Born in
Salford,
Lancashire, the eldest of eleven children of a
bootmaker, he attended the day school of the
Cross Street Unitarian Chapel before a year at the
Manchester Grammar School prepared him for
apprenticeship to his father at age twelve. He also assisted at the
Sunday School at Cross Street where he met
William Fairbairn and
William Gaskell. In 1868, he married Ellen Ferguson at the chapel and they went on to have three children. By the 1870s, the
Manchester Mechanics' Institute was in decline. Despite its original ambitious mission to bring technical expertise to working men, its core activities had shrunk to the provision of elementary education where it faced increasing competition from the state-funded schools established by the
Elementary Education Act 1870 (
33 & 34 Vict. c. 75). In 1879, Reynolds was appointed Secretary to the Institute and immediately set about its rejuvenation. An able and active administrator, and an enthusiastic and persuasive advocate, Reynolds grasped the city's appetite for more effective
vocational education and planned and led the relaunch of the institution as the
Manchester Technical School in 1882. Reynolds still did not rest. He reorganised the school using the schemes and examinations of the
City and Guilds of London Institute and, following legislation in 1889 and 1890, negotiated the school's transfer to Manchester City Council as the
Municipal Technical School. Reynolds took a role in the city authority as director of technical instruction and set out to survey the superior establishments in Germany and Switzerland and the thriving schools of the United States and Canada. He was elected to membership of the
Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on 15 October 1901 A grant from the
Whitworth Institute enabled him to realise his ambitions for a state-of-the-art institution with the construction of the existing buildings on Sackville Street, opened in 1902 by
Arthur Balfour. The institution was renamed as the
Municipal School of Technology and Reynolds became its principal and director for
higher education of Manchester. In 1904, the newly-autonomous
Victoria University of Manchester recognised the status of many of the courses that Reynolds had developed by establishing a
faculty of
technology at the Institute. Reynolds became
dean of the faculty, enjoying an
ex officio seat on the university's senate. The Institute's newly appointed
professors were recognised by the university. However, consistent with Reynolds'
radical sympathies, the bulk of the Institute's work was still devoted to vocational, rather than academic, education. Reynolds lived most of his later life in
Cheadle Hulme. He died while on holiday with his family in
Anglesey. ==Honours==