Rachel Beer

British newspaper editor (1858–1927)

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

[edit]

Rachel Sassoon was born in Bombay, India, 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

[edit]

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

[edit]

Further information: 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

[edit]

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, Kent 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

[edit]

1. ^ Hertog, Susan. "The First Lady of Fleet Street". Jewish Ideas Daily. Retrieved 21 May 2012.
2. ^ Peled, Daniella (7 September 2011). "The life and death of Rachel Beer, a woman who broke with convention". Haaretz. Retrieved 3 June 2025.
3. ^ Financial Times, 7 & 8 May 2011, p. 17.
4. ^ The Observer, 8 May 1983, p. 39.
5. ^ "Veriovps.co.uk". Archived from the original on 2 March 2005.
6. ^ Jackson, Stanley (1989), The Sassoons: Portrait of a dynasty, p. 95.
7. ^ Beer, Rachel, Interviews with Major Esterhazy, The Observer, 18 and 25 September 1898.
8. ^ Narewska, Elli (2 March 2018). "Rachel Beer, editor of the Observer 1891-1901". The Guardian.
9. ^ Mount, Ferdinand (5 August 2003). "History of a foxhunting man". The Guardian.
10. ^ Thorpe, Vanessa (28 June 2020). "Legacy restored for Rachel Beer, Fleet Street's forgotten feminist pioneer". The Observer.
11. ^ Tobitt, Charlotte (9 July 2020). "Observer and Sunday Times pay for grave memorial to Fleet Street's first female editor Rachel Beer". UK Press Gazette.

## Sources

[edit]

* 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

Media offices

Preceded by

Henry Duff Traill

|  Editor of The Observer
1891–1904  | Succeeded by

Austin Harrison

Preceded by

Arthur William à Beckett

|  Editor of The Sunday Times
1893–1901  | Succeeded by

Leonard Rees

* v
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The Times and The Sunday Times

Editors of
The Times|

* 1785: John Walter
* 1803: John Walter, 2nd
* 1812: John Stoddart
* 1817: Thomas Barnes
* 1841: John Thadeus Delane
* 1877: Thomas Chenery
* 1884: George Earle Buckle
* 1912: Geoffrey Dawson
* 1919: George Sydney Freeman
* 1919: Wickham Steed
* 1923: Geoffrey Dawson
* 1941: Robert Barrington-Ward
* 1948: William Francis Casey
* 1952: William Haley
* 1967: William Rees-Mogg
* 1981: Harold Evans
* 1982: Charles Douglas-Home
* 1985: Charles Wilson
* 1990: Simon Jenkins
* 1992: Peter Stothard
* 2002: Robert Thomson
* 2007: James Harding
* 2013: John Witherow
* 2022: Tony Gallagher

Editors of The
Sunday Times|

* 1821: Henry White
* 1822: Daniel Whittle Harvey
* 1824: Clarkson
* 1828: Thomas Gaspey
* 1835: Unknown
* 1850: Edward Tyrrel Smith
* 1858: E. W. Scale
* 1867: Edmund Scale
* 1874: Joseph Hatton
* 1881: Neville Bruce
* 1887: Phil Robinson
* 1890: Arthur William à Beckett
* 1893: Rachel Beer
* 1901: Leonard Rees
* 1932: William W. Hadley
* 1950: Harry Hodson
* 1961: Denis Hamilton
* 1967: Harold Evans
* 1981: Frank Giles
* 1983: Andrew Neil
* 1995: John Witherow
* 2013: Martin Ivens
* 2020: Emma Tucker
* 2023: Ben Taylor

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* Harcourt interpolation
* The Mysterious Affair at Styles
* "Ode of Remembrance"
* The Secret Adversary

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