CHAPTER I
Vitae melioris ad usum
‘To improve the quality of life’.
Motto beneath a painted, mythological roundel
on the ceiling of the Speyers’ music room
A system of lines that would... render life more easy and comfortable.
Sir Edgar Speyer on the completion
of the London Underground, 1906
A war... seems hardly conceivable.
Sir Edgar Speyer, ‘Germany and England as Citizens
of the World’, in England and Germany by Leaders of
Public Opinion in both Empires, (ed) Ludwig Stein, 1912
In the opening chapters of The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), John Maynard Keynes looked back with nostalgia to a pre-war Antonine age of peace, progress and prosperity, when a man might invest his capital wherever he wished in a cosmopolitan, economically interdependent and financially harmonious world whose stability was grounded on the solid rock of the gold standard. The blessings of that world, and its apparently boundless prospects, were hailed at the time by one who thrived in it, in an article published in 1912, entitled ‘Germany and England as Citizens of the World’. Its author was the Rt Hon Sir Edgar Speyer, Bart, PC. The article appeared in a collection whose title sufficiently explains his standing as a contributor: England and Germany by Leaders of Public Opinion in Both Empires.
Like the Rothschilds, the Speyers originated as one of the Jewish merchant-banking families of Frankfurt. By the late 18th century one Isaac Michael Speyer was the wealthiest representative of Frankfurt Jewry: indeed his riches outstripped those of the fledgling house of Rothschild. The founding firm of Lazard-Speyer-Ellissen was established in 1818. In the 19th century its activities fanned out across the globe, with branches in New York (1837) and London (1862). Under Gustav Speyer, the New York house, Speyer and Co, negotiated loans for the federal government during the Civil War and financed American railroads and enterprises in Mexico and Cuba. In accordance with Gustav’s wish, its head at the turn of the century was his elder son, James, while the younger, Edgar, ran the London house, Speyer Bros. Their sister, Lucie, married Eduard Beit, who later took over the Frankfurt house now known as Speyer-Ellissen. James, Edgar and Eduard were all partners in each other’s firms. In 1912, the year that Edgar published his article, Eduard was appointed Honorary British Consul-General at Frankfurt, a common arrangement in those halcyon days despite periodic Anglo-German tensions.
In 1886, having supervised the Frankfurt firm for three years after his father’s death, Edgar Speyer, aged 24, settled permanently in London as chairman of Speyer Bros. He became a naturalised British subject in 1892. ‘I was’, he recalled, ‘a very keen businessman’.1 Under his management Speyer Bros prospered greatly, occupying a sumptuous Venetian-Gothic building in Lothbury, behind the Bank of England.
In 1902 Edgar took up a challenge which brought him into the public eye and also into some degree of controversy: to finance the transformation of London’s transport system. London’s rapid growth in the mid-19th century had attracted an increasing volume of commuters and visitors to the capital. The railways brought them to the periphery of central London, but the only form of transport from there to the heart of the capital was by horse-drawn carriage. The world’s first underground railway, built by the Metropolitan Railway Co, opened in 1863. The tunnels were constructed by excavating a deep wide trench in the roadway, lining it with brick and covering it with a roof of brick or iron over which the roadway was relaid. The trains were hauled by steam locomotives. Despite complaints of smoke-filled tunnels, the Metropolitan and its rival the District line steadily expanded their tracks. The Circle line was completed in 1884, while extensions above ground reached such suburbs as Hounslow and Aylesbury by the 1890s.
During the 1880s, two important technologies combined to challenge the dominance of steam. The first was deep tunnelling through London’s clay. Originally pioneered by Brunel, the technique was developed by Barlow (1869) and perfected by Greathead (1890), using a tube of cast-iron segments to line the tunnels and greatly speed construction. Deep underground tunnelling avoided the welter of sewers, gas-pipes and water-pipes. It also avoided the expense of compensating owners of some of the world’s most expensive property for damage to foundations. In 1886 a new line was started from a shaft sunk below the Thames, with tunnels bored north and south, the prototype of the Northern line.
A second advance came in 1888 with the adoption of electric traction, first demonstrated by Siemens in Berlin (1878) and in use by the 1880s in Brighton and Blackpool. Electricity was the clean, modern and obvious alternative to steam: it was also thought that it would prove ultimately cheaper and more profitable, once the capital outlay had been met, though this would turn out to be an illusion. Two more deep-tunnel lines were opened, using electric locomotives to haul the carriages: the Waterloo & City in 1898 and the Central in 1900. By then, the idea of replacing locomotives with multiple-unit electric trains was rapidly gaining support: the Central line introduced them in 1903.
Numerous proposals were advanced for further deep electric lines, while the Metropolitan-District system came under pressure to electrify. The obstacle to immediate fast development was lack of finance. Parliament granted authorisation for the future Bakerloo, Northern and Piccadilly lines and some construction began, but funds to push them through were not forthcoming.
