pride in battle
Well-Known Member
Met him a couple of times, a lovely unassuming gentleman R.I.P
P.S does anyone know how he died, had he been ill ?
P.S does anyone know how he died, had he been ill ?
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Sir Howard Bernstein R. I. P
- Thread starter dublinblue12
- Start date
The press release said ‘After a short illness’ but did not specify what it was.Met him a couple of times, a lovely unassuming gentleman R.I.P
P.S does anyone know how he died, had he been ill ?
East Level 2
Well-Known Member
He had been receiving cancer treatment at The Christie but I'm not sure of the exact cause of death.Met him a couple of times, a lovely unassuming gentleman R.I.P
P.S does anyone know how he died, had he been ill ?
I have copied and pasted his obituary here,for anyone who wants to read it,from the Times.
Sir Howard Bernstein obituary: Head of city council hailed as the ‘maker’ of modern ManchesterVisionary Mancunian spearheaded the city’s regeneration after the IRA bombing of 1996
When Sir Howard Bernstein met George Osborne in 2014 to discuss regional regeneration, he had a simple message for the chancellor of the exchequer. “We want our city back,” the chief executive of Manchester city council said.
Osborne was highly receptive to the message. The Conservative Party was under extreme pressure in the northwest and had been beaten into third place by Ukip and Labour in local and European elections. Osborne, whose own seat of Tatton bordered Greater Manchester, knew something had to be done.
Agreeing with Bernstein that the “hollowing out” of local democracy had to be reversed, he came up with the concept of the northern powerhouse, with Manchester at its heart, and the two men devised a plan known in Whitehall as “Devo Manc”.
In an unprecedented derogation of power from the centre and under the control of the newly created office of an elected mayor, the city took charge of a portfolio of activities from Whitehall including transport regulation, strategic planning, housing development, further education, skills training and economic growth.
Bernstein “had his city back” and in Devo Manc, Osborne had achieved what he called “the thing of which I think I am most proud” in his time in office.
“Why does nobody come up with ideas for getting things done like Howard does?” Osborne chided Treasury officials. Bernstein, he enthused, was “one of the very, very best public servants I’ve ever come across” and “the star of British local government”.
“The Osborne-Bernstein deal was like two mafia bosses carving up Apulia,” the former Times editor Sir Simon Jenkins wrote. “There was no white paper or consultative document, let alone a debate in parliament.” Rather the deal was “reached by sleight of hand, by one man with a political problem to solve and another who saw this as an opportunity”.
Bernstein had spent 40 years labouring in Manchester’s vast and magnificent Victorian town hall, built in celebration of the triumph of King Cotton and the Lancashire mills that spun money and cloth in equally prodigious quantities.
He had entered the imposing building as the most junior of 18-year-old clerks and climbed the local government ladder during decades of urban decline, while dreaming of civic rebirth and fretting that a city that had once built and run its own schools, hospitals, museums, transportation and social services should languish under the lash of Whitehall.
Forty-six years later, 19 of them spent as chief executive, he retired in 2017, fêted by the Manchester Evening News as “the man widely credited with spearheading the city’s 21st century renaissance”.
Howard Bernstein was born in Manchester in 1953, the son of Miriam and Maurice Bernstein, whose parents had emigrated from Russia in the 1900s. The older of two brothers, he grew up in the city’s traditional Jewish quarter of Cheetham Hill where his father sold raincoats from a shop above a launderette.
He credited his Jewish upbringing and the sense of community that it fostered with shaping his outlook on life. “My father was not political, but very socially aware,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I think most Jewish families were in that era and being in a community was fundamental. Treating people with respect, working across the community — that always was seen as being very important.”
At Ducie High School in the tough Moss Side (now part of Manchester Academy) he was a keen sportsman and developed a lifelong passion for Manchester City and Lancashire County Cricket Club — he went on to become honorary president of the former and president of the latter. As chief executive of the council he was heavily involved in planning the building of the City of Manchester Stadium (now the Etihad Stadium) to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and its subsequent transfer to Manchester City on a lease from Manchester city council.
