Journalist, Tour Guide, and Author of Manchester: The Biography, Ed Glinert, talks his new book and Jewish contributions to the city’s history.
Landing in Manchester from London in 1977, Ed Gilnert started his journalism career at the student newspaper – The Mancunion – before founding City Life and working for Private Eye and MOJO music magazine in the 90s.
He has since become one of the country’s most prolific tour guides, working in many UK cities, and has a growing list of books to his name and Manchester: The Biography is the latest in his repertoire. He describes it as ‘the first epic, detailed, and accurate history of the world’s first modern city – from the Romans to 21st century renaissance and from cotton machines to cultural richness’.
Manchester’s history is something that Ed has always had great passion for and in 2008, he published The Manchester Compendium: “That was the first ever time anyone had ever done a kind of gazetteer to Manchester area by area, street by street, and building by building.”
It was this passion combined with his writing skills and knowledge from over 5,000 tours of the city that led him to write the latest book: “Nobody had ever done a proper epic history of Manchester before; its history books are either quite banal or written by academics and totally unreadable. Most of these books only deal with cotton, engineering, and the war, and nobody had gone into the depth that I like. People want to read something interesting, and I wanted to write something they would pick up and read most of it in one go.”
As a Jewish historian, it was important for Ed to include the contributions of Jews in Manchester: “Bill Williams has done a wonderful job about the Jewish history of Manchester but that was the book – it’s literally called Jewish Manchester: An Illustrated History. I thought that the general history of the city needed to have a good Jewish section which is very poignant given the oppression faced by community at the minute. I wanted the section to convey that we’re not going to be destroyed by this; we’re going to proclaim ourselves proudly in a general history of Manchester that mostly non-Jewish people will read.
“I’ve done it in an original way by calling the chapter ‘A Manchester Man Creates the State of Israel’ just to grab people’s attention, especially with Israel currently being rather unpopular outside of the Jewish world.”
The story of Chaim Weitzman and the Balfour Declaration is the main Jewish focus of the book. Chaim moved to Manchester in the early 1900s and taught in the chemistry department at the University of Manchester before becoming Israel’s first president: “During the First World War, the government was getting short of acetone and needed to find a cheap way of distilling it so turned to the nation’s chemists. Weitzman solved the problem by discovering that you can distil acetone easily from horse chestnuts.
“Churchill couldn’t thank Weitzman enough and asked how the country could repay him and he responded: ‘you can take my plans for a Jewish homeland more seriously’. Which resulted in the Balfour Declaration and the creation of what we know today as Israel.”
Despite Jewish people in Manchester playing such an important role in history, Ed believes there’s still more work to be done on awareness: “I’ve stopped doing my Jewish tour of the city as nobody’s been booking it because of the current situation. I’ve been doing it for private Jewish groups but on the general public’s awareness of things, there’s so much more work to be done.”
Up next for Ed is what he describes as a ‘mammoth Kabbalah thriller’: “The Kabbalah is a mysterious body of Hebrew legend and myth that only rabbis are supposed to know. I’m putting it into a semi-fictional setting with all the characteristics of a thriller. It’s such an epic book, it’s taking me forever to write – one day I might finish it!”
