The Life and Death of a “Colonel Blimp”

His romantic disposition made him very vulnerable. In 1917, it might have helped to explain the valour that won him the Military Cross. But in 1950, it landed him in the bankruptcy court. The rather portly figure who turned up to his hearing over-dressed on a hot summer’s day was a source of much amusement for a while in the newspapers, but he would soon be forgotten.

The cause of his ruin was the oldest in history. In 1948, Major Arthur Meyer Sasson, M.C., O.B.E., married a young actress, who had once been a stand-in for Vivien Leigh. Although the Major belonged to the wealthy Sassoon family, the “Rothschilds of the East”, his wife’s taste for furs and jewellery far exceeded even his ability to meet their cost. It was inevitable that he would wind up – and be wound up – in the bankruptcy court.

The newspapers reported the details of the Official Receiver’s examination, which revealed a staggering scale of expenditure. Although the Major’s financial affairs were already in a desperate position, in December 1949 he bought jewellery to the value of £5,540 on credit (about £240,000 in today’s money). “What did you do with that?” the receiver asked. “I gave it to my wife.” “She had had £19,000 before from you?” “Yes.” “But she still wanted more?” “She always wanted more.”

Eventually, the Major was driven to the lunacy of pawning gems that hadn’t yet been paid for. His wife then became so cross that she refused to give back any valuables that might have kept him from insolvency. When the receiver suggested that the Major had allowed her to twist him round her little finger, his lawyer cut in on his behalf, saying that such a question was “embarrassing and difficult to answer”.

The Daily Express published an interview with the wife, Mrs Yvonne Sassoon, who had appeared in films under the name of Yvonne Murray. She claimed that they had not lived lavishly and seldom held parties. Describing the jewellery she wore during the interview, the newspaper wrote: “On one finger was a huge gold and sapphire cocktail ring, on her right wrist was an inch-wide gold, heavily linked bracelet. Her left wrist held a watch set in a gold-linked bracelet, and her brushed back curls showed diamond and sapphire floral ear-clips.”

But it was the receiver who was left to have the last word when he admonished the Major: “With regard to the gifts to your wife, you should have remembered the truism that liberality, unless tempered with moderation, leads to ruin. It has led you here.”

Outside the court, the Major put on a brave face for the reporters. He would start again, he told them. “I have plenty of plans, but they are in my nut and are staying there. I am giving nothing away.” But he had already given everything away.

At this low point in his life I couldn’t help wondering whether the Major might have thought back to before the Great War when he was a young man, starting out for the first time. In the movie of his life this would be the moment for a flashback, returning him to his past glory.

Forty years ago, in 1910, Major Arthur Meyer Sassoon was a fellow of enterprise. He was a young 2nd lieutenant, only twenty-one years old, who had just received his commission as a cavalry officer in the 13th Hussars. The regiment was in India when the Great War began. With their 560 horses, they sailed for France in November 1914, landing at Marseilles the following month, only a little too late to count among the Old Contemptibles.

They found a hellish landscape that was impossible for cavalry. The battlefield had already been cut up into endless trenches that stretched all the way from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. They spent a year and a half in billets north-west of Arras, periodically taking their turn to hold the line, until in June 1916, only a few days before the Battle of the Somme, they were posted to Mesopotamia.

Taking part in the campaign to capture Baghdad, on 5 March 1917 they suffered heavy casualties in a cavalry charge against Ottoman forces that blocked their advance. About half of the officers and men who made the charge were either killed or wounded. But a few days later, on 11 March, when the city was taken, the 13th Hussars was the first cavalry regiment to enter Baghdad.

As the Major looked around the town, I wonder if he was aware that it was a place from which nearly a century before his family had been driven out by anti-semitic persecution. The engaving on the hilt of his cavalry sword suggests that he had an inkling.