On leaving school in 1971 he had joined the council on a wage of £10 a week. “My first job was being given a big bowl of cups and being told to go and wash them,” he recalled. “Which was a bit of a culture shock, because I’d never washed anything in my life.”
After three months of washing pots he became a post boy in the legal department but still found himself making the tea for the council’s lawyers, so he began studying for an external degree with London University. Later he moved to the conveyancing department.
At the time Manchester was, by Bernstein’s own admission, a grim place. The cloth manufacture that had made the city prosperous had suffered a long postwar decline. Inept planning had been hugely damaging, as whole areas of the city of Manchester were levelled and replaced with council housing of such poor design and construction that much of it subsequently had to be rebuilt.
As a junior employee he looked on powerlessly. Full-on post-industrial blight had set in by 1980, when he was promoted to head of urban policy. Finally, he was in a position to do something to halt the slide.
Further promotion followed after Graham Stringer, later the Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, became council leader in 1984. Impressed by Bernstein’s role in establishing Manchester airport as a PLC and the tenacity with which he pursued an unfair competition case against Stansted airport, Stringer appointed Bernstein as assistant chief executive in 1986.
Four years later he was promoted again to deputy chief executive and he began to plot the rejuvenation of the city, with projects including the building of Bridgewater Hall.
He took a pragmatic approach of seeking allies wherever they could be found in the private sector and in the Conservative government.
“We’d lost our way,” he said of Manchester during the Thatcher years. “We didn’t really have an economic policy. We certainly didn’t work with the government.” Yet the confrontational approach of hard-left Labour authorities such as Liverpool had proved disastrous and had only served to make the government more intransigent.
Much better, Bernstein argued, to “recognise serious shortcomings in national policies and try to overcome them by persuading them and working with them where you can”.
Stringer agreed and long before Bernstein and Osborne made common cause, he found another Conservative ministerial ally in Michael Heseltine, secretary of state for the environment in John Major’s government. They first worked together in 1991, drawing up the City Challenge Partnership to regenerate the Hulme area with 3,000 new homes, shopping areas, roads and community facilities. A quarter of a century later, Bernstein took Heseltine back to Hulme to show him what had been achieved. “He was quite moved by it,” he noted. “There’s something quite chastening about having turned around a failing neighbourhood and transforming people’s lives.”
By 1996 a series of redevelopment projects was under way in the city in support of Manchester’s successful bid to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games, while Bernstein claimed further success when he brought together “a so-called hard-left council” and an “ideological Conservative government” to fund Metrolink as “the first privatised railway this country had seen for a century”. It represented the city’s ability “to put place before party politics”, he declared.
However, it was the IRA bomb that devastated the city centre in June 1996 which forced the pace on regeneration. Although miraculously there were no fatalities, the bombing was at the time rated one of the most expensive disasters the insurance industry had ever faced. An estimated 400 businesses within half a mile of the blast were affected and the claims eventually totalled £411 million (£1 billion in today’s money).
Bernstein was at a wedding in northern Manchester when the bomb went off and heard the blast. “This is going to take some herculean effort to get this back together,” he told himself when he later toured the rubble-strewn city centre.
As head of the task force charged with supervising the rebuilding, he travelled to London with Sir Richard Leese, who had succeeded Stringer as the Labour council leader, for a meeting with the deputy prime minister, Heseltine, who immediately agreed to central government providing £100 million and announced an international design competition to redevelop the bomb-affected area.
Bernstein set to work raising further capital and £600 million of public and private sector cash was eventually secured to fund the renewal. By the time the rebuilding plans were unveiled in 1998, Bernstein had been appointed chief executive. His efforts led to him being knighted in the 2003 new year’s honours list for services to his city, although he rated becoming president of Manchester City as an even prouder moment.
