands, and the increasing tensions in USA.
[44] Elsewhere, Whitfield claims that Simpson's published observations on the subject demonstrated a conviction that Black people were temperamentally unsuited to the pressures of day-to-day policing,[45] and, in 1963, an internal memo from the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Tom Mahir GM[46] in charge of 'D' Department (recruitment and training) stated, “The truth is, of course, that we are not yet prepared to recruit any coloured men”.
Simpson's brother-in-law Sir John Valentine Wistar Shaw had been Governor and Commander in Chief of Trinidad and Tobago from 1947 to 1950.
In 1968 Mahesh Upadhyaya became the first person in the UK to bring a racial discrimination case to court using the recently introduced Race Relations Act 1968.
He died suddenly at his home in Roehampton four years later at the age of 58, his early death probably brought on by stress caused by overwork.
His funeral was held with full honours at Westminster Abbey on 29 March 1968,[50] with all Metropolitan Police officers who were able to do so observing a one minute's silence at 11am.
"[52]Sir Charles Cunningham, who was formerly at the Home Office wrote in The Times of his leadership, fearlessness, his intellect, patience, tolerance, integrity and his capacity to understand others and see the other man's point of view, "These were qualities which everyone who worked with him – Ministers, Civil Servants, members of his own service - recognised, respected and admired.
She was a soprano, under the training of Elena Gerhardt, and her singing tour of Germany in 1938, well-acclaimed by Hans Scholz,[60] an eminent writer and musicologist in Münchener Zeitung of 20 March 1938 coincided with Hitler's invasion of Bavaria, sharpening her family's awareness of the destitution and 'ethnic cleansing' that came with the build-up to Kristallnacht and the Second World War.
They had two sons, the elder of whom, Mark, served for some four years in the British South Africa Police in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); he resigned in 1963 to avoid being transferred from the Criminal Investigation Department back to the uniformed branch.
[62] Mark Simpson then served briefly in the Rhodesian Army and the Department of Internal Affairs from which he resigned [63] in 1964 because of imminent political change (UDI).
Ben Simpson was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the New Year Honours 2010 for services to the community in Oxford.