Julian kept an Australian stock whip, and once used it after a party in Philip’s luxurious rooms to chase him around Christ Church’s Tom Quad, cracking the whip to within inches of Sassoon’s head, crying out, ‘I see you, Pheeleep,’ mocking his French accent. Julian would also call out ‘I see you, Pheeleep’ if he spotted him in the Balliol Quad, causing Philip to scurry for the gatehouse or a nearby staircase entrance. Their friendship, which developed at Oxford, was largely based on their mutual interest in rigorous outdoor pursuits. Lawrence Jones remembered that they ‘both had a passion for beauty, as well as for getting things done’.19 Julian and Philip were complex personalities who defied preconceived ideas of their characters. Julian was the rough man who was also developing into an increasingly accomplished poet. Philip was the aesthete who jumped fences and muddy ditches in perfectly tailored buckskin breeches, and played opponents into the ground at tennis.
In July 1908, at the end of Philip’s first year at Oxford, he attended a large summer party at Taplow Court given by Lady Desborough, to mark the final appearance by Julian’s brother Billy in the Eton versus Harrow cricket match, with guests including the new Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and the Conservative leader, Arthur Balfour. Philip then departed to spend part of the vacation in Munich to improve his German. He lodged with a baron who provided rooms for young gentlemen, often those aspiring to work in the diplomatic service and looking to perfect their languages. Sassoon shared his quarters with John Lambton, who was just a few years older than him but already much the same as the rather staid Earl of Durham that he would become.
Lambton was friendly with the American novelist Gertrude Atherton, who was living in the city at the time, and Philip joined their group. There could not have been a greater contrast between the irrepressible Philip and the stolid Lambton. Gertrude remembered that Philip was ‘as active as Lambton was Lymphatic; he might indeed have been strung on electric wires, wanted to be doing something every minute … To sleep late was out of the question with that dynamo in his room at nine in the morning demanding to be taken somewhere.’20
Along with Gertrude’s niece Boradil Craig, they embarked on an energetic tour of the sights and treasures of Bavaria, including Ludwig II’s extraordinary Romanesque Revival castle of Neuschwanstein. Ludwig had created a romantic fantasy of pre-Raphaelite splendour high in the rugged hills above Hohenschwangau. It was inspired by the world of German knights, honour and sacrifice captured in the works of Richard Wagner, whom Ludwig worshipped. Philip Sassoon toured every corner of the castle, devouring in detail the architecture and decor, and admiring the personal artistic statement that Ludwig had made. Philip’s great-grandfather David had similarly built his own palace at Poona, and the young Sassoon would later fashion a new estate in Kent at Port Lympne, which would be his greatest creative legacy.
In the evenings the group would often attend Munich’s Feldherrnhalle opera house, and on one occasion Philip and Boradil danced in the open air in Ludwigstrasse, on a platform before a replica of Florence’s Loggia di Lanza. Gertrude recalled that Philip ‘in an excess of high spirits kicked off [Lambton’s] hat and played football with it [and] he was highly offended. Despite his lazy good nature he could be haughty and excessively dignified, and all his instinct of caste rose at the liberty. But Young Sassoon was irrepressible. Hauteur and aristocratic resentment made no impression on him.’ Gertrude thought Philip ‘a nice boy and an extremely brilliant one, the life of our parties’.21
Philip returned to his studies at Oxford, working diligently if not with huge distinction, and graduated after four years with a second-class honours degree in Modern History, specializing in eighteenth-century European studies. He’d also signed up at Oxford, with his father’s encouragement, as a junior officer in the East Kent Yeomanry, which was the local reservist regiment for Edward’s parliamentary constituency of Hythe. Edward, always thinking of a future career for his son in public life, told Philip that such a move would be ‘useful in other ways later on’.22
A number of Philip’s Oxford friends joined various respectable institutions after graduating. Julian Grenfell became a professional soldier, Charles Lister went to the Foreign Office, and Patrick Shaw Stewart followed his first-class degree with a fellowship at All Souls and a position at Baring’s Bank. It was not clear what Philip would do next. He did not need to make money, and there was no requirement that he should take an active interest in the family firm. He would accompany his father on occasional visits to the office of David Sassoon & Co. in Leadenhall Street, and also to some political meetings and speaking engagements in the constituency.
However, from the summer of 1909, halfway through Philip’s Oxford career, and for the next ten years, death did more than anything to shape the course of his life. Philip would lose in succession his parents, his surviving grandparents and then, in the First World War, a great number of his friends. With death as his constant companion, he could not have been blamed for being imbued, as he would later remark, ‘with a fatalism purely oriental’.23 By this he meant the idea that life is preordained, and that nothing can be done to avoid the fate for which you are destined. Philip would certainly follow the path his parents had set out for him, but his response to each of the blows which death delivered shows a determination to rise to the challenges they presented, and not to be cowed by them.
In early 1909, Philip’s beloved mother Aline was diagnosed with cancer, and her health failed fast. On 28 July, aged just forty-four, she died at her family’s home in the Avenue de Marigny and was buried alongside her grandfather in the Rothschilds’ family tomb at Père Lachaise. The whole family was devastated, and Aline’s friends tried to rally around the children. Frances Horner wrote to Philip in Paris immediately after her friend’s death to remind him that ‘You will return to a country that loved her and will always love her children.’24 Philip was given the string of pearls that Edward had presented to Aline on their wedding day, in the expectation that he would one day give them to his own bride. Instead he often kept them in his pocket, rubbing them occasionally – in order, he would tell friends, ‘to keep them alive’.fn11 Philip believed, as he would later tell Lady Desborough, that the greatest burden of sorrow was felt for those who had to live on without Aline, rather than for his mother herself, whose life had been so tragically cut short.25
Edward Sassoon never recovered from the loss of his wife, and became a withdrawn figure, remote even from other members of the family. In the winter of 1911 he was involved in a collision with a motor car on the Promenade de la Croisette in Cannes and remained badly shaken by the accident. His health further deteriorated in the new year, as a result, it was discovered, of the onset of cancer. Just as with Aline, the end came all too rapidly and he died at home in Park Lane on 24 May 1912, a month short of his fifty-sixth birthday. His coffin was enclosed in the Sassoon mausoleum in Brighton, alongside that of his father, Albert. The twenty-three-year-old Sir Philip, now the third baronet, and his seventeen-year-old sister Sybil were left with the grief of having lost both parents in less than three years. Their maternal grandparents had also both died, in 1911 and 1912, first Baron Gustave de Rothschild and then their grandmother, to whom Sybil had been particularly close. Frances Horner again wrote to Philip: ‘You have both been so familiar with grief and suffering these two years [that it] must have [made] a deep mark on your youth.’26
Philip did not receive the normal orphan’s inheritance, as tragic circumstances had contrived to make him one of the wealthiest young men in England. Along with his title, he received an estate from his parents worth £1 million, including the mansion at 25 Park Lane, a country estate and farmland at Trent Park, just north of London, and Shorncliffe Lodge on the Kent coast at Sandgate. There was also property in India, including his great-grandfather’s house at Poona, and Edward’s shares in David Sassoon & Co. These came with the request in his father’s will that he should never sell them to outsiders and thereby weaken