The woman who smashed the glass ceiling: In an age when women didn't even have the vote, she edited TWO of Britain's most venerable newspapers

By Corinna Honan for the Daily Mail
Updated: 19:14 EST, 1 April 2011

One by one, the three doctors arrived to interview the rich widow in her mansion.

They found her sitting erect on a chair in her spacious drawing-room, with fresh lilies and orchids on every surface.

But there was no disguising her terrible grief at the loss of her husband, who had died a year before after a long illness. 

Pioneer: Not only had Rachel Beer been the very first female editor of a Fleet Street newspaper, but she had simultaneously edited both the Observer and the Sunday Times

Today, Rachel Beer would be diagnosed as suffering from a nervous breakdown. But in 1903, the three doctors came to a radically different conclusion: the woman had clearly lost her mind.

As a result, Rachel’s next visitor was a barrister with the title Master in Lunacy, who with a stroke of his pen ensured that one of the most powerful women in Britain was ignominiously stripped of most of her rights — including the control of her £460,000 fortune, worth many millions in today’s money.

Her plight excited no interest, and within months it was as if she had never existed. Yet not only had Rachel been the very first female editor of a Fleet Street newspaper, but she had simultaneously edited both the Observer and the Sunday Times while also writing regular columns and conducting interviews that set the agenda for national debate.

Another 80 years would elapse before another woman was (wrongly) hailed as the first female editor of a national paper.

Rachel’s success was all the more extraordinary because she lived in an age when women were denied both the vote and equal access to education. Indeed, it was believed that too much intellectual activity would make them mentally unbalanced.

Yet the name of Rachel Beer means nothing now. It is only through the painstaking investigative work of her biographers that she can now resume her proper place in the annals of Fleet Street.

As the home-educated daughter of rich Jewish immigrants, originally from Iraq, she’d been confidently expected to do no more than marry a cousin within her clan. Instead, Rachel Sassoon, as she was then, fell in love with the Christian heir to a banking fortune.

Frederick Beer was almost 30 and shared her appreciation of art, a tendency towards introversion and a gentle disposition. But Rachel was fully aware that her orthodox family would disapprove of him; in fact she compounded her ‘sin’ by being baptised as an Anglican the day before their wedding in 1887 — at which the former prime minister William Gladstone, a family friend, was guest of honour.

Powerful friends: Former prime minister William Gladstone, a family friend, was guest of honour at her wedding in 1887 to Frederick Beer

Her punishment was to be banned by her mother from ever seeing her family again. At last Rachel was free to re-invent herself.

Fortunately, Frederick happened to own the Observer, which he’d inherited after the death of his parents. So she started popping into the paper to suggest ideas — and it was only a matter of time before she fell out with the editor, who disapproved of emancipated women.

After he resigned, Rachel became a contributor and then the assistant editor. The final step — to editor — was not an option, since it would have placed her in the undesirable position of being her husband’s employee.

But Frederick had an ingenious solution: he bought her a newspaper of her own.
So, in 1894, an era when female journalists were typically restricted to reporting on frocks, frills and social functions, Rachel Beer became the ‘editress’ of the Sunday Times.

She decided that she wouldn’t support any political party, but that her paper would watch MPs’ squabbles ‘as an entomologist observes the contest of rival tribes of ants’. Other innovations came thick and fast: a column from America, and regular interviews, often conducted by herself.

In her first leader column, she commented on the Sino-Japanese war over control of Korea, touched upon the state of British colonies around the globe, focused on Russia and chided British politicians for their lack of charisma.

Fleet Street was slack-jawed. Not only had a mere woman dared to write with conviction on weighty matters of state, but she’d done so with wit and vigour —– as though she’d been writing editorials for years.

Like most editors at that time, Rachel chiefly worked from home — in her case, a mansion in Chesterfield Gardens, Mayfair, where she sat at a mahogany desk and wrote nearly 3,000 words a week with a fountain pen. Her fingers, observed her nephew Siegfried Sassoon (later a celebrated war poet) were permanently ink-stained.

