Judd Lord Reading

Rufus Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading, Lord Chief Justice and Viceroy of India, 1860-1935
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ISBN: 978-0-571-30010-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 334 Seiten

Rufus Isaacs was in his day the first commoner to rise to the rank of marquess since the Duke of Wellington. Born into a lively Jewish family, he left school aged 14, yet made his name as a brilliant QC before being elected to the Commons as a Liberal in 1904. Smeared during the Marconi scandal of 1913 he survived to be appointed Lord Chief Justice, and elevated to the peerage in 1914. He would go on to be Ambassador to the United States, Viceroy of India, and Foreign Secretary. For this major work, first published in 1982, Denis Judd drew upon private papers in order to place Rufus Isaacs' complex career in perspective and so provide an overdue reassessment of one of the most outstanding public figures of the twentieth century. 'Excellent.' A.J.P. Taylor, Observer 'A lucid and revealing book' Geoffrey Moorhouse, Times 'The best biography [of Lord Reading] to have appeared so far.' Robert Blake, Evening Standard

Denis Judd

Autoren/Hrsg.

Judd, Denis

Leseproben

1 Origins and Schooldays, 1860–75

If your mother says it is so, it is so, even if it isn’t so.

Joseph Isaacs, father of Rufus, to his children

Lessons he left unlearnt, class work he shirked, and mischief was his only devotion.

A schoolboy contemporary describing Rufus Isaacs

Rufus Daniel Isaacs was born on 10 October 1860, at 3 Bury Street, St Mary Axe, within the sound of Bow Bells. He was the fourth child, and the second son, of Joseph and Sarah Isaacs; five children were later born to Joseph and Sarah, and Rufus thus enjoyed a comfortable middle position among his siblings.

To be born into a Jewish family in mid-Victorian Britain, however, by no means guaranteed a comfortable life, free of slights and indignities. Nor did it promise an effortless advancement in public affairs. On the contrary, Rufus Isaacs’s Jewish origins at various times provided his critics and enemies with an easy, and mostly cheap, source of ammunition to use against him. This was ironical in the case of a man who set little store by formal religion, and who eventually fitted so painlessly into the highest social and official positions offered by his country.

Isaacs’s ancestors had first come to England from central Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century when Michael, son of Isaac, had settled in Chelmsford from where he peddled his merchandise. Michael Isaacs had a son, Israel, born about 1735. Israel Isaacs married Katherine Judah: two sons were born to them, Samuel in 1759 and Isaac in 1767, at a time when Britain was triumphantly asserting her claims to naval and colonial supremacy at the expense of Spain and France.

Samuel Isaacs lived to the awesome age of one hundred and six years. He died in 1865, the year in which the death of Lord Palmerston cleared the way for the supremacy of Gladstone and the creation of a new Liberal party. Five years before Samuel Isaacs’s death was born the great-grandson who was destined to sustain the Liberal party in the more taxing conditions of the twentieth century, and the subject of this biography.

Rufus Isaacs’s extended family, with the patriarch Samuel at its head, was both varied and interesting. His great-grandmother Sarah, wife of the centenarian, herself lived to be one hundred and three, and various of her and Samuel’s descendants lived well into their eighties and nineties. One of Rufus’s great-uncles was the celebrated prize-fighter Daniel Mendoza (1765–1836) whose success with his fists provided the British public with an image very different from the contemporary stereotype of the cringing, peddling, money-lending Jew. Before he retired to a pub in Whitechapel, Daniel Mendoza had helped to revolutionize pugilism with his skill and dexterity, and had written his classic Art of Boxing, first published in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. Although Rufus Isaacs never knew this fighting great-uncle, he admired his achievements greatly, and was for a time an enthusiastic amateur boxer himself.

Daniel Mendoza’s Spanish name is an indication that the Isaacs had already married into the Sephardic branch of the Jewish faith. Michael Isaacs, son of the redoubtable Samuel, had married Sarah, daughter of Aaron Mendoza, and the niece of the prize-fighter. It was later rumoured that the Mendozas were somehow related to Benjamin Disraeli, though there is no clear proof of this, and when a subsequent generation of the Isaacs family referred to ‘Uncle Ben’ it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Despite this tenuous connection with Disraeli, the Mendozas had a forbear to be proud of in his own right: in 1732 an earlier Aaron Mendoza had published one of the first books produced by a Jew in England – a manual of the laws governing ritual slaughter, with illustrations in his own hand.

As well as marrying Sarah Mendoza, Michael Isaacs launched the family into the fruit business on a considerable scale. Whereas his father Samuel had held a stall in the fruit market in Duke’s Place, Aldgate, Michael Isaacs set up a company devoted to the importing of foreign fruit – mostly from Italy and Spain – at Mitre Street, in Aldgate. The business was still thriving in the immediate post-Second World War era.

