Flora Solomon

Flora Solomon, OBE (28 September 1895 – 18 July 1984) was born Flora Benenson in Pinsk, Imperial Russia, in 1895. She was known as an influential Zionist. She was the first woman hired to improve working conditions at Marks & Spencer in London. She was the mother of Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International.

Solomon was born in Pinsk, in what is now Belarus. She was a daughter of the Jewish Russian gold tycoon Grigori Benenson, 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. During World War II she organised food distribution for the British government and was awarded the OBE for her work, which had a profound impact on later government policy in the UK in relation to health care and the welfare state.

She founded Blackmore Press, a British printing house. Her life was described in her autobiography A Woman's Way, written in collaboration with Barnet Litvinoff and published in 1984 by Simon & Schuster.

Solomon is also remembered for improving employee conditions at Marks & Spencer stores in the UK, 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. In her new position, she "pioneered the development of the staff welfare system" (including subsidised 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".

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