Rachel Beer

Early life and family Rachel Sassoon was born on 7 April 1858 in Bombay, Company Raj (present-day Mumbai, India) to Sassoon David Sassoon, a businessman, banker, and philanthropist, and Fahra "Flora" Sassoon (née Reuben; 1828–1919). Beer grew up between Ashley Park and Cumberland Terrace. Frederick was the son of businessman, banker and newspaper owner Julius Beer, and was a Jewish convert to Anglicanism.

Journalism career Soon after she married Frederick Beer, 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. Two years later, she purchased The Sunday Times and became the editor of that newspaper as well. Though "not ... a brilliant editor", she was known for her "occasional flair and business-like decisions".

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 being a spy for the Germans 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, reporting his confession and writing a leader column accusing the French military of antisemitism and calling for a retrial for the innocent Dreyfus. 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.

Beer's husband, Frederick, was buried in his father's mausoleum in Highgate Cemetery in north London, but her family intervened to prevent her own burial in that bastion of Anglican religion. Instead she was due to be interred in the Sassoon family mausoleum in Brighton, Sussex, but her grave is now in the municipal cemetery at Tunbridge Wells, Kent. A marker was added to her headstone in 2020 in recognition of her work as a journalist and editor, paid for by The Observer and The Sunday Times.