Sassoon was a member of the prominent Jewish Sassoon family
and Rothschild family. He was born in his mother's mansion on Avenue de
Marigny, Paris. His father was Sir Edward Albert Sassoon, 2nd Baronet, MP, son
of Albert Abdullah David Sassoon; his mother was Aline Caroline, daughter of
Gustave Samuel de Rothschild. His sister was Sybil Sassoon, who married the
Marquess of Cholmondeley. He was a cousin of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. He
was descended from the banking family of Frankfurt. When aged only nineteen
years old his great-grandfather, James Rothschild was sent to Paris to set up
the family business in France. James became wealthy. When he died in 1868 he
was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. His branch of the Sassoon-Rothschild
family kept the Jewish faith, donated to Jewish charities and founded
synagogues.
His great-grandfather David Sassoon had been imprisoned in
Baghdad in 1828, and in 1832 he established his business David Sassoon &
Co. at Bombay. He took advantage of British rule to return to Baghdad to trade.
The family eventually established a Head Office at Leadenhall Street, London
and another in Manchester. The Sassoons became assimilated Jews, dressing,
acting and thinking like Englishmen. The Sassoon Brothers, David and Albert
were friends of the Prince of Wales, built the 'Black Horse' brand. The
business came with a baronetcy of Kensington Gore. His father bought
Shorncliffe Lodge, where his cousin Mayer Rothschild was the MP. His father was
not a successful backbencher, but the political influences had a profound
effect on young Philip.
He was educated at Farnborough Prep school and Eton before
going up to Oxford. Old Etonian Arthur Balfour recommended the Debating Society
to him. His father was also friendly with Frances Horner, wife of Sir John
Horner, a longtime friend of Gladstone who lived at Mells Manor in Somerset.
His house master was a member of the secret society of liberals, the Young Apostles.
Also a near contemporary was Osbert Sitwell, the Yorkshireman and author. A
French scholar, he learned the language doing classes at Windsor Castle.
Sassoon was taught aesthetics by Henry Luxmoore giving an insight into
philosophy and social realism. However he chose to read Modern History at
Christ Church, Oxford. He was one of only 25 Jewish undergraduates, but was
invited to join the Bullingdon Club. He joined the East Kent Yeomanry while
still at Oxford and was commissioned as a second lieutenant.
Philip Sassoon entered Parliament in 1912.
Sassoon served as private secretary to Field Marshal Haig
during the First World War from 1915-1918. Sassoon was present at the meeting
on the First of December 1914 at the Chateau Demont at Merville in France, when
King George V and Edward Prince of Wales met with Poincare, President of
France, and the Generals Joffre, Foch and Rawlinson. The allies showed their
determination to fight Germany and the Central Powers. Because of his "numerous
social and political connections" Sassoon, at that time a Second
Lieutenant in the Royal East Kent Yeomanry, was in attendance. A square bronze
plaque commemorating the occasion was auctioned in 2012.
Political caree
He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Hythe from 1912,
succeeding his father, initially as the "Baby of the House". He was
Parliamentary Private Secretary to David Lloyd George in 1920. Between 1924 and
1929 and again from 1931 until 1937 he served as Under-Secretary of State for
Air, and gained much prominence in political circles. He was appointed a Privy
Councillor in the 1929 Dissolution Honours. In 1937 he became First
Commissioner of Works, a post which he held until his death, aged fifty, two
years later.