A year later, on 6 May, the 13th Hussars took on Ottoman forces outside Kirkuk. “After sending out patrols, who were met by a very heavy fire, we galloped forward and dismounted for action against the enemy holding the trenches,” reported the regimental history. “Finding the enemy so strongly entrenched, we were unable to advance, but hotly engaged them until dusk.” It was on this day that Arthur Sassoon, now a captain, was cited for the gallantry in action that won him the Military Cross – although it wasn’t the only time that he would be mentioned in despatches.

A man of his time, the Major was a passionate believer in the values of the British Empire as a force for good in the world. Between the wars, he campaigned for the British Legion. When he expressed the hope in one 1930s speech that the Legion – with its mission to remember the war dead and look after the survivors – would “last as long as the British Empire”, he could not have known that actually it would last much longer.

Although he had left the army, the Major was still galloping along in the 1930s. And it was with the confidence of a former cavalry officer that he galloped into the pages of British cinema history. With his friend Lieutenant-Colonel Crossfield, who had been chairman of the British Legion, in 1937 he founded the independent film company, Two Cities.

The two cities concerned were London and Rome. The declared goal was to make English-language films in partnership with an Italian company, Imperial Films, which was based in Rome. Perhaps what was most striking about the venture was its idealism. “I am interested in the project largely because it is my view that the more contacts we make with people of other countries, the better we shall be able to understand them,” commented Colonel Crossfield. “We simply ask ourselves how we can best work with the peoples of other countries, for all ex-servicemen have had the same experience and none of them wants another war.”

Whatever their feelings of disappointment when war finally broke out, the two old soldiers quickly began to pursue a new resolve. Two Cities had been born amid a desire to foster peace, but now, with the Major acting as its chairman and managing director, it threw itself into making propaganda films to support the British war effort. First there was Freedom Radio, the story of an anti-Nazi radio station in Vienna; then Unpublished Story, about two journalists in Blitzed London who expose a Nazi spy ring. But the biggest venture of all was Noël Coward’s production In Which We Serve.

To get it off the ground, the Major gave a personal guarantee of £200,000 to secure the financing of what was then the most expensive film ever to be made in Britain. A celebrated wartime morale-booster, it launched the directorial career of one of Britain’s great film-makers, David Lean. It also made some money. But money had always flowed through the Major’s life like water. What mattered most to him, I think, was to live up to the title of the film. He would have taken the “We” very seriously.

In Which We Serve was an obvious high point in a life that had blithely ignored the official receiver’s “truism” about moderation. Two Cities went on to invest in ever more ambitious movies with a liberality that knew no bounds until, in 1945, to complete a big Technicolor production of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V – far more expensive than In Which We Serve – the company was forced to sell out to the Rank Organisation.

It was not the first time that the Major had fallen off his horse. The year before he had been divorced from his first wife, Doris. She was the daughter of Elias Meyer, an immensely wealthy businessman. Although I don’t know exactly what caused the break-up, it certainly can’t have helped that the Major had used his wife’s fortune to help fund Two Cities films.

If a few years later marrying a beautiful young actress twenty-five years his junior seemed a fine way to get back into the saddle, now – fully into his “Blimp” years – he quickly realized the error of his ways once the bills started rolling in.

Whatever brilliant plans the Major had for a comeback stayed in his nut. The last mention I could find of him was a 1956 story in the Daily Herald under the headline “Mystery of the ‘vanished’ major”. After his bankruptcy was annulled in 1955, his wife petitioned for divorce and was granted a decree nisi. Although she claimed that she had been unable to trace him, his cousin, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, told the paper that he had heard that the Major was living in the South of France. “He’s an awfully decent fellow,” he added. “Don’t persecute the poor chap.” When the newspaper spoke to the Major’s brother, he confirmed that the family knew where he was, but would not reveal the location, saying only that he was “living in retirement”.

Why did the family go to such lengths to spirit him away? Probably, I suppose, because they were worried about those two things that most of us worry about whether we’re rich or poor: money and love. For one thing was clear: he  still loved her. And would do so till the floods came.

Eventually, through the easy armchair research that our online age makes possible,  I discovered that this real-life Colonel Blimp had died in Monaco in 1977. I would have preferred not to know, really. For old soldiers should never die, but just fade away.