He is survived by his second wife, Vanessa, whom he married in 2004; by his two children, Jonathan and Natalie, from his first marriage to Yvonne Selwyn, which was dissolved; and by his three stepchildren, Danielle, Francesca and Dominique.
He said he had been fortunate in his career never to have experienced antisemitism — “I find that quite remarkable” — and attributed the lack of prejudice to the fundamental decency of the Mancunian character.
“I’ve always been a proud Manc,” he said. “It’s my city and I could never do another job in another place.”
Sir Howard Bernstein obituary: Head of city council hailed as the ‘maker’ of modern ManchesterVisionary Mancunian spearheaded the city’s regeneration after the IRA bombing of 1996
When Sir Howard Bernstein met George Osborne in 2014 to discuss regional regeneration, he had a simple message for the chancellor of the exchequer. “We want our city back,” the chief executive of Manchester city council said.
Osborne was highly receptive to the message. The Conservative Party was under extreme pressure in the northwest and had been beaten into third place by Ukip and Labour in local and European elections. Osborne, whose own seat of Tatton bordered Greater Manchester, knew something had to be done.
Agreeing with Bernstein that the “hollowing out” of local democracy had to be reversed, he came up with the concept of the northern powerhouse, with Manchester at its heart, and the two men devised a plan known in Whitehall as “Devo Manc”.
In an unprecedented derogation of power from the centre and under the control of the newly created office of an elected mayor, the city took charge of a portfolio of activities from Whitehall including transport regulation, strategic planning, housing development, further education, skills training and economic growth.
Bernstein “had his city back” and in Devo Manc, Osborne had achieved what he called “the thing of which I think I am most proud” in his time in office.
“Why does nobody come up with ideas for getting things done like Howard does?” Osborne chided Treasury officials. Bernstein, he enthused, was “one of the very, very best public servants I’ve ever come across” and “the star of British local government”.
“The Osborne-Bernstein deal was like two mafia bosses carving up Apulia,” the former Times editor Sir Simon Jenkins wrote. “There was no white paper or consultative document, let alone a debate in parliament.” Rather the deal was “reached by sleight of hand, by one man with a political problem to solve and another who saw this as an opportunity”.
Bernstein had spent 40 years labouring in Manchester’s vast and magnificent Victorian town hall, built in celebration of the triumph of King Cotton and the Lancashire mills that spun money and cloth in equally prodigious quantities.
He had entered the imposing building as the most junior of 18-year-old clerks and climbed the local government ladder during decades of urban decline, while dreaming of civic rebirth and fretting that a city that had once built and run its own schools, hospitals, museums, transportation and social services should languish under the lash of Whitehall.
Forty-six years later, 19 of them spent as chief executive, he retired in 2017, fêted by the Manchester Evening News as “the man widely credited with spearheading the city’s 21st century renaissance”.
Howard Bernstein was born in Manchester in 1953, the son of Miriam and Maurice Bernstein, whose parents had emigrated from Russia in the 1900s. The older of two brothers, he grew up in the city’s traditional Jewish quarter of Cheetham Hill where his father sold raincoats from a shop above a launderette.
He credited his Jewish upbringing and the sense of community that it fostered with shaping his outlook on life. “My father was not political, but very socially aware,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I think most Jewish families were in that era and being in a community was fundamental. Treating people with respect, working across the community — that always was seen as being very important.”
At Ducie High School in the tough Moss Side (now part of Manchester Academy) he was a keen sportsman and developed a lifelong passion for Manchester City and Lancashire County Cricket Club — he went on to become honorary president of the former and president of the latter. As chief executive of the council he was heavily involved in planning the building of the City of Manchester Stadium (now the Etihad Stadium) to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and its subsequent transfer to Manchester City on a lease from Manchester city council.
On leaving school in 1971 he had joined the council on a wage of £10 a week. “My first job was being given a big bowl of cups and being told to go and wash them,” he recalled. “Which was a bit of a culture shock, because I’d never washed anything in my life.”