Trent Park
He had a reputation for being one of the greatest hosts in
Britain. Herbert Baker designed one house for him in 1912, Port Lympne, later
the Port Lympne Wild Animal Park, in Kent, and Philip Tilden largely re-built
another at Trent Park, Cockfosters, from 1923. Stylistic differences between
the two houses illustrate changes in taste among members of British high
society of the period. Trent Park possessed a landscape designed by Humphrey
Repton but the existing house was Victorian and undistinguished. Sassoon and
his designers turned it into one of the houses of the age, "a dream of
another world - the white-coated footmen serving endless courses of rich but
delicious food, the Duke of York coming in from golf... Winston Churchill
arguing over the teacups with George Bernard Shaw, Lord Balfour dozing in an
armchair, Rex Whistler absorbed in his painting... while Philip himself flitted
from group to group, an alert, watchful, influential but unobtrusive stage
director - all set against a background of mingled luxury, simplicity and
informality, brilliantly contrived...’ This atmosphere, as Clive Aslet has
suggested, represented a complete about-face from Sassoon's earlier
extravagance at Port Lympne to what Aslet called "an appreciation of
English reserve." In the words of Christopher Hussey, at Trent Sassoon
caught "that indefinable and elusive quality, the spirit of a country
house... an essence of cool, flowery, chintzy, elegant, unobtrusive rooms that
rises in the mind when we are thinking of country houses."
Port Lympne Mansion
Neither the eye-popping interiors nor the extravagant
gardens at Port Lympne Mansion could be described as in any way
"reserved", or even "English". Mark Girouard has written of
the "quiet good taste expected of a country gentleman" against which
Philip may have chafed in his younger years, apparently torn between the
standards of Country Life and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His Ballets Russes-inspired
dining room at Port Lympne with its lapis walls, opalescent ceiling,
gilt-winged chairs with jade-green cushions, all surmounted by a frieze of
scantily-clad Africans, suggests the outsider confidence of a Rothschild and of
an openly gay man. Philip Tilden added a bachelor's wing with Moorish
courtyard, which Lady Honor Channon, (wife of Chips), unkindly likened to a
Spanish brothel, to accommodate young airmen from nearby Romney Marsh flying
field - among his other enthusiasms, Sir Philip was himself an aviator - and
Tilden's twin swimming pools and monumentally classical garden staircase were
in much the same theatrical spirit.
One frequent guest was Lawrence of Arabia.
Charmed Life by Damian Collins review – the phenomenal world
of Philip Sassoon
The politician, arts patron, aviator and lavish host who
called himself a ‘worthless loon’ is brought fluently to life
Richard Davenport-Hines
Sat 31 Dec 2016 07.30 GMT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018
14.58 GMT
Sir Philip Sassoon said that he might have been interesting
had he slept with Michelangelo’s male muse Cavalieri or invented the wireless
instead of Marconi. He would not have felt such “a worthless loon”, he added,
if he had painted Velázquez’s court painting Las Meninas or written Wuthering
Heights. These hankerings show the essence of the man: a classy aesthete, with
a love of big names and modern gadgets.
Despite his self-deprecation, though, Sassoon had a
fulfilling life. In 1912, in his early 20s, he inherited a fortune with a
baronetcy, and was elected as Conservative MP for Hythe – a constituency that,
in the 1920s, his political opponents did not even bother to contest. In 1915
Field Marshal Haig, commander-in-chief of British armies on the western front,
selected him as his private secretary. A few years later the prime minister,
David Lloyd George, appointed him as his political secretary. He held
interesting government posts during most of the interwar years.
Haig quipped that in recruiting Sassoon to his staff, he had
attached a first-class dining car to his train. It is as a host with superb
French chefs that Sassoon is remembered most. He liked to buy people’s
friendships, to receive them in surroundings that he had beautified, and to
embellish himself. Even as an Eton boy he gave ruby shirt studs and diamond
cufflinks to other pupils. Thereafter he spent his wealth in ceaseless coddling
of the English governing classes.
Sassoon’s mother was a Rothschild; he was born in her
family’s Paris mansion in 1888. His paternal ancestors had amassed their booty
as merchants in boomtown Bombay, trading in silver, gold, silks, opium, spices
and cotton. After settling in the UK, the Sassoons ingratiated themselves with
the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VII. They fed his appetite for advance
and confidential news, entertained him in their palatial houses and abetted his
gambling sprees.
Max Beerbohm drew a cartoon of Sassoon as a newly elected
MP, looking demure and outlandish on the Commons benches among beefy, booming,
rubicund Tories. Yet as a politician he soon proved to be a fluke success. He
had a faultless memory for facts and figures, and was a businesslike speaker
who never needed notes. Although he tried to suppress flamboyance, he
nevertheless had, as one Labour MP said, the air of having wafted into
parliament on a magic carpet. He was politically ambitious, “as clever as a
cartload of monkeys”, and an inveterate flatterer of men in power.