Around the turn of the century a remarkable American, Charles Yerkes,* arrived in London. Yerkes was a dynamic American tycoon with a chequered financial background, who had nonetheless masterminded the Chicago elevated railway known as the ‘Loop’ and had tried unsuccessfully to establish a monopoly in public transport there. London offered greater possibilities and richer pickings. In 1901 he bought the District Railway and set about electrifying it, forcing the Metropolitan to follow suit. Yerkes had £1 million capital of his own and more from some American banking houses, but he needed far more to match his ambition of acquiring and electrifying an entire underground network for London.
Charles Yerkes met Edgar in March 1902 and put his ideas to him. Edgar responded quickly. In April, he formed an international consortium, the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, or ‘UERL’. Speyer Bros and Speyer & Co were its main backers, Edgar Speyer and James Speyer were its chief directors and Yerkes was its chairman. The aim of the UERL was ambitious: to finance and oversee the electrification of the Metropolitan and District lines and the construction of major sections of what became, under the Company’s ownership, the Piccadilly, Bakerloo and Northern lines.
Edgar’s primary role, then, was to find the money to finance the UERL. Speyer Bros would market the shares on behalf of the Company, for which they provided a capital of £5 million. The UERL raised £15 million through a convoluted system – which even financial experts who examined it found abstruse – of shares and certificates, most of which were taken up by American and Continental investors. Further share issues raised a colossal total of £18 million by 1903. Commissions to the bankers, principally Edgar and James, were huge. In December 1905, however, Yerkes suddenly died and Edgar immediately took over as Chairman. As his responsibilities unexpectedly expanded, so his interest in the venture intensified. He saw the Company not only as a hoped-for source of profit which he must strive to keep solvent but also as a great public amenity, an agent of urban and social progress. The Underground became an end in itself.
Meanwhile, however, he faced a dire financial legacy left by Yerkes, whose ingenuity was exceeded only by his audacity. As a candid historian observes, ‘if Yerkes had been an entirely honest, upright banker, much of the Underground system would probably never have been built’.2 The exact nature of the relationship between Edgar Speyer and Yerkes does not emerge from the available evidence. It is clear that Edgar’s imagination was fired by Yerkes’ ambition and dynamism, but what was his attitude to Yerkes’ business methods, which were by any standards unorthodox? How far he was privy to them and what part he played in them is not known. His own reputation was that of a man of resourcefulness and probity.
‘Straphangers meant dividends’,3 Edgar had pithily predicted, but he was over-optimistic. The Company was vastly overextended and unable to meet its commitments, including heavy annual interest payments on the shares. Despite the huge £18 million capital investment, passenger numbers proved to be less than half those originally estimated – partly because of competition from bus companies. Revenue from fares fell far short of operating costs, which included the unanticipated high cost of fire-safety measures imposed by the Board of Trade. The situation had been compounded when Yerkes slashed fares in an effort to boost passenger numbers. Shareholders grew restive, awaiting the quick dividends promised on Yerkes’s £100 so-called ‘profit sharing notes’ redeemable in 1908. £7 million of these bonds had been taken up, but the security on which they were issued consisted of shares in other UERL enterprises, some of doubtful value, and the value of the ‘profit-sharing notes’ had fallen by two-thirds.
In 1907, Lloyd George, President of the Board of Trade, was invited to open the Northern line, which now extended to Golders Green and Archway, despite the fears of Hampstead residents that tunnelling would damage the Heath.* At the celebratory banquet at Golders Green, Edgar tried to persuade Lloyd George to subsidise, municipalise or even nationalise the Underground. While ‘other cities rendered active help’, he observed, ‘London stood alone in not assisting’.4 Lloyd George was not to be drawn by the prospect of what he called ‘socialistic legislation’. ‘Sir Edgar Speyer’, he replied, ‘had tried to lure him into some of the loveliest traps ever set for a Minister’.5 The London County Council likewise declined to take over the Company.
With American shareholders demanding their dividends and threatening bankruptcy proceedings as the date for redemption approached, Edgar bailed out the Company with £175,000 from Speyer Bros’ reserves in order to pay interest due on the ‘profit-sharing notes’, and exchanged the notes for a mixture of fixed-interest bonds redeemable in 25 years and preference shares redeemable in 40 years. Settlement was reached with the shareholders at the last moment, Edgar himself addressing them. While ‘it would be idle to pretend’, he said, ‘that the result of our six years’ labours had not been very disappointing’,6 he pointed out that the biggest losers were Speyer Bros, as holder of many of the notes. He also kept the Company afloat by boldly purchasing in 1910 the flourishing London General Omnibus Company, whose profits could be diverted to offset losses on the Underground.
For all the unexpected difficulties encountered by the UERL and its narrow escape from collapse, Edgar remained resilient and optimistic. His energies and his imagination were bound up in Yerkes’ inspiring vision – he hailed his late partner as ‘the great master mind’7 – of an integrated transport system for London and by his own involvement in its realisation. The UERL, which Edgar called his ‘pet enterprise’ and his ‘child’,8 was the policy-making and managerial brain of the whole venture, and despite all obstacles, the ‘Tube’, which Yerkes had not lived to see, was up and running, a daily part of London life.