After three months of washing pots he became a post boy in the legal department but still found himself making the tea for the council’s lawyers, so he began studying for an external degree with London University. Later he moved to the conveyancing department.
At the time Manchester was, by Bernstein’s own admission, a grim place. The cloth manufacture that had made the city prosperous had suffered a long postwar decline. Inept planning had been hugely damaging, as whole areas of the city of Manchester were levelled and replaced with council housing of such poor design and construction that much of it subsequently had to be rebuilt.
As a junior employee he looked on powerlessly. Full-on post-industrial blight had set in by 1980, when he was promoted to head of urban policy. Finally, he was in a position to do something to halt the slide.
Further promotion followed after Graham Stringer, later the Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, became council leader in 1984. Impressed by Bernstein’s role in establishing Manchester airport as a PLC and the tenacity with which he pursued an unfair competition case against Stansted airport, Stringer appointed Bernstein as assistant chief executive in 1986.
Four years later he was promoted again to deputy chief executive and he began to plot the rejuvenation of the city, with projects including the building of Bridgewater Hall.
He took a pragmatic approach of seeking allies wherever they could be found in the private sector and in the Conservative government.
“We’d lost our way,” he said of Manchester during the Thatcher years. “We didn’t really have an economic policy. We certainly didn’t work with the government.” Yet the confrontational approach of hard-left Labour authorities such as Liverpool had proved disastrous and had only served to make the government more intransigent.
Much better, Bernstein argued, to “recognise serious shortcomings in national policies and try to overcome them by persuading them and working with them where you can”.
Stringer agreed and long before Bernstein and Osborne made common cause, he found another Conservative ministerial ally in Michael Heseltine, secretary of state for the environment in John Major’s government. They first worked together in 1991, drawing up the City Challenge Partnership to regenerate the Hulme area with 3,000 new homes, shopping areas, roads and community facilities. A quarter of a century later, Bernstein took Heseltine back to Hulme to show him what had been achieved. “He was quite moved by it,” he noted. “There’s something quite chastening about having turned around a failing neighbourhood and transforming people’s lives.”
By 1996 a series of redevelopment projects was under way in the city in support of Manchester’s successful bid to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games, while Bernstein claimed further success when he brought together “a so-called hard-left council” and an “ideological Conservative government” to fund Metrolink as “the first privatised railway this country had seen for a century”. It represented the city’s ability “to put place before party politics”, he declared.
However, it was the IRA bomb that devastated the city centre in June 1996 which forced the pace on regeneration. Although miraculously there were no fatalities, the bombing was at the time rated one of the most expensive disasters the insurance industry had ever faced. An estimated 400 businesses within half a mile of the blast were affected and the claims eventually totalled £411 million (£1 billion in today’s money).
Bernstein was at a wedding in northern Manchester when the bomb went off and heard the blast. “This is going to take some herculean effort to get this back together,” he told himself when he later toured the rubble-strewn city centre.
As head of the task force charged with supervising the rebuilding, he travelled to London with Sir Richard Leese, who had succeeded Stringer as the Labour council leader, for a meeting with the deputy prime minister, Heseltine, who immediately agreed to central government providing £100 million and announced an international design competition to redevelop the bomb-affected area.
Bernstein set to work raising further capital and £600 million of public and private sector cash was eventually secured to fund the renewal. By the time the rebuilding plans were unveiled in 1998, Bernstein had been appointed chief executive. His efforts led to him being knighted in the 2003 new year’s honours list for services to his city, although he rated becoming president of Manchester City as an even prouder moment.
He is survived by his second wife, Vanessa, whom he married in 2004; by his two children, Jonathan and Natalie, from his first marriage to Yvonne Selwyn, which was dissolved; and by his three stepchildren, Danielle, Francesca and Dominique.
