Biography
Born in Cologne, Germany, Cassel's family were Jewish. His father Jacob Cassel owned a small bank, but the son Ernest arrived penniless in Liverpool, England in 1869. There he found employment with a firm of grain merchants. With an enormous capacity for hard work and a natural business sense, Cassel was soon in Paris working for a bank. The Franco-Prussian War forced him to move to a position in a London bank, as he was born in Prussia.
He prospered and was soon putting together his own financial deals. His areas of interest were in mining, infrastructure and heavy industry. Turkey was an early area of business ventures, but he soon had large interests in Sweden, the United States, South America, South Africa, and Egypt.
One of the wealthiest men of his day, Cassel was a good friend of King Edward VII, prime minister Herbert Asquith and Winston Churchill. In 1878, he married Annette Mary Maud Maxwell at Westminster. Their only child, Amalia Mary Maud Cassel (1879–1911), married Wilfrid Ashley, 1st Baron Mount Temple.
Cassell became a Roman Catholic at the behest of his wife, but many still considered him a Jew. The establishment was surprised to find out that he had converted when he chose to be sworn in to the Privy Council with the Catholic Bible.
Cassel retired from active financial operations in 1910. His philanthropic benefactions included £500,000 for educational purposes, £225,000 for a hospital for nervous diseases, £50,000 to King Edward's Hospital Fund in memory of his only child, besides large gifts during the First World War to the British Red Cross. He also built and endowed an Anglo-German Institute in 1911 in memory of King Edward VII. He owned a castle in Switzerland, Riederfurka, to which it was possible to arrive on the back of a mule. When the inhabitants of the town nearby said they were going to make a better road to his property, he answered: "If you do, I'm not coming here anymore." Felix Somary, who tells this anecdote in his autobiography, visited him there in 1914 to persuade him that war was inevitable.
Cassel had a famous art collection and many beautiful houses. He bred racehorses and owned Moulton Paddocks in Newmarket. After the early death of his wife Annette, his widowed sister Wilhemina (known as Bobbie) helped each other bring up his daughter and her son and daughter. His only child, Maude, also died as a young woman, leaving him two granddaughters on whom he doted, especially the eldest, Edwina, who looked after him in his old age. She later married Lord Louis Mountbatten.
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