In the speed and scale of its construction and the comfort and modernity of its design, the Underground was one of the wonders of the age. John Price’s electrically powered rotary excavators cut through the London clay at an average depth of 80 feet and at a rate of around 80 feet a week. Tracks ran both ways in separate tunnels lined with cast iron and concrete. They were lit by lamps situated every 40 feet. Power was provided by a massive generating station – Europe’s largest – at Lot’s Road, Chelsea, next to the Thames, along which a constant procession of barges delivered the huge amounts of coal needed to fire the eight steam-turbine generators. Hightension alternating current passed by cable to 24 substations where it was converted to direct current at 500 volts and fed to the multi-unit trains through conductorrails. Progress was spectacular. The Circle line was electrified by 1905 and most of the Metropolitan by 1908. The three new lines, Piccadilly, Bakerloo and Northern, were open by 1907 and amalgamated in 1910.
All three lines shared a common design. The rolling stock, mostly imported from France, Belgium, Hungary and the USA, was streamlined and elegant. The trains, consisting of from three to five cars, each seating 50 passengers, travelled at an average speed of 15 miles an hour, including stops, thanks to the increased acceleration provided by electric traction. They ran daily on average every three minutes from 5.30 am until 11.30 pm. Safety was ensured by American-style automatic signalling and braking, and the position of every train was visible to the signalman from an illuminated track diagram in his box. Access to the platforms was by electric lifts supplied by Otis, and every station had an iron spiral staircase for emergencies. The platforms were 300 feet long and 11 feet wide and were connected to adjacent stations by intercommunicating pedestrian tunnels. Forced ventilation ensured a constant flow of fresh air. The stations themselves, designed and decorated in the Art Nouveau style, had an exterior of glazed ruby tiles, featuring the well-known bar-and-circle logo.
These achievements were the fruit of Yerkes’ knowhow and drive. Except in finance, Edgar was no technical expert, but as Yerkes’ successor at the UERL, he showed enthusiasm for every aspect of the gigantic undertaking, from raising the colossal capital to support it and devising and implementing the measures necessary to avert the company’s threatened collapse, to approving details of the advertising posters, the map of the Underground, the uniforms to be worn by the transport staff and their personal welfare. He took pride in the Company’s achievement, lyrically extolling the benefits of a network of lines that would
bring the population of a vast area more easily and agreeably to their work ... render life more easy and comfortable and enable the poorer classes more easily and pleasantly to reach that happy land where houses ceased and where fields, trees and flowers began.9
In 1912 Edgar further consolidated the Company’s control of London’s transport by purchasing the two further Underground lines, the Central and the City and South London (now part of the Northern line). The Daily Mirror, styling him ‘London’s “King of the Underground”’, pointed out that he ‘finds himself, at the age of 50, the master-mind dealing with the mammoth problem of London’s passenger-traffic’.10 The same year saw the publication in the radical weekly, The New Age, of a not altogether friendly cartoon depicting a giant, mustachioed, self-satisfied Sir Edgar Speyer, legs astride, a train running between his polished black boots. Behind this image of a modern Colossus, however, the truth was that, because of the rapid spread of private motoring, unforeseen at the time, the Underground, whether under the UERL or any subsequent management, never became profitable.
Sir Edgar Speyer, 1912 caricature (J de J Rosciszewski, The New Age, 19 December 1912)
Despite his involvement in the grandiose but lossmaking Underground project, Edgar’s own fortune remained unaffected. His prowess as banker and entrepreneur ensured that he remained an extremely rich man. There were other millionaires in Edwardian London, but Edgar was far more than that. In his opulent style of life, the extent of his munificence, the breadth of his cultural interests and his informed enthusiasm, personal engagement and generosity as a patron of the arts, he stood out as someone akin to a Renaissance prince, and his contribution to London’s musical life knows no parallel. Of youthful, debonair appearance, slight and shortish at 5’5”, with a ‘very striking face’ of olive complexion and ‘brilliant brown eyes’,11 he was alert, active and decisive.
In 1895, Robert Newman, founder-manager of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, and its conductor, Henry Wood, launched the Promenade Concerts. Informal public concerts had been part of London life since the early 19th century, but little had been done to raise public taste until Newman and Wood made it their mission to make available the best of classical and modern music. One of the performers for whom Newton acted as agent was a young American violinist then in her twenties, Leonora von Stosch, a woman of remarkable beauty, character and talent. Leonora’s father had left Germany for America as a young man, dropped his title, fought for the Union in the Civil War and married an American lady of English birth. He died before Leonora was born.