Michael and Sarah Isaacs had two sons: Henry Aaron and Joseph Michael. The career of the former exemplifies the new freedom from civil disabilities which Jews, and other religious dissenters, were able to enjoy fully by the middle of the nineteenth century. Henry, or ‘Harry’, Isaacs became a member of the Corporation of London in 1882, then Alderman and later Sheriff. He was knighted in 1887 and two years afterwards was elected Lord Mayor of London.

His younger brother Joseph met, as a small boy, his future wife Sarah Davis at a dancing class. He fell instantly in love with her and determined to marry her as soon as it became practical. In 1855 the wedding took place, when Joseph was twenty-three years old and Sarah was twenty. The marriage was to last for fifty-two years.

After their wedding Joseph and Sarah moved to the Bury Street address where Rufus was born in 1860. Why he was given the unlikely name of Rufus is quite clear: he was named after the eldest of his mother’s six brothers. There was, however, doubt in the family as to whether this uncle Rufus had formally been given this name; it seems most likely that he had originally been called Abraham but had later adopted the name of Rufus as more striking and original. The properly named Rufus Isaacs certainly had no cause to regret his uncle’s eccentricity, and his own son later wrote, ‘the name … was so invaluable an asset to him throughout life. “Rufus Isaacs”: it was always a distinguishing mark, a proclamation, at once arresting and euphonious, of his identity, which reached its zenith in the inevitable and invincible slogan of later electioneering days: “Rufus for Reading” in huge letters of the Liberal red.’1

Not long after Rufus’s birth, Joseph and Sarah Isaacs moved to Finsbury Square, into a larger house which in due course provided a home for their nine children. Finsbury Square was still within the City of London and thus conveniently close to the family fruit business, M. Isaacs and Sons Limited. A few years later the family moved again, this time to the more bracing air of Hampstead, where they settled at 21 Belsize Avenue, next door to Sarah Isaacs’s parents. The Isaacs were to live there for the next quarter century.

The migration from the City to Hampstead represented more than a proof of Joseph Isaacs’s prosperity, and was not merely a predictable drift from an inner city area that was becoming less residential in nature to an attractive suburb well-served by public transport. In part, at least, the move to Belsize Avenue was a step towards emancipation – a break away from the close embrace of orthodox City Jewry to the more cosmopolitan environment of Hampstead where the Isaacs made new friends among neighbours that were predominantly either gentile or loosely attached to Jewish religious ritual.

Rufus’s mother, Sarah, flourished in this new setting. Unlike her husband, Joseph, she set no great store by orthodox religion. Even her appearance belied her ethnic origins and her grandson has described her as, ‘Rather above average height and strongly built, with brown hair, grey eyes, firm chin and her father’s short, straight nose, she gave little outward indication of being a Jewess.’2 Joseph Isaacs, called ‘the Guv’nor’ by his children, was of medium height, sturdily built, ‘brown eyed, with a heavy moustache, short side whiskers and an expression of great kindliness which was not belied by his real nature in spite of occasional explosions into wrath’.3

Joseph Isaacs fought a losing, and sometimes noisy, battle to keep his family in the ways of the old religion. Until after the move to Belsize Park, Joseph insisted upon the ritual of daily family prayers. An incident not long after the move, however, shook his determination in this respect. He and his wife went on a few weeks’ holiday. Before leaving, Joseph had summoned his elder sons Harry and Rufus, and, urging upon them the desirability of daily prayer in his absence, had secretly put a small onion into each boy’s prayer bag. On his return, he inquired if they had prayed daily, and was assured that this had indeed been the case. On opening their prayer bags, however, Joseph found that each young onion had sprouted undisturbed in the dark. Although he thrashed his sons as punishment, the sprouting onions symbolized a defiant and independent filial outlook that could not be curbed. Indeed, Rufus Isaacs grew up to hold no religious beliefs, took a gentile as his second wife, and viewed his grandson’s Anglican baptism with equanimity, even encouragement.

Perhaps the prime reason why Joseph Isaacs lost the battle to maintain religious orthodoxy lay in the fact that ‘in the home Mrs Isaacs, always called by her family “the Mater”, exercised unchallenged sway’. Dominated in business by his elder brother Harry, he was equally submissive at home, telling his children, ‘If your mother says it is so, it is so, even if it isn’t so.’4 Occasionally Joseph’s frustrated aggression would explode in violent displays of temper and he would pursue his delinquent sons round the garden, cracking a horse whip and roaring revenge. Even these demonstrations of paternal authority tended to be cut short by his wife, who prided herself on her French, interceding with a commanding...