Rachel Beer: family, feminism, and professionalism

Rachel Beer (1858 – 1927), née Sassoon, was the first woman editor of two British national Sunday papers: the Observer (1896–1901) and the Sunday Times (1894–1901). Her family had fled Baghdad and moved to England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. She married Frederick Beer in 1887. Both husband and wife were of Jewish decent and heirs to large fortunes.²⁸ They became leading London socialites and frequently appeared in society pages of the time.²⁹ Rachel Beer wished to get involved in the running of the Observer soon after her marriage, but her contributions were not well received by the editorial staff. This prompted Frederick Beer to purchase the Sunday Times, another leading newspaper, on 2 July 1894, of which Rachel became owner and editor. Two years of professional rivalry followed as Frederick had taken up editorial functions on the Observer since 1893, but the competition never seemed to impede their marital well-being. When Frederick’s health declined in 1896, Rachel started editing the Sunday Times and the Observer simultaneously. Rachel and Frederick Beer had no children, and upon Frederick’s death, on 30 January 1901, his widow suffered from what would now be known as acute mental depression. She was declared of unsound mind by a Master in Lunacy, at the request of her own family and the verdict became official

27 Joseph Hatton, Journalistic London. Being a Series of Sketches of Famous Pens and Papers of the Day (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1882), 199. Negev and Koren, The First Lady of Fleet Street, 100.

28 Rachel converted to Anglicanism the day before her wedding, see Negev and Koren,The First Lady of Fleet Street, 137.

29 Mrs Beer’s name appeared regularly in the press as a hostess or confirming her attendance to social events with details of her dress. An example: “the performance will be held at 7, Chesterfield Gardens (by kind permission of Mrs Frederick Beer) to-day, May 24, at three o’clock, when Miss Dorothea Baird will make her

in 1903: she was stripped of her rights and her autonomy and lived for the rest of her life in a large mansion in Tunbridge Wells attended by three mental health nurses. After her death on 29 April 1927, her family buried her at Tunbridge Wells Borough Cemetery, away from the Beer family mausoleum, with the short epitaph: “Daughter of the late David Sassoon.”

During what remained of 1901 after the death of her husband, Rachel gradually abandoned her responsibilities and left the Observer to its own management. The four following years were disastrous for the periodical and affected, in retrospect, Beer’s professional reputation. The paper was reduced, in one description, to “a venerable and respected survival of ‘the old journalism’” with a circulation which had supposedly shrivelled to “a mere handful.”³⁰ According to Northcliffe, it “lay derelict in the Fleet ditch.”³¹ Indeed, between 1902 and 1905 the newspaper lost many subscribers and buyers. Yet when Alfred Harmsworth (who became Lord Northcliffe) acquired it in 1905, its circulation was officially a little over 3,000 copies, which was the same figure as the one Frederick Beer inherited from his father.

Until Negev and Koren’s biography was published in 2011, Rachel Beer was almost entirely forgotten. In her own time, however, Beer was admired by her own sex, for whom she blazed a path, and was noticed at an international level for her work on the Dreyfus case.

The periodical the Woman’s Signal (1894 – 1899), edited by women, followed and praised the advancement of her career: “The appointment of Mrs Beer to the editorship of the Sunday Times adds one more to the list of women’s successes in journalism – this one perhaps the most brilliant, the Sunday Times being the only general newspaper that has a woman at its head.”³² Yet her exceptionality proved difficult to deal with, even within the active, albeit peripheral, women’s movements of the late Victorian period.

A few months after Rachel assumed her role as editor of the Sunday Times, the Society of Women Journalists held its winter session. Miss March Phillips was to discuss the topic ‘Women as Editors,’ but ‘having reflected that one swallow does not make a summer,’ she changed her focus to ‘Women in Journalism.’ Mrs Beer’s case demonstrated that women did not lack ‘sufficient resource, critical faculty, and discrimination to take command of a paper for general readers,’ but she was still the only exception to the rule.³³

30 Collin, The Observer and J. L. Garvin, 1 and 6.

31 Negev and Koren, The First Lady of Fleet Street, 269.

32 “Concerning Women,” The Woman’s Signal, no. 40 (4 October 1894): 215.

