Joseph Sunlight
Born Joseph Zchovsky on 2 January 1889 in Novogrudock, Belorussia, then part of the Russian Empire of Jewish parents, the first ten years of his life were spent in the care of his maternal grandfather. As a result of religious persecution, he and his parents, Israel and Minnie, left Russia, arriving eventually in England where he immediately changed his name to Joe Sunlight. He was educated at private school, at Kingston-upon-Thames.
In 1904 he began the "long furrow" of his chosen profession when he entered the offices of William Purdey architect of Brazennose Street, Manchester at a salary of three shillings a week. Three years later, in 1907, he set up practice on his own account with offices at 4, St Ann's Square, Manchester, aged 18 years. Before he was 21 he had built 1000 houses in the Kings Road area of Prestwich, and not long afterwards he designed almost everything in industrial Derby Street, Cheetham, excepting the Ice Palace. By 1921 he estimated that over £1 million of building works had been carried out to his designs. Sunlight became a member of the Institute of Registered Architects on 31 January 1942.
During a brief career as Liberal MP for Shrewsbury, 1923-1924, Joseph Sunlight scored a one‑vote victory with a private member's bill standardising the size of bricks to speed local council housing schemes. However, the bill was lost as a result of the General Election of 1924
In the 1920s he visited New York to study the newly built Empire State Building. By 1926 he had commenced work on the design of Sunlight House on Quay Street which he described as his “Waterloo or flying across the Atlantic with six sandwiches.” This 14-storey city centre office block, built by his for which he acted as both architect and developer was built by own men in the depressed early 1930s, was the first skyscraper block in the North it opened in 1933. But his dream of building a 33-storey block alongside it was never fulfilled. The city council turned down his plans in 1949 and, although he saw many other multi-storey blocks go up, the Sunlight House extension was never built.
However, it was as a racehorse owner and punter that Joe Sunlight captured the public imagination. Nicknamed “The Mug Punter,” he once lost £15,000 at Ascot and won it back in a day. The man in a "lucky" velvet collared coat, studying his race card with a grey shell framed magnifying glass was a familiar figure to race goers. The man who was badly injured by a horse and given up for dead when he was two, once joked "I've been trying to get even with horses ever since".
Until three months before his death Joe Sunlight still went daily to his office in Sunlight House but following a fall in 1972, he had increased difficulty walking. Eventually he was forced to use a wheelchair.
His wife, Edith Forshaw (1913–2000) the daughter of a motor engineer, came from a fairly humble Church of England background. Edith was 23 and Joseph 51 when they finally married in a register office in Brighton on 8 May 1940. Their only son, Ben Sunlight, the artist, had been born in Brighton in 1935; he died in 2002.
Joseph Sunlight died peacefully at his Knutsford home on April 15 1978, aged 89 and was buried on 17 April 1978 in the Jewish section of the southern cemetery, Barlow Moor Road, Manchester. He was survived by his widow, Edith and his only child, Benjamin. His estate was valued at £5,714,422, (£5,522,472 net), including a £4 million valuation for Sunlight House.