hanged at Pentonville prison 3 August 1916. He had been previously received into the Church of Rome. His knighthood had been annulled on 30 June, and his name taken off the companionage. His acceptance of these honours is difficult to reconcile with the limitations to his allegiance; but, when they were bestowed, all the world thought them richly earned. And those who knew Roger Casement knew him to be honourable and chivalrous as well as able far beyond the ordinary measure of men.
[Parliamentary Papers, vol. lxii, 357 (Congo), 1904, and vol. lxviii, 819 (Putumayo), 1912-1913; P. S. O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, 1924; Evelyn, Princess Blücher, An English Wife in Berlin, 1920; L. G. Redmond Howard, Sir Roger Casement, 1916; private information; personal knowledge.]
CASSEL, Sir ERNEST JOSEPH (1852-1921), financier and philanthropist, born at Cologne 3 March 1852, was of Jewish descent, the youngest of the three children of Jacob Cassel (died 1875) by his wife, Amalia Rosenheim (died 1874). Jacob Cassel had a small banking business in Cologne which yielded a moderate competence. His elder son Max (born 1848) died in 1875. Ernest was educated in Cologne for a business career. He left school at fourteen to start work with the banking firm of Eltzbacher; but in January 1869 he went to Liverpool and entered the office of Blessig, Braun, & Co. Here he remained till April 1870, when he obtained a clerkship in the Anglo-Egyptian Bank at Paris. On the outbreak of the Franco-German War he was obliged, being a German subject, to leave Paris. He returned to England with an introduction to the financial house of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt (in London), which was interested in the Franco-Egyptian Bank.
In the service of this house the foundations of Cassel’s immense fortune were laid with amazing rapidity. Engaged at a salary of £200, he soon gave such evidence of a remarkable aptitude for finance that he obtained early promotion. In 1874, at the age of twenty-two, he was appointed manager at £5,000 a year. The firm, in conjunction with various foreign associates, had incurred heavy commitments in America and elsewhere, out of which had arisen at this period certain claims and lawsuits. Cassel was entrusted with the negotiations for settlement, and it was arranged that he should participate in the amounts recovered. His success in this work, and notably in the disentanglement of the affairs of the New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio Railway, resulted in substantial additions to his emoluments. Moreover, in the course of his visits to New York, he formed an intimate friendship with Jacob H. Schiff, of the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb, & Co., through whom he became profitably interested on his own account in other American enterprises.
Thus Cassel was already in flourishing circumstances in 1878, when he married Annette, daughter of Robert Thompson Maxwell, of Croft House, Croft, Darlington. On the day of his marriage he became a British subject by legal naturalization. A happy married life was cut short by the early death of Mrs. Cassel three years later. She was a convert to the Church of Rome; and, by her dying wish, Cassel himself was soon afterwards received into the Church of Rome, though the fact was not generally known till his own death. Their only daughter married in 1901 Lieutenant-Colonel Wilfrid W. Ashley; she died in 1911.
By the time of his wife’s death Cassel had already accumulated a capital of £150,000; and in the next fifteen years the increasing magnitude of his operations made him one of the wealthiest and most powerful financiers in the city of London, where his high reputation for integrity and sureness of judgement, particularly in the placing of foreign issues, inspired the utmost confidence. He remained associated with the Bischoffsheim firm, though he was never made a partner, till 1884; and even then, though he began to undertake business independently, he continued to occupy part of their office in Throgmorton Street. It was not till 1898 that he took premises of his own at 21 Old Broad Street. These were his business head-quarters until the end of 1910, when he retired from active work in the City; he then purchased 51 Green Street, Grosvenor Square, from which address his affairs were subsequently administered.
While still with the Bischoffsheim firm Cassel showed great far-sightedness in connexion with what appeared to be a losing venture which the firm had made in financing the Swedish Central Railway in the early ’seventies. This railway connected the port of Oxelösund with the phosphoric iron-ore mines of the Grängesberg district. The working of these mines proved unremunerative; and Cassel realized that the success of the railway depended on its obtaining a larger revenue from the conveyance of iron ore. When
97