33 Negev and Koren, The First Lady of Fleet Street, 170.

Beer’s professional reputation spread in Britain, and her name appeared in the satirical press, The day on which no Lawson nor Harmsworth may appear,

The day kept strictly sacred to Church and Mrs Beer ³⁴

Beer’s reputation also went beyond national borders. In January 1899, the Jewish Herald, an Australian periodical (1879 – 1920), quoted the New York Independent, about the career of Rachel Beer. This example reflects the international impact of Beer’s work for the Observer and illustrates the world-wide awareness of the unfolding Dreyfus case:

Justin M’Carthy, the well-known British member of Parliament, writes a recent number of the New York Independent as follows:— ‘The heroine of the hour at present in London is Mrs Rachel Beer, wife of the proprietor of the Observer and the Sunday Times, and herself the directress of one or both these papers. These are the two great Sunday papers of London, and the present excitement all comes of the Dreyfus case.’³⁵

Moreover, Beer can be regarded as an actor in the international feminist movement that rallied in support of Dreyfus. As Blum and Carduner-Loosefelt argue, “The Affair gave women an excellent opportunity to mobilise as intellectuals, in public universities, journals, networks and of course in the press.”³⁶ Although Beer’s name is hardly mentioned today in feminist scholarship, the French journal La Fronde (1897–1905), whose editor, Marguerite Durand, was also a fervent supporter of Dreyfus, paid tribute to her work: “Mrs Beer is a worthy and intelligent lady, a strong feminist and a great friend of the Fronde.”³⁷

Out of respect for her husband, Beer remained discrete where it concerned her editorial duties for the Observer. In an interview for Woman, she described to Arnold Bennett her vision of her responsibilities: “I recognize that though I am his wife, I do not own the Observer, and I am far more scrupulous concerning my work for it, than for my Sunday Times, which is quite my own property.”³⁸ She respected all Frederick’s policies regarding the paper’s frequency, price, and format. There were very few images published in the paper, as established years earlier by Julius Beer. Each issue contained eight pages, to which Rachel Beer irregularly added a supplement of up to seven pages in times of war. Her articles and

34 “Private Views: Mostly Unpopular No. IV. – What are we?” Punch 117 (7 June 1899): 265.

35 “Two Notable Women,” The Jewish Herald 20, no. 492 (6 January 1899): 34.

36 “L’Affaire offre aux femmes une possibilité tout à fait inédite de se mobiliser en tant qu’intellectuelles, notamment dans les universités populaires, dans les revues, dans les réseaux et bien sûr dans la presse,”

Françoise Blum et Muriel Carduner – Loosefelt, “Du Genre en Histoire des Intellectuels,” Mil Neuf Cent. Revue d’Histoire Intellectuelle (Cahiers Georges Sorel) 16 (1998): 133–43, 137.

37 “Mrs Beer est une femme de valeur et d’intelligence, féministe convaincue, et grande amie de la FRONDE,”

Marguerite Durand, “Les Aveux d’Esterhazy,” La Fronde 2, no. 292 (26 September 1898): 1.

38 quoted in Negev and Koren, The First Lady of Fleet Street, 199.

editorial notes were never signed.³⁹ The leaders, usually one to three articles, were soberly printed under mastheads with the date and a title. Beer’s overview of foreign politics followed in the “Notes” section. She covered news from many countries and there was usually only one article on home affairs for every five or six columns on foreign affairs. Frederick Beer had done away with the “Correspondence” section in which the reader would find letters to the editor. The frequency of appearance of these letters was not regular: one or two every third week or so, on average. They often discussed home politics or matters such as the

‘Crown and the Church,’ which might be the reason for their intermittence, as these only took up a small part of Beer’s focus. The arrangement of the letters was the result of the editor’s effort to place them in a relevant succession of topics. She would wedge them between articles from foreign correspondents, sorted under individual headings. They appeared after the editorials, or on the last pages of an issue. If Beer published a supplement, some of the letters could be found within. They were addressed to the editor, with the customary salutation “Sir,” which Beer seemed not to oppose – in contrast to letters sent to the Sunday Times, which were headed “Dear Madam,” her apparent ambivalence either because she felt she was acting as Observer editor by proxy, or because to be a woman at the head of the Observer might not be appealing to some of her readers.⁴⁰

3.1.3 Gender difference and social politics: Beer models her sense of