He said he had been fortunate in his career never to have experienced antisemitism — “I find that quite remarkable” — and attributed the lack of prejudice to the fundamental decency of the Mancunian character.
“I’ve always been a proud Manc,” he said. “It’s my city and I could never do another job in another place.”
pride in battle
Well-Known Member
Wonderful...I have copied and pasted his obituary here,for anyone who wants to read it,from the Times.
Sir Howard Bernstein obituary: Head of city council hailed as the ‘maker’ of modern ManchesterVisionary Mancunian spearheaded the city’s regeneration after the IRA bombing of 1996
When Sir Howard Bernstein met George Osborne in 2014 to discuss regional regeneration, he had a simple message for the chancellor of the exchequer. “We want our city back,” the chief executive of Manchester city council said.
Osborne was highly receptive to the message. The Conservative Party was under extreme pressure in the northwest and had been beaten into third place by Ukip and Labour in local and European elections. Osborne, whose own seat of Tatton bordered Greater Manchester, knew something had to be done.
Agreeing with Bernstein that the “hollowing out” of local democracy had to be reversed, he came up with the concept of the northern powerhouse, with Manchester at its heart, and the two men devised a plan known in Whitehall as “Devo Manc”.
In an unprecedented derogation of power from the centre and under the control of the newly created office of an elected mayor, the city took charge of a portfolio of activities from Whitehall including transport regulation, strategic planning, housing development, further education, skills training and economic growth.
Bernstein “had his city back” and in Devo Manc, Osborne had achieved what he called “the thing of which I think I am most proud” in his time in office.
“Why does nobody come up with ideas for getting things done like Howard does?” Osborne chided Treasury officials. Bernstein, he enthused, was “one of the very, very best public servants I’ve ever come across” and “the star of British local government”.
“The Osborne-Bernstein deal was like two mafia bosses carving up Apulia,” the former Times editor Sir Simon Jenkins wrote. “There was no white paper or consultative document, let alone a debate in parliament.” Rather the deal was “reached by sleight of hand, by one man with a political problem to solve and another who saw this as an opportunity”.
Bernstein had spent 40 years labouring in Manchester’s vast and magnificent Victorian town hall, built in celebration of the triumph of King Cotton and the Lancashire mills that spun money and cloth in equally prodigious quantities.
He had entered the imposing building as the most junior of 18-year-old clerks and climbed the local government ladder during decades of urban decline, while dreaming of civic rebirth and fretting that a city that had once built and run its own schools, hospitals, museums, transportation and social services should languish under the lash of Whitehall.
Forty-six years later, 19 of them spent as chief executive, he retired in 2017, fêted by the Manchester Evening News as “the man widely credited with spearheading the city’s 21st century renaissance”.
Howard Bernstein was born in Manchester in 1953, the son of Miriam and Maurice Bernstein, whose parents had emigrated from Russia in the 1900s. The older of two brothers, he grew up in the city’s traditional Jewish quarter of Cheetham Hill where his father sold raincoats from a shop above a launderette.
He credited his Jewish upbringing and the sense of community that it fostered with shaping his outlook on life. “My father was not political, but very socially aware,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I think most Jewish families were in that era and being in a community was fundamental. Treating people with respect, working across the community — that always was seen as being very important.”
At Ducie High School in the tough Moss Side (now part of Manchester Academy) he was a keen sportsman and developed a lifelong passion for Manchester City and Lancashire County Cricket Club — he went on to become honorary president of the former and president of the latter. As chief executive of the council he was heavily involved in planning the building of the City of Manchester Stadium (now the Etihad Stadium) to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and its subsequent transfer to Manchester City on a lease from Manchester city council.
On leaving school in 1971 he had joined the council on a wage of £10 a week. “My first job was being given a big bowl of cups and being told to go and wash them,” he recalled. “Which was a bit of a culture shock, because I’d never washed anything in my life.”
After three months of washing pots he became a post boy in the legal department but still found himself making the tea for the council’s lawyers, so he began studying for an external degree with London University. Later he moved to the conveyancing department.
