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 (néeSassoon; 7 April 1858 – 29 April 1927) was an Indian-born British newspaper editor. She was editor-in-chief ofThe Observer andThe Sunday Times.

Rachel Sassoon was born inBombay toSassoon David Sassoon, of theBaghdadi JewishSassoon 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 ofJulius Beer (1836–1880), and converted toChristianity. Frederick, an Anglican Christian, was also from a family of ethnicallyJewish converts to Christianity. In the wake of her conversion, the family disowned her.^[2]

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

Soon after she married Frederick, she began contributing articles toThe 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 purchasedThe 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]

During her time as editor,The Observer achieved one of its greatest exclusives. A torn-up handwritten note, referred to throughout the affair as thebordereau, was found by a French housekeeper in a wastebasket at the German Embassy in Paris. Thebordereau described a minor French military secret, and had obviously been written by a spy in the French military.Jewish French ArmyCaptain Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of the crime on no reliable evidence, and imprisoned onDevil's Island. The actual culprit, MajorCount 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 becauseThe 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 aleader 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.

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 wascommitted 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 inTunbridge Wells, where she died of the disease in 1927.

In her will she left a generous legacy to her nephewSiegfried Sassoon, enabling him to purchaseHeytesbury 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 agentile, in her case the action was forgivable because of her sex.

While Beer's husband Frederick was buried in his father's large mausoleum inHighgate 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 inBrighton, 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 byThe Observer andThe Sunday Times.^[10][11]

• 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

• 1858 births
• 1927 deaths
• British Jews
• British newspaper editors
• Converts to Anglicanism from Judaism
• Emigrants from British India to the United Kingdom
• People from Royal Tunbridge Wells
• Sassoon family
• The Observer people
• The Sunday Times people
• Journalists from Maharashtra
• Women writers from Maharashtra
• 19th-century Indian journalists
• 20th-century Indian journalists
• Indian women newspaper editors
• 19th-century Indian women writers
• 19th-century Indian writers
• 20th-century Indian women writers
• Indian newspaper journalists
• Jewish women writers
• Jewish non-fiction writers
• British women journalists
• Indian people of Iraqi-Jewish descent
• British people of Iraqi-Jewish descent
• Deaths from syphilis
• 19th-century Indian women journalists
• 20th-century Indian women journalists

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