Edgar Speyer

Sir Edgar Speyer
Sir Edgar Speyer by Sir William Orpen, 1914
Born	7 September 1862 New York
Died	16 February 1932 Berlin
Nationality	American/British
Occupation(s)	Banker Philanthropist
Title	Chairman of Underground Electric Railways Company of London Limited
Term	1906–1915
Predecessor	Charles Yerkes
Successor	Thomas Farrer, 2nd Baron Farrer
Spouse	Leonora Speyer
Children	3

Sir Edgar Speyer, 1st Baronet (7 September 1862 – 16 February 1932) was an American-born financier and philanthropist of German Jewish ancestry. He became a British citizen in 1892 and was chairman of Speyer Brothers, the British branch of his family’s international finance house, and chairman of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London Limited (UERL, forerunner of the London Underground) from 1906 to 1915. He was a supporter of the musical arts and largely funded the Promenade Concerts until 1914. For his philanthropy he was made a baronet in 1906 and a Privy Counsellor in 1909.

After the start of the First World War, he became a subject of anti-German attacks in the press. Speyer resigned as chairman of the UERL and went to the United States in 1915. In 1921, following an investigation of accusations that he traded with the enemy during the war and other wartime conduct not compatible with his British citizenship, his naturalisation was revoked by the British government and he was struck off the list of members of the Privy Council.

Life to 1914

Family

Speyer was born on 7 September 1862 in New York, the second son of German Jewish parents, Gustavus Speyer and Sophia Speyer (née Rubino) from Frankfurt. His father was an international banker with businesses in Frankfurt, New York and London. Speyer was educated at the Realgymnasium in Frankfurt. In 1902, in London, Speyer married the American violinist Leonora von Stosch. They had met at concert held by Maude Valerie White at which Leonora had performed. They had three daughters: Pamela, Leonora and Vivien Claire.

Financier

In 1884, Speyer became a partner in each of his father's companies. He headed the Frankfurt office for three years before moving to the London office, Speyer Brothers, in 1887, to take control there. The firm specialised in arbitrage with Europe and the United States, and the financing of railway projects. His older brother, James, headed the New York company. On 29 February 1892, Speyer became a naturalised British citizen.

Logo of the Underground Electric Railways of London, 1908

Speyer Brothers' involvement in railway finance brought Speyer into contact with American Charles Yerkes in 1900. In Chicago, Yerkes had led the development of the city's urban transport system, and he came to London to capitalise on the emerging opportunities for new deep level underground "tube" railways there. He and Speyer headed a consortium of international investors involved in the construction of three of London’s underground railways and the electrification of a fourth.

With Yerkes as chairman, the UERL was established in 1902 with a capitalisation of £5 million with the majority of shares sold to overseas investors. Further share issues followed, which, by 1903, raised a total of £18 million (£2.44 billion today) to be used across all of the UERL's projects. Yerkes died in 1905, and Speyer took his place as chairman of the UERL. By 1907, the three new railways had opened and the electrification works had been completed. Despite the UERL's engineering success in carrying out the works in such a short time, the company was in a difficult financial position. The pre-opening estimates of passenger numbers proved to be greatly over-optimistic and revenues were not covering operating costs. Speyer, with Managing Director Albert Stanley, struggled for a number of years to restore the finances. This was only achieved with the purchase of the London General Omnibus Company in 1912, the profits of which could be used to offset losses elsewhere in the group.

Philanthropist and patron

As head of the London arm of the family businesses, Speyer became very wealthy. He owned a pair of neighbouring houses at 44 and 46 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, which he had rebuilt as a single residence at the cost of £150,000 (approximately £19.3 million today) The works were carried by Detmar Blow and Fernand Billery in 1910 and 1911; they provided the house with a "Beaux-Arts" style portland stone façade and lavish interiors including 11 bedrooms and a large music room. Speyer also had a large country house built in 1908, at the fashionable Edwardian resort of Overstrand on the Norfolk coast. The house was named "Sea Marge" (meaning land that borders the sea) and was designed in the Mock Tudor style surrounded by Italianate gardens. In December 1904, Speyer donated £5,700 to replace the funds lost be investors in the failure of a penny savings bank at Needham Market, Suffolk.

