Charmed Life: The Phenomenal World of Philip Sassoon. Damian Collins

business in English. However, he could see how vital Great Britain was to global trade, particularly in cotton and textiles, so in 1858 the twenty-six-year-old S. D. Sassoon, grandfather of the First World War poet Siegfried, was sent to open an office in London. England may have held no great appeal for the Sassoon patriarch, but his sons would become enthralled with life in the global centre of the British Empire. S. D. Sassoon took up residence in a fine fifteenth-century estate at Ashley Park in Surrey, where Oliver Cromwell was said to have lived during the trial of King Charles I. He opened the firm’s head office at 12 Leadenhall Street in the heart of the City of London, the same street where the great East India Company had based itself. Sassoon offices were also opened in Liverpool, the gateway for trade with America, and in ‘Cottonopolis’ itself – Manchester – at 42 Bloom Street. The family’s decision to come to England was made at exactly the right moment. The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 created an enormous demand from England for bales of cotton from India, as the traditional markets in the southern United States were closed by naval blockade. Bombay boomed and the fortunes of the Sassoons rose with it. When the American Civil War ended, and the cotton markets opened up again, many Indian traders went bust as prices fell. The Sassoons, though, had protected themselves, using their profits to make shrewd investments in property and developing trade with China. They were further strengthened by the comparative weakness of their Bombay competitors, many of whom had overextended themselves and were forced to sell up at rock-bottom prices when their loans were called in.

      David Sassoon marked his new wealth by building a great palace for the family in Poona, about 100 miles inland from Bombay, where the British took up residence during the monsoon season. He called it Sans Souci, after the estate created by Frederick the Great near Potsdam in Germany. He also became one of the leading philanthropists of Poona and Bombay, endowing hospitals, schools and synagogues.

      As David Sassoon started to draw back from his day-to-day involvement in the business, his sons began to dress as British gentlemen, rather than in the traditional Arabic costume their father favoured. Abraham Sassoon encouraged people to call him the more English-sounding Arthur. Abdullah also preferred to be addressed as Albert, and named his son Edward, after the Prince of Wales. When David Sassoon died in 1864, Albert took over as chairman of the company but much of the day-to-day running of the business was left to his brothers. Fate played a further part in the direction followed by members of the family when in 1867 S. D. Sassoon collapsed and died in the lobby of the Langham Hotel in London. Albert sent Reuben from Hong Kong to take over affairs in England, and to look after S. D.’s young family at Ashley Park. In 1872 Reuben was joined in London by Arthur and his beautiful new wife Louise, and the brothers soon made their mark on society. In addition to homes in the capital and on the coast at Hove, Arthur took possession of Tulchan Lodge, the Speyside estate in Scotland where he entertained the Prince of Wales at shooting parties. The loyalty, discretion and generosity of the Sassoon brothers won them the favour and friendship of the Prince, who was a man of great appetites, though without the necessary resources to supply them.

      Back in India, Albert Sassoon pursued his chief interest of consolidating the family’s position in political society, a path that both his son Edward and grandson Philip would also follow. Albert created the ‘David Sassoon Mechanics Institute and Library’ which still stands in the city, served on the Bombay Legislative Council and was made a Companion of the Order of the Star of India for his philanthropic works in the city, the highest British order of chivalry in India.

      In 1875 Albert Sassoon was central to business and official life in Bombay. He opened the vast Sassoon Docks, the first commercial wet dock in western India, and threw a magnificent ball at Poona for Edward, the Prince of Wales to honour his official visit. Afterwards Albert presented to Bombay a 13-foot-tall equestrian statue of the Prince. It was placed in front of the David Sassoon Library and became known as the Kala Ghoda, meaning Black Horse in Hindi, a title which was subsequently used to describe that neighbourhood of the city.^fn3

      However, the success of Edward’s visit, combined with the letters back to Bombay from his brothers, made Albert increasingly keen to join them permanently in England. London promised a more glamorous life, and it could be justifiably argued that the chairman of David Sassoon & Co. should be based there. He took up residence in a mansion at 25 Kensington Gore and at a large summer house in Brighton, near to Arthur’s home in Hove.