Despite her surname, Leonora was brought up as an American and was a celebrated ‘Washington belle’. She had studied music at Brussels, Paris and Leipzig and performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She made her London début on the first night of the ‘Proms’ in 1900 with a performance of Saint-Saëns’s Rondo Capriccioso so impressive that she re-appeared at no fewer than six other Promenade Concerts that season. After an unhappy first marriage to an American, by whom she had one daughter, she lived for a time in Paris. Edgar and Leonora first met some time around 1900 in the Cotswold village of Broadway at a concert-party in which she was a soloist. Leonora obtained a divorce from her first husband and she and Edgar were married in Germany in 1902. Leonora was 30 years old, Edgar ten years older. Edgar had evidently joined the Church of England, for the ceremony took place in the English Church in Hamburg. Until she met Edgar, Leonora ‘did not know a word of German’. Thereafter she was said to speak ‘fluent but bad German’ and in London she ‘passed as an American’.12
A few months after Edgar and Leonora were married, Robert Newman went bankrupt. His ruin would have put an end to the Promenade Concerts had it not been for Edgar’s prompt and spontaneous intervention. He stepped in –’to please my wife’,13 he said – by offering immediate financial and practical help. He set up the Queen’s Hall Orchestra as a limited company, Edgar himself becoming Chairman, while retaining Newman as manager and investing upwards of £2,000 a year in the orchestra, some £26,000 in all by 1914. He thus saved the Proms by underwriting their losses and placing them on an assured financial footing.
He did more than that. As the Saturday Review later put it, ‘Speyer was out to make music, not money’.14 He set out to make the best music available to the widest possible public, and he did so by offering almost absurdly favourable prices: the average price of a season ticket was fourpence a night. He set the orchestra on a new and professional foundation. Hitherto, members of the orchestra were only paid to perform on the night of the concert and even then they might engage a substitute! Edgar put a stop to this, and insisted on personal attendance at rehearsals. He encouraged and seconded Wood and Newman’s ambition to improve the orchestra’s quality and enlarge its repertoire. Wood recalled ‘how delightful I found Speyer to work with. He was so sincere in his outlook, a lover of art willing to spend any amount of money to advance the cause of good music’.15 A typical instance arose when Wood lamented the lack of a first-class oboe soloist. Edgar at once wrote off to the Paris Conservatoire. ‘Come on!’ he said to Wood. ‘We will go over there next week and hear their best players. We will stay at the Ritz and enjoy ourselves’.16
In 1899 Edgar bought the leasehold on two adjacent houses on Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, and had them rebuilt as a single residence, No 46, by the fashionable architect, Detmar Blow. The exterior was elaborately faced in Portland stone. The principle rooms were variously designed in the styles of the gothic, the renaissance and the 18th century. The fittings including carved ceilings, some transported from Orvieto and the chateaux of the Loire. From a great hall, extended on each side by arcades, two massive staircases led to a music room decorated in the style of Louis XV, complete with a pipe-organ and a musicians’ gallery. These splendours, matched by an Italian garden set with marble colonnades, produced in the heart of London a palatial dwelling fit for a princely banker, luxuriously fitted out and adorned with works of art, pictures, tapestries and statues.
In the music room, fixed within the panelling of one wall, the centre of attention was a magnificent full-length portrait of Leonora by John Singer Sargent, for which Edgar paid 1,500 guineas, the highest fee Sargent had yet received for such a commission. The background to the portrait was a 17th-century Flemish harpsichord exquisitely redecorated in the 18th century. It was in this room that Edgar and Leonora held their regular musical evenings. Leonora herself would perform on a Stradivarius or Guarneri, accompanied by a small private orchestra. At Overstrand, near Cromer, on the Norfolk coast, Edgar built a so-called ‘cottage’, in reality a large mock-Tudor country-house overlooking the sea and named ‘Sea Marge’. Here too he hosted musical evenings.
When, often at his suggestion, Wood and Newman sought to attract world-famous names to perform at the Queen’s Hall, Edgar would pay the fees and offer hospitality at Grosvenor Street. He placed at his guests’ disposal an entire suite of rooms, accessed by electric lift and overlooking the Italian garden. ‘We live even more elegantly than kings and emperors’, the elderly Edvard Grieg marvelled, when he and his wife were guests in 1906. ‘We wade among masterpieces of art’.17 A score of servants ministered to their wants. A limousine stood ready to whisk them around London. On the evening of his visitors’ arrival Edgar would provide a special dinner in their honour, after which he would invite them to perform before a selected audience, which sometimes included royalty. Among those whom Leonora invited to meet the Griegs was the young Australian pianist and composer, Percy Grainger, whom she playfully called ‘the village idiot’.18 200 guests were entertained at the dinner, after which Grieg took part in a recital of his own work which began at 11.00 pm. Grieg accompanied Leonora in a performance of his second Violin Sonata, Nina Grieg sang two sets of his songs and Percy Grainger played two of the Norwegian dances.