The Queen's Hall, 1893

Speyer was a music lover and patron of the arts, frequently holding concerts in his home. He was friends with composers Edward Elgar, Edvard Grieg, Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy and Percy Grainger and the German cellist and composer Hugo Becker. He was chairman of the Classical Concert Society until 1912 and, following financial problems experienced by Robert Newman, chairman of the Queen's Hall Concert board from 1902 to 1914, paying £2,000 per year (£270,000 today) to underwrite the Promenade Concerts. He was described as "the sole monetary force which kept the Queen's Hall Orchestra afloat". Speyer brought Strauss to London to conduct the first English performance of Ein Heldenleben. Becker's Three Pieces for Cello with Piano Accompaniment and Strauss's Salome were dedicated to Speyer. Speyer also contributed to the foundation of Whitechapel Art Gallery where he was a trustee. He was president of Poplar Hospital and sat on the board of the King Edward's Hospital Fund, to which he donated approximately £25,000 in 1902 (£3.43 million today).

From 1909, Speyer was Honorary Treasurer of the fund raised to finance Robert Falcon Scott's 1910 British Antarctic Expedition to which he donated £1,000 of the £40,000 that was required. Speyer was prepared to take personal responsibility for a share of the liabilities of the expedition, although the money raised from public donations was sufficient. Mount Speyer (78°52′00″S, 160°42′00″E) in Antarctica is named in his honour, and one of Scott's last letters was written to Speyer.

Speyer owned violins by Stradivarius and Giuseppe Guarneri. He also collected works of art, furniture and room interiors with which he decorated his homes. His portrait was painted by William Orpen and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1914. His wife's portrait was painted by John Singer Sargent in 1907.

On 14 July 1906, Speyer was created a baronet. Politically, Speyer was a Liberal and was a friend of H. H. Asquith, by whose recommendation he was made a Privy Counsellor (PC) in 1909. In 1911, he was awarded the Order of the Crown, 2nd class by Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Life after 1914

Solid, an anti-German cartoon regarding Germany's opposition to the Anglo-French entente, from Punch, 1911
GERMANY: "Donnerwetter! It's rock. I thought it was going to be paper."

Anti-German pressure

The end of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, saw rising anti-German sentiment in Britain. Against a background of the naval arms race between Britain and Germany, this was characterised by novels warning of the rising military threat from Germany such as Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands and invasion novels such as William Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910.

Following the British declaration of war with Germany on 4 August 1914, Speyer resigned as a partner of the Frankfurt branch of the bank. Following a Royal Proclamation on 11 September 1914, requiring British subjects to have no links with companies doing business with Germany, Speyer resigned as a partner of the American bank. Nonetheless, suspicions against Speyer's German parentage led to a hate campaign against him. Crowds gathered outside his home and jeered visitors. Accusations of disloyalty and treachery were made against him in the Press and he was accused of signalling to German submarines from his Norfolk house.

On 17 May 1915, Speyer wrote to Asquith, then Prime Minister, asking him to accept his resignation as a Privy Counsellor and to revoke his baronetcy stating:

"Nothing is harder to bear than a sense of injustice that finds no vent in expression.

For the last nine months I have kept silence and treated with disdain the charges of disloyalty and suggestions of treachery made against me in the Press and elsewhere. But I can keep silence no longer, for these charges and suggestion have now been repeated by public men who have not scrupled to use their position to inflame the overstrained feelings of the people.

I am not a man who can be driven or drummed by threats or abuse into an attitude of justification. But I consider it due to my honour as a loyal British subject and my personal dignity as a man to retire all my public positions.

I therefore write to ask you to accept my resignation as a Privy Councillor and to revoke my baronetcy."

He resigned as chairman of the UERL and from the boards of the King Edward's Hospital Fund, the Poplar Hospital and the Whitechapel Art Gallery .

It is doubtful whether it was possible for Speyer to resign from the Privy Council or as a baronet, there being no normal mechanism to do so, but the Prime Minister's response was supportive: "I have known you long, and well enough to estimate at their true value these baseless and malignant imputations upon your loyalty to the British Crown. The King is not prepared to take any step such as you suggest in regard to the marks of distinction which you have received in recognition of public services and philanthropic munificence." On 26 May 1915, Speyer and his family left for America.

