Rachel Beer

Rachel Beer
Born	Rachel Sassoon 1858 Bombay, India
Died	29 April 1927 Royal Tunbridge Wells, England
Occupation	Editor
Religion	born Jewish; converted to Christianity
Spouse(s)	Frederick Arthur Beer (1887-1903)
Relatives	Siegfried Sassoon (nephew)

Rachel Sassoon Beer (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 Iraqi Sassoon family, one of the wealthiest families of the 19th century; indeed, he 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 converts. 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]

It was during her time as editor that The Observer achieved one of its greatest exclusives: the admission by Count Esterhazy that he had forged, under instructions from his superiors, the letters that had falsely convicted the innocent Jewish officer Captain Dreyfus^[7] leading to his incarceration on Devil's Island. The story provoked an international outcry and led to the release and pardon of Dreyfus and court martial of Esterhazy.

Last years

Frederick's death in 1903 triggered Beer's breakdown, with her erratic behavior 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 in 1927.

Though Beer's husband Frederick was buried in his father's enormous mausoleum in Highgate Cemetery in London, Rachel's family intervened to prevent her burial in that bastion of Anglican religion. Instead she was interred in the Sassoon family mausoleum in Brighton. Among her relatives was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was her nephew. Her brother, Alfred, had been cut off by his family for marrying outside the Jewish faith; though Rachel had also married a gentile, in her case the action was forgivable because of her sex. In her will she left a generous legacy to Siegfried, 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.

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, and Brian Harrison (eds.). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 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