Edward Elgar had conducted the first performance of his ‘Cockaigne’ overture in the Queen’s Hall in 1901. A year later, in a gracious, if slightly un-English letter, addressed to ‘so eminent a musician as you are ... so deservedly popular and admired everywhere’,19 Edgar invited him to return for a repeat performance of that joyous evocation of Edwardian London. In January 1910, when Elgar was working on his Violin Concerto, he and his wife dined with Edgar and Leonora at Grosvenor Street. After dinner, Elgar and Leonora tried out the slow movement. It was so well received that they played it again. They rehearsed the first movement in May – Leonora predicting its ‘worldwide success’ – two days before it was premiered by Kreisler at the Queen’s Hall. The following year Edgar financed the première of Elgar’s Second Symphony. The appearance at the Queen’s Hall in 1908 and 1909 of Claude Debussy was entirely due to Edgar, who sent Henry Wood to Paris to entice the reluctant Frenchman to London. ‘Tell Debussy what you like’, he told Wood, ‘but make him come over’. George Enesco, also a guest in 1909, became ‘a great friend’ of Edgar. Everyone found the Speyers to be ‘genial and charming’20 hosts.
Richard Strauss had long been a friend of Edgar, and he and his wife, Pauline de Ahna, were frequent guests at Grosvenor Street. Pauline complained of a smoking chimney in her bedroom but the composer complimented Leonora at dinner on a ‘well orchestrated’21 dessert. At Edgar’s invitation, Strauss conducted the first performance in England of Ein Heldenleben in 1902 to a packed and rapturous Queen’s Hall. ‘However many rehearsals I asked for in order to ensure a perfect performance’,22 Wood recalled, Edgar at once agreed. In the case of Ein Heldenleben there were 17 rehearsals. In 1905 Strauss dedicated his opera Salomé to ‘my friend Sir Edgar Speyer’.
The music critic of the Observer hailed the Promenade Concert season of 1911, comparing modern audiences favourably with those of 40 years earlier, when the programme had featured little more than music hall items. ‘This great growth in the popular appreciation of the finest music’ was demonstrated by an educated audience that ‘cheered itself hoarse’23 at the Beethoven and Wagner evenings. By his material support and encouragement of Newman and Wood (he secured a knighthood for Wood in 1910), Edgar revived a cultural institution that extended and enriched the musical life of England.
Edgar told Wood that ‘it had cost him many thousands of pounds to make Richard Strauss’s Symphonic Poems known to England’,24 and the 1913 Proms season featured Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben, as well as Sibelius’s Finlandia and such novelties as Debussy’s Iberia, Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, Vaughan Williams’s incidental music to The Wasps, Frank Bridge’s The Sea, Grainger’s Mock Morris and even Stravinsky’s Firebird suite. The Observer praised the season’s ‘remarkable success’ and its ‘educative influence’25 on large and appreciative audiences.
Edgar patronised art and science as well as music. He financed the Whitechapel Art Gallery as a founder trustee. He coordinated the financing of both of Captain Scott’s Antarctic expeditions, appealing for international donations. Without Edgar, neither expedition could have been mounted, for they were beset throughout by lack of funds. He personally donated £5,000 to the Discovery expedition of 1901–4. (The nearest contribution was a £1,000 gift from the Government of New Zealand). On Scott’s return, he and Edgar became close friends. In 1909 Edgar agreed to serve as Honorary Treasurer of a fundraising committee for the Terra Nova expedition. When Scott set off on that second venture in July 1911, Edgar was among the small crowd of well-wishers at Waterloo Station. He had done his utmost to place the enterprise on a sound footing, but expenses continued to outrun the funds, as Scott acknowledged. Accepting that the expedition’s assets hardly represented ‘good security from a business point of view’, he asked Edgar ‘whether in the event of an overdraft you can get it guaranteed till I return’.26 Edgar agreed to share part of the liabilities.
The news that Roald Amundsen was heading for the South Pole turned the Terra Nova expedition, essentially a scientific enterprise of great value, into a race for the Pole. Again Edgar lent his name to a fresh appeal for funds. One of Scott’s last letters, written from his tent on his ill-fated return and found with him on his body, was addressed to Edgar. In this poignant testimony Scott acknowledged Edgar’s generosity and set the expedition’s financial failure against the tragic grandeur of its achievement:
16 March 1912
My dear Sir Edgar,
I hope this may reach you. I fear we must go and that it leaves the Expedition in a bad muddle. But we have been to the Pole and we shall die like gentlemen. I regret only for the women we leave behind.
I thank you a thousand times for your help and support and your generous kindness. If this diary is found it will show how we stuck by dying companions and fought the thing out well to the end. I think this will show that the Spirit of pluck and the power to endure has not passed out of our race ...
We nearly came through, and it’s a pity to have missed it, but lately I have felt we have overshot our mark. No one is to blame and I hope no attempt will be made to suggest that we have lacked support.
Goodbye to you and your dear kind wife.
Yours ever sincerely,
R. Scott.27
Edgar lent his efforts to a memorial fund, part of which went to succour the explorers’ dependants, part to commission monuments and part to found the future Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.