In June 1915, Sir George Makgill, Secretary of the Anti-German Union applied for permission from the High Court to issue quo warranto writs against Speyer and Sir Ernest Cassel, another German born Privy Counsellor, requiring them to prove their right to hold that position. Makgill's claim was that the Act of Settlement 1701 prevented a person born outside Britain or its dominions from being a Privy Counsellor. In December 1915, Lord Chief Justice Lord Reading, rejected the application on the grounds that the parts of the Act of Settlement that prohibited this had been repealed by later legislation.

Revocation of naturalisation

On 2 August 1918, in a House of Lords debate on the Denaturalisation Bill, the subject of Speyer's membership of the Privy Council was brought up by Lord Lincolnshire, who condemned "the brutal and insolent German manner in which Sir Edgar Speyer had resigned his dignity". Lord Curzon announced that the Home Office was examining his membership of the council. Speyer again offered the Prime Minister, then David Lloyd George, his resignation from the council, although no response was made.

Following an investigation into Speyer's wartime conduct held in camera by the Home Office's Certificates of Naturalisation (Revocation) Committee, Speyer's naturalisation was revoked by an order dated 1 December 1921. On 13 December 1921 an order was issued by King George V for Speyer to be struck off the list of the Privy Council. He is the last person to receive this punishment, although others have resigned from the Privy Council since.

The committee's decision was that Speyer had "shown himself by act and speech to be disaffected and disloyal to His Majesty; and [had]... unlawfully communicated with subjects of an enemy State and associated with a business which was to his knowledge carried on in such manner as to assist the enemy in such war." The committee's final opinion was "that the continuance of Sir Edgar Speyer's certificate is not conducive to the public good." By this revocation, Lady Speyer and the couple's children also lost their British citizenship.

The report of the committee was published on 7 January 1922. The committee had considered nine issues in making its decision:

1. Retirement from Speyer & Co. – it was decided that Speyer had been slow and reluctant to resign as a partner of the American bank where he was still in partnership with his German brother-in-law, Edward Beit von Speyer.
2. Association with enemy traffic – Speyer Brothers had continued to trade jointly with a Dutch firm, Teixeira de Mattos Brothers, between February and June 1915. As a firm of a neutral country, Teixeira, continued to trade with German businesses. The committee calculated that Speyer Brothers had made £1,000 by these trades, despite the company's accounts showing no trade with Germany when they were inspected. It concluded that "Sir Edgar Speyer seems to have preferred his private financial interests to the prompt discharge of his duty to the State."
3. Communication with enemy subjects – Speyer had continued to correspond with his German brother-in-law throughout the war.
4. Evasion of the censorship – in his correspondence with his brother-in-law, Speyer had used various means including aliases and intermediaries to avoid the censor inspecting his letters.
5. Proposed return to Berlin – the contents of intercepted letters from Edward Beit von Speyer suggested that Speyer had proposed living in Germany after the war. Speyer denied this and claimed that the meaning of the letters had been misconstrued in the absence of his side of the correspondence being before the committee.
6. Association with Muck – when living in America, Speyer had become friendly with Karl Muck the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who was strongly pro-German even after the United States entered the war. Muck was suspected of being a German agent although this was not known by Speyer and Speyer claimed that their friendship was on the basis of their shared love of music.
7. Association with Koren – in America, Speyer was friendly with John Koren an American statistician who represented the United States on the International Prisons Commission. In 1916, Speyer had funded a fact-finding trip by Koren to Europe during which Koren visited Germany and met Speyer's sister and friends. Although the committee considered the trip strange, they drew no inference of disloyalty from the events.
8. The Boston Journal – in April 1917 on the advice of John Koren, Speyer had provided a loan to The Boston Journal newspaper to prevent it from going out of business. The newspaper had printed some articles of a pro-German nature and the committee thought it imprudent but not disloyal of Speyer to have lent the money.
9. Paying money to enemy subjects – friends of Speyer had made claims at the Frankfurt bank for payment of sums due to them that had been in the hands of Speyer in London. Speyer had authorised the payments although this was not correct under the regulations. The committee commented that in similar circumstances it had shown leniency to others doing the same thing and would not have attached great importance to the matter if it had stood alone.

