Rachel Sassoon Beer was the first woman to become editor of a national newspaper in Britain. She started editing the Observer in 1891 and took over fully from her husband Frederick Beer in 1896, when he had become too ill to continue working. At this time she was also editor of the Sunday Times, and for several years she continued to edit both papers.
Beer was a member of the wealthy Sassoon family (poet Siegfried Sassoon was her nephew). The family was Jewish, originally from Iraq. Beer’s grandfather, David Sassoon, moved to Bombay from Baghdad in the 1830s and Rachel Beer was born there, though her family moved to England when she was a baby. Beer worked as a nurse as a young woman, before marrying Frederick Beer in 1887.
Frederick Beer’s family was also wealthy, also Jewish, but had converted to Anglicanism when they moved to England from Frankfurt (his father Julius Beer built a monumental family mausoleum in Highgate Cemetery). Rachel Beer converted the day before their wedding and was rejected by her own family as a result.
The GNM Archive holds little about Beer’s tenure as editor of the Observer, but there is a series of correspondence from 1965 between Tristan Jones, Managing director of the Observer, and Stanley Jackson, who was conducting research for his book on the Sassoon family.
One of these letters includes queries on a range of subjects including: Julius Beer, who had bought the Observer in 1870 and passed it to his son; a dramatic sounding editorial on cannibalism (of which Jones found no evidence); and obtaining a photo of a portrait of Rachel Beer belonging to Siegfried Sassoon (likely the image that appears above in the Observer’s 1966 175 year anniversary edition).
It also includes a reference to one of the most interesting episodes of Beer’s time as editor of the Observer: her involvement in the Dreyfus affair. The case was made famous by Emile Zola’s 1898 open letter J’accuse. Beer was committed to obtaining justice for Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army falsely accused and convicted of passing military secrets to Germany.
Beer achieved a scoop for the Observer when she met and obtained a confession from Major Esterhazy, the officer who had produced false documents (a “bordereau”) to aid Dreyfus’s conviction.
Esterhazy was in London in secret, hiding from authorities (having disguised himself by shaving off his moustache). Beer had knowledge of his whereabouts because the Observer’s Paris correspondent had already established a relationship with the Major.
Amid speculation in the press across Europe about where Esterhazy might be hiding, Beer was able to publish two exclusives “special to the Observer” on the case, first detailing where he had been staying and the following week confirming their meeting and including his own confession to her.
In her own leader column on 25 September 1898, Beer accused the French military of antisemitism and called for a retrial for Dreyfus.
Beer continued to edit the Observer until 1901.
The catalogue for the GNM Archive is available to browse here. Please see this page for further information on the archive collections and how to access them.
How to access past Guardian / Observer articles
Further reading
- First Lady of Fleet Street by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren - review by Katherine Whitehorn
- First Lady of Fleet Street by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren - review by Vanessa Thorpe
- First Lady of Fleet Street by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren - review by Roy Greenslade
- Observer 225 timeline: a liberal voice in a changing world
- ‘The Observer’s women’s page pushed open the doors for the best women writers’
- Leader: In praise of ... Alfred Dreyfus
- The Dreyfus Affair by Piers Paul Reid - review by David A Bell
- The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France by Ruth Harris - review by Carmen Callil