At the time Manchester was, by Bernstein’s own admission, a grim place. The cloth manufacture that had made the city prosperous had suffered a long postwar decline. Inept planning had been hugely damaging, as whole areas of the city of Manchester were levelled and replaced with council housing of such poor design and construction that much of it subsequently had to be rebuilt.
As a junior employee he looked on powerlessly. Full-on post-industrial blight had set in by 1980, when he was promoted to head of urban policy. Finally, he was in a position to do something to halt the slide.
Further promotion followed after Graham Stringer, later the Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, became council leader in 1984. Impressed by Bernstein’s role in establishing Manchester airport as a PLC and the tenacity with which he pursued an unfair competition case against Stansted airport, Stringer appointed Bernstein as assistant chief executive in 1986.
Four years later he was promoted again to deputy chief executive and he began to plot the rejuvenation of the city, with projects including the building of Bridgewater Hall.
He took a pragmatic approach of seeking allies wherever they could be found in the private sector and in the Conservative government.
“We’d lost our way,” he said of Manchester during the Thatcher years. “We didn’t really have an economic policy. We certainly didn’t work with the government.” Yet the confrontational approach of hard-left Labour authorities such as Liverpool had proved disastrous and had only served to make the government more intransigent.
Much better, Bernstein argued, to “recognise serious shortcomings in national policies and try to overcome them by persuading them and working with them where you can”.
Stringer agreed and long before Bernstein and Osborne made common cause, he found another Conservative ministerial ally in Michael Heseltine, secretary of state for the environment in John Major’s government. They first worked together in 1991, drawing up the City Challenge Partnership to regenerate the Hulme area with 3,000 new homes, shopping areas, roads and community facilities. A quarter of a century later, Bernstein took Heseltine back to Hulme to show him what had been achieved. “He was quite moved by it,” he noted. “There’s something quite chastening about having turned around a failing neighbourhood and transforming people’s lives.”
By 1996 a series of redevelopment projects was under way in the city in support of Manchester’s successful bid to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games, while Bernstein claimed further success when he brought together “a so-called hard-left council” and an “ideological Conservative government” to fund Metrolink as “the first privatised railway this country had seen for a century”. It represented the city’s ability “to put place before party politics”, he declared.
However, it was the IRA bomb that devastated the city centre in June 1996 which forced the pace on regeneration. Although miraculously there were no fatalities, the bombing was at the time rated one of the most expensive disasters the insurance industry had ever faced. An estimated 400 businesses within half a mile of the blast were affected and the claims eventually totalled £411 million (£1 billion in today’s money).
Bernstein was at a wedding in northern Manchester when the bomb went off and heard the blast. “This is going to take some herculean effort to get this back together,” he told himself when he later toured the rubble-strewn city centre.
As head of the task force charged with supervising the rebuilding, he travelled to London with Sir Richard Leese, who had succeeded Stringer as the Labour council leader, for a meeting with the deputy prime minister, Heseltine, who immediately agreed to central government providing £100 million and announced an international design competition to redevelop the bomb-affected area.
Bernstein set to work raising further capital and £600 million of public and private sector cash was eventually secured to fund the renewal. By the time the rebuilding plans were unveiled in 1998, Bernstein had been appointed chief executive. His efforts led to him being knighted in the 2003 new year’s honours list for services to his city, although he rated becoming president of Manchester City as an even prouder moment.
He is survived by his second wife, Vanessa, whom he married in 2004; by his two children, Jonathan and Natalie, from his first marriage to Yvonne Selwyn, which was dissolved; and by his three stepchildren, Danielle, Francesca and Dominique.
He said he had been fortunate in his career never to have experienced antisemitism — “I find that quite remarkable” — and attributed the lack of prejudice to the fundamental decency of the Mancunian character.
“I’ve always been a proud Manc,” he said. “It’s my city and I could never do another job in another place.”