Edgar’s energies were not confined to the world of the rich, the famous and the cultured. His concern for the poor and sick went back to his early years in England, when he did voluntary work at Toynbee Hall in the East End. He was President of the Poplar Hospital, a member of the board of the King Edward VII Hospital, to which he donated £25,000, and chairman of the Nervous Diseases Research Fund. Nor did he treat these positions as sinecures. Once a week he attended the accident wards of the Poplar Hospital. He visited the bedside of every patient, and when that patient was the breadwinner, Edgar made a point of relieving the family’s needs.
He was also President of the Royal Society of Musicians, a prestigious charity. He launched a fund to provide for retired members of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. Mathilde Verne, another friend in the musical world, wrote that to less fortunate musicians at the Queen’s Hall ‘his personal kindness was wonderful’.28 He was liberal with favours and advice on investments. He lavished financial tips and bestowed the fruits of unsolicited vicarious speculations on friends and acquaintances.
Edgar’s name appeared with almost monotonous regularity as a donor to every charitable appeal, from famine relief in Russia to the NSPCC. In 1904, on learning of the collapse of a penny savings bank at Needham Market in Suffolk, Edgar at once wrote out a cheque for the £5,700 necessary to restore their funds to the 180 modest depositors whose life savings had been wiped out. His action won him golden opinions. ‘His deed is worthy of the Cheeryble brothers and we wish Dickens were alive to do justice to it’,29 declared the Pall Mall Gazette, while a servant in the Speyer household recalled of this episode that ‘out of all the happy folks I think Sir Edgar and his family were the happiest of all’.30
The following year Edgar unexpectedly became the trustee of great largesse from the hands of another Dickensian figure, a Mr Bawden. Bawden was an elderly gentleman who had made his fortune in the City and had known Edgar’s father. One day in 1905 he turned up at Speyer Bros in Lothbury, and when Edgar appeared, asked if he would do him a favour. In Edgar’s words:
I said ‘Certainly Mr Bawden’, and he pulled out a cheque from his pocket for £100,000, and he said to me: ‘Here you are. I trust you to divide that money as you think best’. I was very much taken aback by this because it is one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me in my life.31
While Edgar’s public benefactions were legion, so too was his private generosity, which he made no boast of, being one of those who, it is no affectation to say,
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
The Speyers’ generosity was spontaneous and unstinted. Their kindness to Henry Wood at a time of personal distress ‘I cannot recall’, he wrote, ‘without a lump in my throat’.32 Amid the splendours of Grosvenor Street, an atmosphere of kindliness, of bourgeois Gemütlichkeit, prevailed. In the intimacy of his home, Edgar was quiet, thoughtful and self-effacing, an affectionate and indulgent family man. Every year, for Leonora’s birthday, he composed a miniature verse-drama in English and German, sometimes set to music by Henry Wood. He had translated into German several of Keats’s Odes and a quantity of English verse and he wrote poems of his own, said to be of a melancholy and reflective nature.
Edgar played golf and kept a race-horse. He had occasionally hunted with the Whaddon. His name appeared regularly in the Court and society columns and he was enough of a public figure to become the subject of a Max Beerbohm cartoon in 1913. A zealous Sir Edgar casts covetous eyes on the scores of perambulators propelled along London streets by scurrying nannies anxious for their infant charges. The caption reads: ‘Sir Edgar Speyer strenuously planning ways to a yet wider control of our traction’.
Edgar was a member of the Reform Club. He interested himself in Liberal politics and became an intimate of Campbell-Bannerman and especially of the Asquiths. As a member of a committee summoned to advise on reform of the Companies Act, he recommended a tightening of directors’ liability for negligence. No doubt it was his contribution to party funds at the landslide election of 1906 that helped to win him his baronetcy that year at Campbell-Bannerman’s instigation. In 1907 he was asked by Lloyd George, then President of the Board of Trade, to advise on the establishment of the Port of London authority. In 1909, on Asquith’s recommendation, he was made a Privy Councillor. He publicly supported Lloyd George’s controversial ‘People’s Budget’ of that year and his name was high on the list of the 250 whom the King would have raised to the peerage at Asquith’s request had the House of Lords failed to pass the Parliament Act.33
In the years before 1914, Edgar’s Anglo-German affinities were more or less in equipoise and his loyalties undivided. He was a member of the German Athenaeum Club and as a patron of the German Hospital and German Orphanage in London, he was honoured by the Kaiser during his visit to England in 1911, with the Prussian Order of the Crown. In 1913 he was a leading contributor to the Kaiser’s jubilee fund to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Emperor’s accession.
