The First Lady of Fleet Street: The Life, Fortune and Tragedy of Rachel Beer by Eilat Negev and Yehida Koren

Robson Press, 2012

Why?

During a discussion about Victorian and Edwardian newspaper proprietors, a friend recommended that I look up Rachel Beer, Editor-in-Chief of both the Observer and the Sunday Times during the 1890s - the first female editor of a national newspaper in the UK.

I had never heard of her - and few others throughout history seems to have been particularly interested in her either. All I could find was this out-of-print biography on Abebooks, published in 2012.

Enjoyment factor

This isn't a brilliant piece of biography - it's dual authored, which is always clunky, and it tends to segue into side topics in which the authors have pursued a pet interest.

However, it's an absolute eye-opener, both into a key individual in the history of media, and also in filling in more gaps for me in the jigsaw of the Sassoon dynasty.

Rachel was Siegfried Sassoon's aunt, his father Alfred and Rachel having been ostracised from rest of the family, which made them close. Siegfried enjoyed many awe-struck visits to his aunt's ostentatious Mayfair mansion as a child, and ultimately inherited a significant proportion of her fortune, which set him up for life and enabled him to pursue a career as a writer.

It left me thinking ...

Quite obviously, how astonishing it is that Rachel Beer appears to be all but forgotten. It's true that her husband, Frederick Beer, owned the papers, so it's easy to argue that she hadn't achieved the positions on merit, but when in position, she proved to be a relentless lobbyist for a variety of social causes, particularly pertaining to women, and an absolute workaholic. She also landed a number of impressive exclusives.

Although she wouldn't have had access to the information exchanged at gentlemen's clubs and other male spaces, Rachel's family meant that she nevertheless had powerful connections, so when she chose to back a cause, she was listened to in the way that few other woman were at the time.

She was a tireless polymath and social organiser, acting as the lynchpin for all types of people to come together and exchange ideas.

Had Rachel been ineffective as an editor, she could easily have been dismissed as unimportant, but this absolutely wasn't the case.

So why has she been so extensively forgotten? The Harmsworths and Beaverbrooks who followed her are lauded; but really Rachel's work constituted building blocks for theirs, which should be recognised. Her Jewishness is of course also of interest, particularly in the light of Alfred Harmsworth's noted anti-semitism - a theme which is only lightly explored in histories of the latter.

Above all, it's astonishing that nobody to whom I've mentioned this female editor of the Observer and Sunday Times in the late 19th century has ever heard of her. Rachel Beer is the ultimate forgotten woman in the history of British media, and deserves to be resurrected.