During the week, a parade of sub-editors, reporters and newspaper messengers would arrive with copy for her perusal; and on Saturdays, Rachel would be driven down to Fleet Street to take the helm.

Unlike her male fellow-editors, who spent much of their time conferring with men in power, she found herself frozen out of political circles.

Even William Gladstone refused to talk politics with a woman, in spite of their long friendship. She didn’t care: circulation was going up and she was having the time of her life.

Many of Rachel’s campaigns and opinions now seem eerily prescient. The Stock Exchange, she thundered, had ‘developed a secret power that has already proved injurious to the community and may easily become a danger to the State’.

Calling for a public overhaul of its management, she wrote: ‘There is too much consideration for profits of members of the Stock Exchange, and far too little for the welfare of the investing public.’

She campaigned against the libel laws, which she claimed could tone editorial comment ‘down to a point where it timidly verges on inanity’.

Sticking her graceful neck out, she railed against wasteful public spending and the absurdly high payments made to retired officials. She also insisted that there should be pensions for workers from the age of 60.

Influential: Strong and determined women like Rachel Beer paved the way for powerful women like Margaret Thatcher (left) and Hillary Clinton to power their way through glass ceilings and make it to the top of their game

Fascinated by inventions and technology, she gave her enthusiastic support to fast trains, light railways, flying machines — and above all the ‘horseless carriage’. During the Boer War, she even offered an astounding internet-like service: readers unable to obtain special war editions could have important news telegraphed to them, after paying a deposit.

Nearly two decades before World War I, it was Rachel Beer who warned that Germany loomed as the greatest threat for future conflict. But she didn’t hold back from criticising British politicians, either.

‘Contrasted with the average MP, Nero himself was an enlightened philanthropist,’ she claimed. Nor did she have any time for MPs who complained about their workloads.

Their ‘exhausted systems’, she wrote mockingly, ‘require a vacation six times the length given to the working journalist, and 12 times that of the city clerk’. Much as Prince Andrew has been held to account in recent weeks, she questioned whether the Duke of Cambridge should remain as commander-in-chief of the British forces at 77.

Rachel’s conclusion was that he was a man of ‘low intellectual calibre’, and simply had to go. Under the resulting pressure of public opinion, the old duke finally bowed out.

Predictably, she was in favour of women having the vote and considered it a travesty that English women could study law, for example, but not appear in court.

But she sometimes took on fluffier subjects, too — drawing attention, for example, to the agony of cats left without food and water during the summer holidays — ‘no better off than if they were in the Gobi desert, or marooned on a coral reef’.

When not setting the world to rights, Rachel threw lavish parties. She also regularly entertained her three nephews, the sons of her late brother, Alfred, who had also been estranged from the Sassoon family for marrying a Christian.

As Siegfried later recalled, she regularly spoiled them with gifts of cricket bats, expensive toys and outings to the theatre.

But everything changed in 1896, when Frederick, then 38, was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Soon, he was too weak to handle his newspaper, and asked Rachel to take over. Before long, she was editing both papers as well as nursing her husband, and the burden began to take its toll.

Instead of going into the Sunday Times office on Saturdays, she asked an apprentice printer, to bring her the proofs of her leader page.

He later reported that he believed Mrs Beer often drank a little too much at lunch and fell asleep over the proofs.

Frederick was slowly dying but Rachel refused to accept the inevitable. ‘She must have loved him very much, for she never gave up hoping that he would get well again,’ said Siegfried. When Frederick’s health took another downward turn in 1901, the distraught editress dropped everything except her leaders.

But rather than her usual muscular prose, they now contained emotional poems that she’d written herself.

None of her staff dared to comment, even when the same lyrics were used in both newspapers. At the end of September, she published a particularly revealing poem that ended: ‘But some unresting souls toss as the sea /In wakeful dreams. /The chill hours take no heed, /Care not for all the raving sobs nor moan’.