Eccles Blue
Well-Known Member
That obituary was great, emotional without being sentimental, like the man himself pragmatic is I think the word. He would never have brought our City (city not the club) back to the force we had once been without that pragmatism.I have copied and pasted his obituary here,for anyone who wants to read it,from the Times.
Sir Howard Bernstein obituary: Head of city council hailed as the ‘maker’ of modern ManchesterVisionary Mancunian spearheaded the city’s regeneration after the IRA bombing of 1996
When Sir Howard Bernstein met George Osborne in 2014 to discuss regional regeneration, he had a simple message for the chancellor of the exchequer. “We want our city back,” the chief executive of Manchester city council said.
Osborne was highly receptive to the message. The Conservative Party was under extreme pressure in the northwest and had been beaten into third place by Ukip and Labour in local and European elections. Osborne, whose own seat of Tatton bordered Greater Manchester, knew something had to be done.
Agreeing with Bernstein that the “hollowing out” of local democracy had to be reversed, he came up with the concept of the northern powerhouse, with Manchester at its heart, and the two men devised a plan known in Whitehall as “Devo Manc”.
In an unprecedented derogation of power from the centre and under the control of the newly created office of an elected mayor, the city took charge of a portfolio of activities from Whitehall including transport regulation, strategic planning, housing development, further education, skills training and economic growth.
Bernstein “had his city back” and in Devo Manc, Osborne had achieved what he called “the thing of which I think I am most proud” in his time in office.
“Why does nobody come up with ideas for getting things done like Howard does?” Osborne chided Treasury officials. Bernstein, he enthused, was “one of the very, very best public servants I’ve ever come across” and “the star of British local government”.
“The Osborne-Bernstein deal was like two mafia bosses carving up Apulia,” the former Times editor Sir Simon Jenkins wrote. “There was no white paper or consultative document, let alone a debate in parliament.” Rather the deal was “reached by sleight of hand, by one man with a political problem to solve and another who saw this as an opportunity”.
Bernstein had spent 40 years labouring in Manchester’s vast and magnificent Victorian town hall, built in celebration of the triumph of King Cotton and the Lancashire mills that spun money and cloth in equally prodigious quantities.
He had entered the imposing building as the most junior of 18-year-old clerks and climbed the local government ladder during decades of urban decline, while dreaming of civic rebirth and fretting that a city that had once built and run its own schools, hospitals, museums, transportation and social services should languish under the lash of Whitehall.
Forty-six years later, 19 of them spent as chief executive, he retired in 2017, fêted by the Manchester Evening News as “the man widely credited with spearheading the city’s 21st century renaissance”.
Howard Bernstein was born in Manchester in 1953, the son of Miriam and Maurice Bernstein, whose parents had emigrated from Russia in the 1900s. The older of two brothers, he grew up in the city’s traditional Jewish quarter of Cheetham Hill where his father sold raincoats from a shop above a launderette.
He credited his Jewish upbringing and the sense of community that it fostered with shaping his outlook on life. “My father was not political, but very socially aware,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I think most Jewish families were in that era and being in a community was fundamental. Treating people with respect, working across the community — that always was seen as being very important.”
At Ducie High School in the tough Moss Side (now part of Manchester Academy) he was a keen sportsman and developed a lifelong passion for Manchester City and Lancashire County Cricket Club — he went on to become honorary president of the former and president of the latter. As chief executive of the council he was heavily involved in planning the building of the City of Manchester Stadium (now the Etihad Stadium) to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and its subsequent transfer to Manchester City on a lease from Manchester city council.
On leaving school in 1971 he had joined the council on a wage of £10 a week. “My first job was being given a big bowl of cups and being told to go and wash them,” he recalled. “Which was a bit of a culture shock, because I’d never washed anything in my life.”
After three months of washing pots he became a post boy in the legal department but still found himself making the tea for the council’s lawyers, so he began studying for an external degree with London University. Later he moved to the conveyancing department.
