The First Lady of Fleet Street: The Life of Rachel Beer, by Eilat Negev and Yehudah Koren, pub., Bantam Books, New York. 349pp.
By David Strom
SAN DIEGO — A new book, The First Lady of Fleet Street, is about the life and times of Rachel Sassoon Beer, a woman who died in the 20th Century. She was the first lady of Fleet Street. This was a way of saying she was the first woman in England to own an important weekly newspaper and also serve as its editor. As owner/editor her paper covered many important world events i.e. the Dreyfus affair, the Boer War and rebellions in England’s colonies. Yet, she is virtually unknown in the United States.
Rachel Sassoon’s family came from Iraq. The first documented member of Rachel’s family was Sheikh Sason ben Saleh, her great-grandfather. He was born in Baghdad in 1750. Sheikh Sason ben Saleh was Nasi, president of the Jewish community. When president of the Jewish community in the late eighteenth century, ten thousand of the eighty thousand inhabitants were Jews, and most of them were religious Orthodox Jews. Jews living in Baghdad were not ghettoized, nor did they face a great deal of discrimination. They spoke Arabic, dressed like the rest of the citizens and participated in the economic commerce of the country. Through ingenuity, luck, and a good marriage Sheikh Sason ben Saleh became a wealthy man.
David Sassoon was the second son of the Sheikh and Rachel’s grandfather. He was married at fifteen, and his wife, Hannah, was a mere thirteen. He could speak four languages. He was able to pray in Hebrew, converse with his neighbors and many work acquaintances in Arabic, speak Turkish with the government officials, and conduct international business speaking Persian.
The pleasant times for the Jews of Iraq quickly changed when a new dictatorial Pasha took over the leadership of the country. David was imprisoned for no known or justifiable reason. While he was imprisoned his father approached the new Pasha and negotiated/bribed a release of his son. Upon his release from prison, David’s father told him to speedily leave the country. He felt confident that the Pasha was not to be trusted to keep his word and would pursue David wherever he went. He was correct. The Pasha chased after David. But David had already escaped to another country.
Eventually, after four years building a small import/export business, David and his family moved again. This time they went to Bombay, India. There his economic enterprises continued to expand. Much of his family’s new wealth came from the opium trade with China. (Opium was legal in Britain at the time. And the British officials, when it came to making quick money for the British economic class, brushed aside the moral issues associated with opium. George Campbell, Secretary of State for India remarked in parliamentary debate, “…As the Aryan races preferred alcoholic drinks, so the Turanian consumed opium.”) The Sassoon’s became wealthy merchants through this trade and other merchandise.
A week after Rachel Sassoon was born in 1858, David, her father, left India to open a new office of the Sassoon enterprises in England. Two and one-half years later, in 1860, the rest of his personal family greeted him in England.
David Sassoon and family sought to integrate into British society as quickly as possible. They wanted to demonstrate their Englishness at all times—in speech, dress, taste and opinion. They wanted to be a part of the “elite” societal world while maintaining their Orthodox Jewish roots. Continuing their Jewish customs was very important to the Sassoons. Along with their mixture of family language that they brought from Iraq to India and now England, they were able to maintain their uniqueness.
Rachel’s received a good academic education. She was taught to play the piano. She was good at it, enjoyed playing classical music and composing, as well. She thought, for a while, she might become a pianist. Flora, her mother had other plans for Rachel.
Flora wanted Rachel to settle down and marry a nice economically suitable Jewish man. However, Rachel didn’t see her life going in that direction. She wanted more from her life then just parties, charity work and raising children. Rachel wanted to be workingwoman, possibly even a professional workingwoman.
Rachel had the moral strength to stand against her mother’s will and left home to work with the sick and poor human beings in London hospitals. She worked over two years volunteering in the sick wards. She learned first-hand about poverty and its devastating effects on the well being of destitute human beings. Another important lesson she learned was compassion and humility for all the women struggling for inclusion into a very closed society. Her work with the indigent changed the way she looked at life and helped to make her a warrior for the impoverished and less fortunate of society. She learned what she wanted from life and, if she married, what she wanted from a husband.
Rachel’s older siblings chose suitable marriage partners-that is they were all socially and/or economically well connected and Jewish. Her younger brother, Alfred Sassoon, however, broke the pattern. He married a non-Jew and had a church wedding. Of course, Flora and the rest of her children did not attend. In fact, Flora “sat shiva” (mourned) for her now “dead” son.
By the time Rachel turned thirty she was ready for marriage. She met and was charmed by Frederick Beer, a non-Jew. Love followed and they married. While neither of them was particularly religious, they had a church wedding. Of course, no Sassoon attended.
Frederick Beer’s father, Julius, was Jewish and born in Germany. Julius moved to London, became a wealthy and successfully enterprising “venture capitalist”. He married a non-Jew, converted to Christianity and had Frederick baptized. Sophia, Julius’s mother, did not disown her son for marrying a non-Jew, as did Flora Sassoon. His father died young leaving the bulk of his fortune to Frederick.