Her husband died three months later at the age of 43.  After the funeral, Rachel seemed to make a superhuman effort to rise above her grief. For a time, she even returned to writing cogent leaders, but she refused to see anyone.

Standing up for women: Rachel's achievement is even more remarkable when you consider that she pre-dated women's rights leaders such as Emmeline Pankhurst

Her final leader, produced that August, dealt with how the clergy should help destitute children. It was over-long, jumpy and incoherent, but her sub-editors bit their lips and let it pass.

All the signs indicated that Rachel was suffering from a case of pathological chronic grief that had resulted in a prolonged depression.On top of that, she was totally isolated. Her family had not spoken to her since her marriage and Frederick had been her one love and dependable ally.

As a temporary measure, she took a break in Tunbridge Wells. But relocating to the countryside did not alleviate her distress.

In the end, an anxious friend approached Rachel’s brother Joseph, who, in consultation with their mother, set in train the procedure to have the sister he hadn’t seen for 15 years declared insane.

In truth, Rachel’s symptoms were mild. But it certainly didn’t help her case that she’d been doing a man’s job, or that she was a childless, wealthy widow whose family considered her rebellious and eccentric.

Joseph Sassoon decided to get rid of the newspapers as quickly as possible — and the Sunday Times went first, in March 1905, for a mere £2,500 to a syndicate headed by a German-born financier.

The Observer was sold next, to Alfred Harmsworth, owner of the Daily Mail, for £4,000. By that time, he commented, the paper ‘lay derelict in the Fleet ditch’, selling only 2,000 copies in winter and 4,000 in summer.

Within ten years, the circulation had soared to 200,000.

As for Rachel, she retired to a mansion in Tunbridge Wells, guarded by three mental health nurses. Siegfried recalled seeing her one day at a fox-hunting meet.

He wrote later: ‘Her large dark eyes would stare at me, apathetic and unrecognising, from under a hat of the latest mode. Someone was sitting there, but it was only a brooding sallow stranger, cut off from the rest of the world.’

Did Rachel Beer ever recover? There’s plenty of evidence that she became a useful, if reclusive, member of society again who regularly became involved in philanthropic causes and held charitable soirees at her home. She even started playing the organ.

But her heart was broken, and not once over the next 25 years did she try to appeal against her certification as a mad woman.

Experts from the Lunacy Commission, who were supposed to re-evaluate Rachel regularly, never came. No one from her blood family ever visited, including the nephews she had pampered in their youth.

A cynic might say that they saw little point in bothering, as she couldn’t make a will and her money was coming to them anyway.

In May 1924, Siegfried was told that Rachel didn’t have long to live. Far from being upset, he confided to his diary that he hoped he and his brothers would get their aunt’s money soon: ‘We have been waiting for it about 20 years!’

To his friend and fellow poet Robert Graves, he sent the following rhyme: When Auntie Rachel hops the twig/ My friends no more will call me Sig/ But pass me with a blank look./ My income then will be immense;/ And I’ll publish (at my own expense)/ Not poems — but my Bank Book.

He had to wait another three years. On April 29, 1927, Rachel Beer died of heart failure at the age of 69. There’s little doubt that she wanted to be laid to rest beside her husband in the Beer family mausoleum in Highgate Cemetery. But her family failed to honour her wish.

Instead, despite her baptism as an Anglican, she was buried in unconsecrated ground at the Tunbridge Wells Borough Cemetery. On the tombstone, she was identified only as ‘Daughter of the late David Sassoon.’

The Observer briefly alluded to her death, but failed to mention she had once been its editor. In the Sunday Times, there was not one word about the remarkable woman who had for ten years been its proprietor and editor.

• First Lady Of Fleet Street by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev will be published by JR Books on April 26 at £20. © 2011 Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev. To order a copy for £16.99 (p&p free) call 0845 155 0720.
  

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