      Brighton would be the scene of the greatest of his royal entertainments, when Albert was persuaded to take over the arrangements for a grand reception for the state visit of the Shah of Persia, Nasr-ed-Din, in July 1889. His mansion on the Eastern Terrace was not large enough to accommodate everyone, so the Empire Theatre was hired for the occasion. He spent liberally on the decorations, on refreshments and on a programme of ballet to entertain the guests, who included members of the royal family. For Albert, it was a long way from his bar mitzvah, as a young immigrant in that dusty town on the Persian coast, nearly sixty years before.

      Nasr-ed-Din was a difficult man, but Albert’s hospitality had been a triumph for which his reward from a grateful British state was a baronetcy. The College of Heralds helped Sir Albert Sassoon to create a coat of arms comprising symbols appropriate to the family’s heritage: the lion of Judah carrying the rod that was never to depart from their Jewish tribe; a palm tree representing the flourishing of the righteous man; and a pomegranate, a rabbinical symbol of good deeds.

      On 24 October 1896, Philip Sassoon, just a few weeks short of his eighth birthday, would learn of the sudden death of his grandfather, and would then see him interred in the domed mausoleum which Albert had recently constructed for the family, close to his Brighton mansion.^fn4 Philip’s father inherited the chairmanship of the family firm, as well as Albert’s title, and so became Sir Edward Sassoon, second baronet of Kensington Gore. Free from the expectation that he would devote himself to the family business, Edward had been brought up to be an English gentleman. He had studied for a degree at the University of London, went shooting with the Prince of Wales at Tulchan and became an officer in a Yeomanry regiment, the Duke of Cambridge’s Hussars. In October 1887 Edward’s marriage to the French heiress Aline de Rothschild was conducted at the synagogue on the Rue de la Victoire in Paris by the Chief Rabbi of France. Twelve hundred guests attended the reception at the Rothschilds’ palatial home on the Avenue de Marigny, and this great dynastic union further consolidated the Sassoons’ standing in European society. The Prince of Wales was often a guest of the Rothschilds at the Avenue de Marigny during his frequent trips to Paris, and Edward and Aline Sassoon became established as part of his circle of close friends known as the Marlborough House set.

      Edward Sassoon was tall and handsome, with a ‘sharp grim look which vanished when he smiled’.⁶ He was an enthusiastic sportsman, who took particular pleasure in shooting, ice skating at St Moritz and playing billiards. Aline combined beauty and elegance with great intelligence. She brought from Paris her love of art and literature, a passion that she would share with their children, Philip and his younger sister Sybil, born six years after him in 1894. Edward and Aline created their own salon, selling Albert’s Kensington Gore house and purchasing a larger mansion at 25 Park Lane, which had originally been built for Barney Barnato, the London-born Jewish diamond magnate.^fn5 Aline became a popular society hostess in England and France and the children would grow up around the parties thrown for her wide circle of friends, who included Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells and John Singer Sargent, who painted her. Aline was also one of the ‘Souls’, an elite social group for political and philosophical discussion whose members included the politician Arthur Balfour, Margot Asquith, the wife of Herbert Asquith, and another great hostess of the period, Lady Desborough.

      The Sassoon family interest in politics was as strong for Edward as it had been for his father, and in 1899 an opportunity came to stand for election to the House of Commons as the Unionist candidate in a by-election for the Hythe constituency. His selection for the seat was easier because it was considered to be a ‘pocket borough’ of his wife’s family. Her father’s cousin Mayer de Rothschild had been its MP for fifteen years until his death in 1874 and the family still made generous annual contributions to the local party funds.^fn6 This south Kent constituency consisted of the ancient Cinque Port towns of Hythe and New Romney, as well as the fashionable resort of Folkestone, which was also a favourite of the Prince of Wales. The district