Queen Mary and Philip’s sister Sybil, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, lead the party in the formal gardens adjacent to the swimming pool and the orangery. Wide borders, laid out to the last square inch by the fashionable garden designer Norah Lindsay, lie in pairs on a gentle slope with broad grass paths on either side so that the eye can rove easily up this glade of brilliance. The incandescent orange and scarlet of the furthest beds give way to rich purples and blues in the middle distance, and the soft assuaging creams and pastel shades in the foreground. After the long borders are pergolas of Italian marble covered with vines, wisteria and clematis, where Winston Churchill likes to sit and paint on quieter afternoons.
The Prince of Wales arrives by aeroplane, landing at the Trent airstrip, and heads to the terrace where the American golf champion Walter Hagen is waiting to play a round with him on Sir Philip’s private course. The Duke of York and Anthony Eden, dressed for tennis, stride off with the professional to Trent’s courts. There is an air display by pilots from the RAF’s 601 Auxiliary Squadron, swooping and flying low over the estate. In the late afternoon, after the Queen has departed, the airmen join guests at the blue swimming pool, cavorting in the walled garden that surrounds it, filled with delphiniums and lilies, which deliver an almost overpowering scent.
The overnight guests withdraw to change for dinner, finding cocktails and buttonhole flowers waiting on their dressing tables as they put on their black tie. Philip Sassoon invites them to dine on the terrace, where Richard Tauber sings later by moonlight, and at the end of the evening there is a display of fireworks over the lake.
For guests reminiscing in the years to come, Philip’s lavish hospitality would seem like a dream of a lost world, the like of which would never be seen again. Yet even on this 1930s summer evening, amid the elegance and luxury of Trent Park, there is concern for the future. Among the politicians there is hard talk about Mussolini, Baldwin’s government, Germany’s threat and British rearmament. And this was not unusual. Almost every major decision taken in Britain between the wars was debated by those at the heart of the action while they were guests of Philip Sassoon.
Their host was more than just a wealthy patron and creative connoisseur. From the First World War through to 1939, Philip worked alongside Britain’s leaders and brought them together with some of the most brilliant people in the world. He exerted influence by design, while surrounded by an air of personal mystery.
One day, Haroun Al Raschid read
A book wherein the poet said: –
‘Where are the kings, and where the rest
Of those who once the world possessed?
‘They’re gone with all their pomp and show,
They’re gone the way that thou shalt go.
‘O thou who choosest for thy share
The world, and what the world calls fair,
‘Take all that it can give or lend,
But know that death is at the end!’
Haroun Al Raschid bowed his head:
Tears fell upon the page he read.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
‘Haroun Al Raschid’ (1878)1
The first thing that an English gentleman might consider about Sir Philip Sassoon was that he was foreign – an ‘oriental’2 in thought and action. His friend the art historian Kenneth Clark thought him to be ‘a kind of Haroun al Raschid, entertaining with oriental magnificence in three large houses, endlessly kind to his friends, witty, mercurial and ultimately mysterious’.3 The diarist and Sassoon’s fellow MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon also observed, ‘Philip and I mistrust each other; we know too much about each other, and I can peer into his oriental mind with all its vanities.’4
To some extent Philip played up to this, and like the great Persian King Haroun Al Raschid from the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, he surrounded himself with beauty, luxury and the most interesting and successful people. No matter that he was also a baronet, the brother-in-law of a marquess and a Conservative Member of Parliament, his eastern heritage marked him out.
Philip Albert Gustave David Sassoon was born in Paris on 4 December 1888 at his mother’s family mansion in the Avenue de Marigny.fn1 He was the first child of Edward Sassoon and Aline, the daughter of Baron Gustave de Rothschild. His great-grandfather James Rothschild had been born into the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt in 1792, and at the age of nineteen was sent by his father and brothers to establish the family business in France. When he died in 1868, James was one of the wealthiest men in the world. Ten thousand people attended his funeral and Parisians lined the streets to pay their respects when his coffin was taken for burial at the Père Lachaise cemetery.
The Sassoons were often referred to as the ‘Rothschilds of the east’. The family claimed that they were descended from King David, and that their ancestors had been transported to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar when he sacked Jerusalem, 600 years before the birth of Christ. They had kept their faith, and over the centuries established themselves as leaders in the exiled Jewish community, while also making money trading in the souks of Baghdad.
Young Philip Sassoon would grow up with the stories of how in 1828 his paternal great-grandfather David had been imprisoned in Baghdad by Dawud Pashafn2 during the suppression of the city’s Jews. David’s father Sasson ben Surah had been treasurer to the governor of the city and his wealth and connections helped him to buy his son’s freedom. David knew that his liberty would be short lived and so fled with only a money belt and some pearls sewn into the hem of his cloak. He went first by boat down the River Tigris to Basra, the port of the fabled Sinbad, and then secretly crossed the Persian Gulf to Bushire, safely beyond the reach of Pasha. Once established he sent for his family, including his eldest son, the ten-year-old Abdullah, future grandfather of Philip Sassoon. The town was the main trading post in Persia of the British East India Company, but it was a backwater compared with Baghdad. In one of Bushire’s dusty courtyards, with just a canopy to protect the congregation from the glare of the sun, Abdullah’s bar mitzvah was held among the traders, money-changers and pedlars of the local Jewish community. The Sassoon family’s good name and the trading skills they had acquired over the generations helped David to start to rebuild their fortunes, but he could see that greater opportunities existed further east in the emerging commercial centre of Bombay. It was there he moved in 1832, the year before the end of the East India Company’s monopoly on commerce in India, and established his business David Sassoon & Co., which grew into a major international trading empire – making the family, within his lifetime, one of the wealthiest in the world. As one contemporary remarked, ‘Silver and gold, silks, gums and spices, opium and cotton, wool and wheat – whatever moves over sea or land feels the hand or bears the mark of Sassoon & Co.’5
David Sassoon was an exotic figure in this boomtown of the British Raj. He continued to dress in the turban and flowing robes favoured by the great merchants of Baghdad. His wharfs and warehouses at the docks of Bombay were a veritable network of Aladdin’s caves holding the goods of the world: Indian cotton for Manchester, Chinese silks and furnishings for the mansions of Europe, and British manufactures for distribution throughout Asia. Twice married and with eight sons in total, David followed the model of the Rothschilds in Europe, using his children to keep close control of the expanding family business. Abdullah was initially sent back to Baghdad, now safe after the fall of Dawud Pasha in 1831, to manage the firm’s contacts in the Arab world. Elias would open the first Sassoon office in Shanghai, and their half-brothers Sassoon David (S. D.), Reuben and Abraham established themselves in Hong Kong.
David Sassoon was fluent