At the time Manchester was, by Bernstein’s own admission, a grim place. The cloth manufacture that had made the city prosperous had suffered a long postwar decline. Inept planning had been hugely damaging, as whole areas of the city of Manchester were levelled and replaced with council housing of such poor design and construction that much of it subsequently had to be rebuilt.
As a junior employee he looked on powerlessly. Full-on post-industrial blight had set in by 1980, when he was promoted to head of urban policy. Finally, he was in a position to do something to halt the slide.
Further promotion followed after Graham Stringer, later the Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, became council leader in 1984. Impressed by Bernstein’s role in establishing Manchester airport as a PLC and the tenacity with which he pursued an unfair competition case against Stansted airport, Stringer appointed Bernstein as assistant chief executive in 1986.
Four years later he was promoted again to deputy chief executive and he began to plot the rejuvenation of the city, with projects including the building of Bridgewater Hall.
He took a pragmatic approach of seeking allies wherever they could be found in the private sector and in the Conservative government.
“We’d lost our way,” he said of Manchester during the Thatcher years. “We didn’t really have an economic policy. We certainly didn’t work with the government.” Yet the confrontational approach of hard-left Labour authorities such as Liverpool had proved disastrous and had only served to make the government more intransigent.
Much better, Bernstein argued, to “recognise serious shortcomings in national policies and try to overcome them by persuading them and working with them where you can”.
Stringer agreed and long before Bernstein and Osborne made common cause, he found another Conservative ministerial ally in Michael Heseltine, secretary of state for the environment in John Major’s government. They first worked together in 1991, drawing up the City Challenge Partnership to regenerate the Hulme area with 3,000 new homes, shopping areas, roads and community facilities. A quarter of a century later, Bernstein took Heseltine back to Hulme to show him what had been achieved. “He was quite moved by it,” he noted. “There’s something quite chastening about having turned around a failing neighbourhood and transforming people’s lives.”
By 1996 a series of redevelopment projects was under way in the city in support of Manchester’s successful bid to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games, while Bernstein claimed further success when he brought together “a so-called hard-left council” and an “ideological Conservative government” to fund Metrolink as “the first privatised railway this country had seen for a century”. It represented the city’s ability “to put place before party politics”, he declared.
However, it was the IRA bomb that devastated the city centre in June 1996 which forced the pace on regeneration. Although miraculously there were no fatalities, the bombing was at the time rated one of the most expensive disasters the insurance industry had ever faced. An estimated 400 businesses within half a mile of the blast were affected and the claims eventually totalled £411 million (£1 billion in today’s money).
Bernstein was at a wedding in northern Manchester when the bomb went off and heard the blast. “This is going to take some herculean effort to get this back together,” he told himself when he later toured the rubble-strewn city centre.
As head of the task force charged with supervising the rebuilding, he travelled to London with Sir Richard Leese, who had succeeded Stringer as the Labour council leader, for a meeting with the deputy prime minister, Heseltine, who immediately agreed to central government providing £100 million and announced an international design competition to redevelop the bomb-affected area.
Bernstein set to work raising further capital and £600 million of public and private sector cash was eventually secured to fund the renewal. By the time the rebuilding plans were unveiled in 1998, Bernstein had been appointed chief executive. His efforts led to him being knighted in the 2003 new year’s honours list for services to his city, although he rated becoming president of Manchester City as an even prouder moment.
He is survived by his second wife, Vanessa, whom he married in 2004; by his two children, Jonathan and Natalie, from his first marriage to Yvonne Selwyn, which was dissolved; and by his three stepchildren, Danielle, Francesca and Dominique.
He said he had been fortunate in his career never to have experienced antisemitism — “I find that quite remarkable” — and attributed the lack of prejudice to the fundamental decency of the Mancunian character.
“I’ve always been a proud Manc,” he said. “It’s my city and I could never do another job in another place.”
A truly great Mancunian.