It may be that in that pre-war era Edgar and Leonora were living in a fool’s paradise; but then so were most people. With hindsight, historians have descried seismic tremors beneath the crust of European civilisation. Few at the time imagined the immensity of the coming catastrophe. In the first decade of the 20th century, a time of intermittent Anglo-German tensions marked by violent oscillations of the diplomatic barometer from ‘fair’ to ‘stormy’ and back again, Edgar used his influence to inform Germans at the highest level of feeling in the British Cabinet, of which he learned at first hand. He sometimes acted as an unofficial go-between. In 1906, during the first Moroccan crisis, he warned the German ambassador in London, Count Metternich, of Britain’s determination to support France. On a visit to Berlin early in 1911 he called on Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg to emphasise British hopes for agreement on the Berlin- Baghdad railway and regretted that the Chancellor had never sought to make the personal acquaintance of the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. Bethmann- Hollweg, rightly assuming that Edgar would pass on his assurances to London, outlined points for settlement of the Berlin-Baghdad issue and said that he ‘could desire nothing better’ than a meeting with Sir Edward. On his return to London, Edgar warned Margot Asquith that Grey’s aloof manner added to the impression held of him in Berlin of personal hostility, and said that if he would only break his insular habits and travel abroad more, ‘he would not be so anti-German’.34
Norman Angel might argue in his celebrated thesis of 1910, The Great Illusion, that ‘the delicate interdependence of international finance’35 made war in Europe an impossibility; but the second Moroccan crisis, coming only six months after Edgar’s Berlin visit, pushed that possibility to the forefront. In 1912, in his own published essay, Edgar too touched on what, like Angel, he trusted was the impossible, though clearly no longer the wholly unthinkable.
In this essay, Edgar hailed Germany and England as ‘citizens of the world’. He quoted Goethe and Shakespeare with some complacency to illustrate the hoped-for prospect of ongoing good relations between the two kindred nations. All seemed reassuring in that golden age of continual progress save for an uneasy awareness, arising from the recurrent international crises, of the one nightmare prospect. That prospect loomed larger with Germany’s insistence on challenging Britain’s naval supremacy. Enlarging, in words which echoed those of Angel, on the economic interdependence and mutual benefits of peaceful Anglo-German competition, Edgar held it ‘inconceivable that the nations who are in the van of the progress of humanity and whose activity has brought such advancement to the world should recklessly destroy their great and civilising work by war’.36 Edgar and a gathering of fellow Anglo-Germans were overheard discussing that appalling possibility. One of the company, in a phrase that epitomised their fear, observed: ‘It will be a terrible thing if we English go to war with us Germans’.37
James Speyer was Edgar’s elder brother by a year. He had settled in New York in 1885 to manage Speyer & Co. Like Edgar’s, his operations were on a gigantic scale, floating large foreign loans, financing railway schemes as far afield as Bolivia and the Philippines. Like Edgar, he believed in ‘international finance as a power for peace’,38 and he welcomed Churchill’s proposal in 1913 of a ‘naval holiday’, a pause in the Anglo-German race to outstrip each other in launching bigger and better battleships. James’s affiliations, however, were on the side of Germany. Only the year before, when a visiting squadron of the German High Seas fleet dropped anchor in New York, James threw a lavish welcoming party and had his naval guests conveyed by special train for further hospitality at ‘Waldheim’, his 100-acre country estate near Scarborough on the Hudson river.
James was hugely successful, rich, and munificent both in America and in Germany. He played a leading role in promoting cultural exchanges. He endowed the Theodore Roosevelt Chair of American history at the University of Berlin in 1905, he founded the American Institute in Berlin in 1910 and established a Kaiser Wilhelm Chair at Columbia University in 1914. He was received by the Kaiser himself, who made much of him and wished to ennoble him. When James demurred at the honour, lamenting that he had no sons to inherit a title, the Kaiser exclaimed: ‘There must always be a Speyer in Frankfurt!’39 and in 1910 granted the title Baron Beit von Speyer to James’s and Edgar’s brother-inlaw, Eduard Beit, who had two sons.
James’s conspicuous ties with Germany proved awkward for Edgar in certain right-wing English circles where influential financier friends of Edward VII, of German and German-Jewish origin, notably Sir Ernest Cassel, were held in suspicion and disdain. It did not help that Edgar’s English, though perfectly fluent, was heavily accented. ‘The man can’t speak English’,40 sniffed the Earl of Crawford, a former Conservative chief whip. The social snobbery common in Edwardian society was personified in Sir Almeric Fitzroy, Clerk to the Privy Council, who, deeply hostile to Edgar’s appointment to that body, described him as ‘a most characteristic little Jew’. When reluctantly swearing him in, Fitzroy made a point of thrusting the Old Testament at him, ‘and thus saved the Gospels from outrage’.41
More ominous was a growing political animosity against wealthy German-born supporters of the Liberal Party, in a Tory party bitter after losing three successive elections since 1906 and passionately resentful of the ‘People’s Budget’, the Parliament Act, Irish Home Rule, and Government policy, thought to be insufficiently robust, on national defence and national conscription. Passions ran high, political antipathies hardened into personal hatreds. The sinister tinge of a conspiratorial theory took root, propounded by such right-wing imperialists as Leo Maxse, editor of the monthly National Review. In their fevered imaginations, a ‘Radical Plutocracy’ of mainly German-Jewish financiers, members and beneficiaries of what Maxse called the ‘Potsdam Party’, was bankrolling the Government and receiving undeserved honours, all the time pulling the wool over the Government’s eyes and carrying out Germany’s business: promoting a pacifist policy while Germany prepared remorselessly for the coming day of reckoning. In these intimations of a powerful secret influence at work, a web of political manipulation behind the scenes linked to the operations of international high finance and with a whiff of the Marconi scandal,* there might be discerned a muted English echo of the Dreyfus affair.
