Rachel Beer

Rachel Beer
Rachel Beer
Born	(1858-04-07)7 April 1858 Bombay, India
Died	29 April 1927(1927-04-29) (aged 69) Royal Tunbridge Wells, England
Resting place	Tunbridge Wells Cemetery , England
Occupation	Newspaper editor
Spouse	Frederick Arthur Beer (1887–1903)
Parent(s)	Sassoon David Sassoon Flora (Fahra) Reuben
Relatives	Sassoon family

Rachel Beer (née Sassoon; 7 April 1858 – 29 April 1927) was an Indian-born British newspaper editor. She was editor-in-chief of The Observer and The Sunday Times.

Early life

Rachel Sassoon was born in Bombay to Sassoon David Sassoon, of the Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family, one of the wealthiest families of the 19th century; her father was known as the "Rothschild of the East".^[1] As a young woman, she volunteered as a nurse in a hospital.

In 1887, she married the wealthy financier Frederick Arthur Beer, son of Julius Beer (1836–1880), and converted to Christianity. Frederick, an Anglican Christian, was also from a family of ethnically Jewish converts to Christianity. In the wake of her conversion, the family disowned her.^[2]

The Beers had their roots as a banking family in the Frankfurt ghetto. In the UK they were financiers whose investments included ownership of newspapers.^[3]

Journalism career

Soon after she married Frederick, she began contributing articles to The Observer, which the Beer family then owned. In 1891, she took over as editor, becoming the first female editor of a national newspaper in the process.^[4] Two years later, she purchased The Sunday Times and became the editor of that newspaper as well. Though "not . . . a brilliant editor",^[5] she was known for her "occasional flair and business-like decisions".^[6]

Dreyfus affair

During her time as editor, The Observer achieved one of its greatest exclusives. A torn-up handwritten note, referred to throughout the affair as the bordereau, was found by a French housekeeper in a wastebasket at the German Embassy in Paris. The bordereau described a minor French military secret, and had obviously been written by a spy in the French military. Jewish French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of the crime on no reliable evidence, and imprisoned on Devil's Island. The actual culprit, Major Count Esterhazy, was found not guilty on trial, but he was declared unfit for service, and fled to London. Beer knew that Esterhazy was in London because The Observer's Paris correspondent had made a connection with him; she interviewed him twice, and he confessed to being the culprit: I wrote the bordereau. She published the interviews in September 1898,^[7] reporting his confession and writing a leader column accusing the French military of antisemitism and calling for a retrial for the innocent Dreyfus.^[8]

Despite this evidence, Dreyfus was found guilty again in a later trial, but following a public outcry was pardoned into house arrest in 1899, and finally exonerated on 12 July 1906, with his military commission restored and promoted to major.

Last years

Frederick died of syphilis in 1901, having passed it on to his wife.^[9] Her own behaviour grew increasingly erratic, culminating in a collapse. The following year she was committed and her trustees sold both newspapers. Although she subsequently recovered, Beer required nursing care for the remainder of her life, spending her final years at Chancellor House in Tunbridge Wells, where she died of the disease in 1927.

In her will she left a generous legacy to her nephew Siegfried Sassoon, enabling him to purchase Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, where he spent the rest of his life. In honour of her bequest, Siegfried hung an oil portrait of his aunt above the fireplace.

Her brother, Alfred, had been cut off by his family for marrying outside the Jewish faith; though Beer had also married a gentile, in her case the action was forgivable because of her sex.

While Beer's husband Frederick was buried in his father's large mausoleum in Highgate Cemetery in north London, her family intervened to prevent her burial in that bastion of Anglican religion. Instead she was due to be interred in the Sassoon family mausoleum in Brighton, Sussex.

However, her grave is now located in the municipal cemetery at Tunbridge Wells, and a marker has been added to her headstone in recognition of her work as a journalist and editor, paid for by The Observer and The Sunday Times.^[10][11]

References

Bibliography

• Jackson, Stanley (1989). The Sassoons: Portrait of a Dynasty. William Heinemann. ISBN 0-434-37056-8.
• Curney, Vanessa (2004). ""Beer [née Sassoon], Rachel". In Matthew, Colin; Brian Harrison (eds.). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 4. Oxford University Press. pp. 816–817.
• Negev, Eilat and Yehuda Koren (2011) The First Lady of Fleet Street: A Biography of Rachel Beer. (London: JR Books). ISBN 978-1-906779-19-1