Young Frederick Beer was not as economically aggressive as his father Julius Beer was. Money not being an issue in his life, Frederick decided to travel and see the world. After a few years traveling, he returned to London to try and figure out what do with his life. He enjoyed art, music, science and politics. He needed an occupation, he thought. So he purchased a newspaper, The Observer.
Rachel and Frederick did not have children, and were close with the Alfred Sassoon, the brother who was disowned by the Sassoon family. Rachel and Frederick purchased another newspaper, the Sunday Times. It was as editor of the Sunday Times newspaper that Rachel reached some of the goals she set for herself as a young woman. At the time there were few women working and making a living as journalists, practically none as editors. Those that worked for papers were usually relegated to the society or fashion pages of the paper. Few worked at covering political or economic news of the day. Rachel Beer was not afraid to tackle the thorny economic and political issues of the day. Her writings were informative and thoughtfully challenging demonstrating that women were able to be fully educated citizens.
When the court-martial of Alfred Dreyfus took place in France, she initially did not think much about it. Rachel, like many others did not believe that such a high level of anti-Semitism existed in high governmental circles in France, the nation that had brought the ideas of liberty and freedom to so many people in Europe. But after learning more about this sordid case of wrongdoing, she and her paper through their writings did their best to change this particular course of history.
On December 22, 1894, the French military court found Alfred Dreyfus guilty of treason and sent him to Devil’s Island. When the verdict was given, Rachel Beer had been editor of the Sunday Times for just two months. One of Rachel’s major worries at the time was that “the anti-Semitic rabble of Paris was already in full cry against his (Dreyfus) co-religionists, not because they were disloyal, but because they are Jews.”
Political and economic relations between England and France were strained because of their colonial rivalry at the time. Stories were planted in the press about a Jewish conspiracy to secret Dreyfus out of Devil’s Island. The anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole declared, “its special correspondent in England had gone to Newport and interviewed the captain and the crew, who had confirmed the news. Only Captain Hunter and the Nonpariel had never existed….” Rachel was cautious in reporting the “going-ons” of the Dreyfus affair. She wrote, “wild tales of every description are born and die a dozen by the hour.”
Once “J”Accuse,” Emile Zola’s famous open letter to the French president was published, Rachel hoped for an open trial. Zola accused the military chiefs and the war office in a closed trial of a “crime against humanity and justice for political ends and to save the General Staff which was compromised.” There had not been an open trial for Dreyfus and Rachel hoped the trial of Zola could bring to light the truth and lower the anti-Semitic outbursts around the nation of France.
Eventually, the Sunday Times interviewed Charles-Marie-Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, the man who gave and sold the secrets to Germany that Dreyfus had been convicted of doing. Esterhazy was a clever scoundrel and thief who hated Jews. Major Esterhazy planted all the evidence against Dreyfus with the connivance or the “looking the other way” by the weak and anti-Semitic French General Staff.
Ultimately, Zola was able to return to France as a vindicated man, and Alfred Dreyfus was freed from prison and given his officer’s rank back.
For a few years, prior to the death of Frederick Beer, Rachel took the helm of the two papers they owned. She nursed her husband at home, hired others to see to his needs, continued running and writing editorials for the papers, held benefits for charities and continued to host the Royal Amateur Art Society. At the age of forty-three on December 30, 1901, Frederick Beer died. He died young, like his parents before him.
After Frederick’s death Rachel fell into a depressed state. She couldn’t pull herself out of her lethargy. Her writing became sporadic and her last editorial “jumpy and incoherent.” All the signs indicated Rachel was suffering from chronic grief and depression.
Not surprisingly, the Sassoon family had Rachel declared legally insane-which she did not challenge. Her brother Joseph, who had not seen her in fifteen years, was made the administrator of her property. He was now sole executor of not only his sister’s property, but of Frederick Beer’s as well.
Sassoon “hired the services of three mental health nurses to live with her.” The senior of the three, Miss Ethel Marguerite Ross, “was in charge of the house affairs, and she also acted as Mrs. Beer’s personal assistant.”
Rachel Beer moved into a luxurious manor and with time took part in some of the societal affairs of the manor. She no longer wrote editorials, nor did she challenge her designation as mentally insane. She continued with some of her social life by offering art and musical parties for small groups of people at her home.
During World War I, Rachel did all she could to help in the war effort. She was a major benefactor to the nearby veteran’s hospital and when the hospital became overcrowded, “she paid for rent of additional grounds, as well as two hostels for the nurses.”
Rachel Beer died of stomach cancer on April 29, 1927. She had loved who she wanted, lived her own style of life, challenged the world of work, and broke some of the taboos surrounding what women mentally and physically could or could not do. As a woman and as a person, possibly because of her early experiences as a nurse for the downtrodden, she fought battles to help the struggling poor always trying to lift off the economic and social shackles of their lives.
She was a righteous person and the first lady of Fleet Street.
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Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University. He may be ccontacted at david.strom@sdjewishworld.com