The First Lady of Fleet Street by Eilat Negev

Author:Eilat Negev
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345532381
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

One Sassoon with whom Rachel did maintain contact was her brother Alfred. A year after Alfred and Theresa Thornycroft married, they signed a postnuptial settlement, which was intended to help resolve some of their emerging differences. Though the promises they made each other in this document helped keep them together for a number of years, and the couple produced three sons, it failed to permanently sustain their relationship. “Her husband is behaving like a madman,” wrote Rachel’s old flame Hamo Thornycroft in his diary. “He is a caution to us westerns—don’t be tempted to marry where there [is] Eastern blood and a Sematic [sic] nostril.” Rachel invited her brother and his wife to a musical party she was hosting, but it was one of their last appearances together. Not long after, Alfred left Theresa for another woman. The Thornycrofts blamed the Sassoons for setting up a match between Alfred and a Jewish lady “to lure him back to the faith.” Caught between her brother—the only Sassoon left for her—and his estranged wife—her close friend—Rachel continued to see them both.

Alfred moved to Eastbourne, hoping that the warmer climate and fresh air would ease the tuberculosis from which he, like his younger brother before him, was now suffering. He was too weak to travel to a sanatorium in Switzerland, and his doctors predicted that it was highly unlikely that he would recover. His mother and brother were quick to welcome the lost sheep back into the fold. It was a well-orchestrated reunion; Joseph came from Ashley Park, Flora from Brighton, and Alfred’s three sons arrived with their nurse from their home in Weirleigh. Flora was delighted to see her grandchildren and was very warm and kind, bombarding them with questions without waiting for the answers. She told the boys that she had seen them once before, for although she had banished Alfred from her life, Flora had kept track of her favorite son and knew the names and birthdates of each of her baptized grandchildren. Unfolding a roll of paper, she pointed to the name at the top—David Sassoon. “Your great-grandfather,” she said. Then, running her finger down to the bottom, “Yourselves.” “Sure enough, there we were, at the foot of the tree, and it was the first time I had seen my own name in print,” wrote Siegfried Sassoon in his memoirs.

After a rupture of eleven years, the reunion was exclusively a Sassoon event. Two were absent from the family gathering around Alfred’s deathbed—his wife Theresa and his sister Rachel, who were not invited. They were also kept away from his funeral on April 22, 1895. It was Flora who dictated the closing chapter in her son’s life, ordering his burial in the Sassoon family plot in London, against the will of his wife, who wanted him buried in their parish churchyard. “My father has become a Christian by religion after marrying my mother, but for some reason, the obsequies was Jewish,” Siegfried wrote; the children found the ceremony eerie, and felt as if their father had been taken away from them by strangers.

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