On 7 January 1922, Speyer's partners published a letter supporting Speyer and rejecting the implications of his correspondence with his German relatives, stating that he was "incapable of any act of treachery against the country of his adoption". Two days later, Speyer also issued a statement responding to the report and rebutting the committee's interpretation of the facts. He claimed that he had been advised of the committee's investigation in 1919 and, after considerable delay by the Home Office, had persuaded it to carry out an investigation in America into allegations made against his conduct there. These investigations, he claimed, had demonstrated that the allegations were false, but, after he returned to Britain for the formal hearing in 1921, a further series of allegations were presented regarding his business transactions. Speyer claimed that the issues involved were of a trivial nature and were similar to those encountered by other British banks which had traded without censure. He claimed that "the whole thing is neither more nor less than the culmination of years of political persecution. The Home Secretary simply dared not give me the vindication to which I was entitled." He challenged the government to publish the evidence examined and "to point to a strip of material evidence that would induce any fairminded main to support the monstrous conclusions of this report."

Final years

In January 1920, Speyer Brothers sold its shareholding in the UERL for approximately £1 million. A month later, Speyer put the Grosvenor Street house up for sale although it did not reach its reserve price at auction. On 1 April 1922, Speyer and his remaining partner in the London bank dissolved Speyer Brothers. The Grosvenor Street house was eventually sold in early 1923 and became the American Women's club. Speyer rejoined the surviving American and German branches of the family bank and continued to live in New York. In 1929, he lived in Washington Square. He died on 16 February 1932 in Berlin having travelled there for an operation on his nose. He had continued to hold his baronetcy, although it became extinct with his death as he had no male heirs.

After his death, Speyer's UK estate was assessed at £3,362 19s 1d and his US estate at $245,287, approximately £290,000 and $5.59 million today.

Legacy

Speyer's two principal legacies are the three deep level tube lines of the London Underground, and the Promenade Concerts. The former may not have been built without the finance he raised with Yerkes, and would have struggled without his chairmanship. The latter may have failed in the early 20th century without his financial support.

After the American Women's club moved out, his London home served as the Japanese Embassy for some years and is now the offices of stockbrokers Killik and Co. The Norfolk house was sold after his death and became a hotel.

Sir Edgar and Lady Leonora were the basis of the characters Sir Hermann and Lady Aline Gurtner in E F Benson's 1919 novel Robin Linnet.

References

• Adams, Byron (2007). Edward Elgar and His World. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-69113-446-4.
• Badsey-Ellis, Antony. London's Lost Tube Schemes. Capital Transport. ISBN 1-85414-293-3.
• Barker, Theo (2004). "Speyer, Sir Edgar, baronet (1862–1932)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36215. Retrieved 2008-09-05.
• Bird, John. Percy Grainger. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-816652-4.
• Friedenwald, Herbert (ed.). The American Jewish Yearbook (PDF). The Jewish Publication Society of America. Retrieved 2008-11-29. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
• Huxley, Leonard (ed.). Scott's Last Expedition, Vol II. Smith, Elder & Co. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
• Klein, Maury (2003). Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19515-801-6. Retrieved 2008-09-05.
• Northtrop Moore, Jerrold. Edward Elgar. A Creative Life. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19315-447-1.
• Rintoul, M. C. (1993). Dictionary of Real People and Places in Fiction. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0-41505-999-2. Retrieved 2008-09-05.
• Sheppard, F. H. W. (1980). Grosvenor Street: South Side, Survey of London: volume 40: The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2 (The Buildings). English Heritage. Retrieved 2008-09-05.
• Turley, Charles. The Voyages of Captain Scott. Smith, Elder & Co.
• Turner, P. M. (1904). "The House and Collection of Mr. Edgar Speyer". The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs. 5 (18). London: The Burlington Magazine Publications Limited: pp. 544–555. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Wolmar, Christian. The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever. Atlantic Books. ISBN 1-84354-023-1.

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