In parliament he was the advocate of aviation. He bought his
own aircraft in 1919, and used it in the way that poorer people ran their motor
cars. As undersecretary in the air ministry, he promoted civilian air travel,
and particularly the routes and airfields that ran from Britain through the
Middle East to India. His book The Third Route – a mixture of technical flying
manifesto and sprightly, observant travelogue – is as eloquent as anything
written by his cousin Siegfried Sassoon (with whom his relations were mutually
mistrustful).
The trajectory of Philip’s career was set by his homes. He
inherited a sumptuously plutocratic London house, 25 Park Lane. His weekly
political luncheons there were called “cabinet lunches”, because ministers came
direct from the morning cabinet meetings in Downing Street. The oriental
luxuries of the house made Neville Chamberlain compare Sassoon to the Count of
Monte Cristo – before appointing him as a minister just below cabinet rank in
his government.
In addition, Sassoon built a sybaritic mansion called Port
Lympne on a high site in Kent overlooking Romney Marsh and the Channel. It was
a unique building, Italianate and Moorish in its influence, built for a
voluptuary of the senses who wanted his rooms to be a rapturous medley of
strong, exotic colours and filled with the luscious fragrance of flowers. The
formal grounds at Port Lympne were like a Hollywood version of Tuscany.
Sassoon transformed his third house, Trent Park, near
Cockfosters in north London, from a mauve and black bricked Victorian mansion
into a masterpiece of rose-red brick expressing the Palladian calm of the Enlightenment.
It resembled the seat of a philosophically minded 18th-century statesman,
except for its golf course and airstrip. At Trent, platoons of footmen in red
cummerbunds attended the weekend parties for politicians, royalty, sportsmen,
authors and artists.
Brilliant
personalities, such as Winston Churchill, attracted Sassoon … Churchill in the
cabinet room at No 10 during the war.
Brilliant
personalities, such as Winston Churchill, attracted Sassoon … Churchill in the
cabinet room at No 10 during the war. Photograph: IWM via Getty Images
Brilliant personalities, such as Churchill, attracted
Sassoon. He idolised the Prince of Wales, but as they were both spoilt and
snappish men, they often bickered. He supported the “King’s party” during the
abdication crisis of 1936, and was implicated in Churchill’s botched attempts
to keep the rackety monarch on his throne. Unlike Churchill, he wanted
international peace at any cost, and convinced himself that Hitler’s promises
were dependable.
Sassoon shone as a patron of the arts and bought rare
objects with discrimination, displaying them with flair. He used his
connoisseurship as chairman of the National Gallery, as a trustee of the Tate
and as first commissioner of works.
Sassoon spoke with a
clipped sibilant lisp, and liked to relax in a blue silk smoking jacket with
slippers of zebra hide
Sassoon enjoyed witty gossip, but was never spiteful. He
spoke with a clipped sibilant lisp, and liked to relax in a blue silk smoking
jacket with slippers of zebra hide. He had fickle, moody fascinations with
young men with whom he soon grew bored, but was loyally appreciative of female
friends and kept an inner court of elderly, cultivated, ironical bachelors. His
sexuality was central to his character and activities, but there is never any
hint of sexual activity in the many memories of him. One hates to think that he
was as sublimated as he sounds. His restlessness and fatalism, which were
notorious among his friends, killed him at the age of 50 in 1939: although his
physicians ordered bed rest after a viral infection, he hurtled about in
unnecessary gaieties until his body was beyond recovery.
Damian Collins is the Conservative MP for Hythe. He has
written an elegant, playful and fluent book about his predecessor. It is widely
researched, canny in its political insights, sympathetic but not syrupy about
Sassoon’s glamour. Puritans will resent his privileges and cavalier grace, but
many readers will enjoy his resilient and dashing brand of razzle-dazzle.
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