In the legendary golden summer of 1914, however, the voices of such conspiratorial journalists were noisesoff, irritating rather than dangerous. Relations with Germany were much improved. Agreement was finally reached on the Berlin-Baghdad Railway. Outwardly there was little to cloud the Speyers’ happiness or to dim the lustre of their daily lives as glittering stars of the metropolis. In May, Edgar was taking the waters at Karlsbad. At the end of May, Leonora held a dance in the ballroom at Grosvenor Street with all her customary glitter and panache. She thought nothing of changing her dresses seven times in two days, Nina Grieg had noted in amazement, ‘each one more splendid than the last’.42 On 10 June, Edgar and Leonora were at a ball attended by a select company which included the German ambassador, Prince Lichnowski, and Count Mensdorff, the ambassador of Austria-Hungary.
Across three nights in mid-June, accompanied at each recital by the composer, Leonora was the soloist in the violin sonatas of Gabriel Faur. and Richard Strauss. On the 19th she played in Fauré’s piano quartet. A week later, on the 26th, at a gala concert laid on by Edgar, Richard Strauss conducted the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration and Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. It was, said the Musical Times, ‘the chief event of the concert season’.43 Two days later, in a not so merry prank, a Bosnian student in Sarajevo levelled a pistol at the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and shot him dead.
Edgar’s portrait by William Orpen was on show at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition to critical acclaim. In July, Edgar took an exchange party of German schoolboys on a tour of London by Underground and bus. As one of four members of the Captain Scott memorial committee, he approved the design of a monument to the hero-explorer. On 15 July Leonora attended a musical ‘at home’ at Downing Street hosted by the Prime Minister and Mrs Asquith.
The season thus played itself out as usual in music, entertainment and public benefactions, and the Speyers betook themselves to ‘Sea Marge’ for the summer. A young guest, the composer Cyril Scott, dedicated to them a ‘meditation’ for piano entitled ‘Sea Marge’: a modernist piece, discordant and vaguely menacing. Meanwhile, something was afoot in the chanceries and war ministries of Berlin and Vienna. Whispering heads, grave but knowing, were bent over maps and railway timetables, ultimatums and military plans. Two short weeks, and out of the blue life would be utterly and irreversibly changed.
Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and his wife, Clementine, were old friends of the Speyers. Churchill’s mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, had often been their guest at ‘Sea Marge’ and Winston and Clementine rented a cottage from them at Overstrand. They were holidaying there during those cloudless days in late July, when the coiled fuse ignited by the assassin’s bullet at Sarajevo fizzled and crackled its serpentine way to and fro across the capitals of Europe until it exploded suddenly and uncontrollably in a world crisis.
Looking out to sea from the beach at Cromer under an azure sky, Churchill recalled: ‘the North Sea shone and sparkled to a far horizon. What was there beyond that line where sea and sky melted into one another?’44 Along the recently widened Kiel Canal the German battle- fleet made its way from the Baltic to the North Sea. The rapidly worsening crisis called Churchill back to London. At ‘Sea Marge’, Edgar and Leonora invited a worried Clementine to maintain contact with her husband by using ‘the Speyers’ splendid telephone’ in Edgar’s study. There, on 28 July, she waited anxiously to be connected at an agreed hour. Opposite her, above the mantelpiece, she noted a portrait of the Madonna, who ‘gazes with melancholy eyes at the pile of business books on the writing table’. At midnight, Churchill wrote to her from the Admiralty: ‘Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse.’45 Shortly before, he had sent orders to the Fleet at Portland to prepare to take up its war station. The following night, under cover of darkness, the 18-mile-long convoy of warships steamed northwards past the unknowing denizens of Overstrand on its long journey to Scapa Flow.
On Sunday, 2 August, Edward Marsh, Churchill’s private secretary, a frequent guest at the Grosvenor Street soirées, paid a social visit to ‘Sea Marge’. He found Edgar sitting out in the sun on the terrace overlooking the sea, listening to his three little pig-tailed daughters recite a poem under the supervision of their governess, Fräulein Klock. It was, he recalled, ‘a perfect little picture of simple patriarchal German domesticity’. Two days later Britain was at war. Of Edgar, the children and Fräulein Klock, Marsh wrote: ‘They were the last Germans I spoke to for many years’.46