Sassoon

"Her French chef created an opulent cuisine which few gastronomes could resist. They could expect pate-stuffed quails, terrines of turtle, ortolans, wood strawberries from France and the first Tay salmon. Rare eastern fruits became as familiar a Sassoon hallmark as their coffee cake, soaked in cognac and servedflambe with ice-cream and hot stewed cherries. It was a gastronomic riposte to the Rothschilds' celebrated chocolate gateau."

"There was no falling off in personal initiative after their father's death; quite the reverse. His counsel would be missed, but they could at last speak their minds, liberated from a sense of being pieces on a chessboard. Each son now had the stimulus of a solid personal holding in the business. Apart from estate in England valued at £160,000, their father had left 'upwards of two million sterling', according to the vague Press announcement. No precise figure was ever published, but it was generally assumed in Bombay that he had been worth over five million pounds."

"More often he devoted his early evenings to talmudic study, receiving visitors and writing letters. Pleas for business advice, dowries, spiritual guidance and endowments came from the Gulf, the Holy Land, China, Japan and even beyond. A small community in New South Wales - one time refugees from Baghdad - might need prayer-books; the congregation in Tientsin required funds to open a new school; and from a dozen rabbis came desperate appeals for Sassoon, descendant of Princes of the Exilarch, to defend his brethren against some local oppressor. He weighed evidence, sifted genuine penury from professional begging letters, and poured out advice, together with his many lakhs of rupees. Every letter was answered in his own firm hand. Visitors who came from afar were given food hampers and clothing for their homeward journey, apart from the inevitable donations. Many stayed. From Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus he brought over and resettled entire families. Most had to be fed, housed and given medical care. In his last years, no Jewish beggar would ever be seen in the streets of Bombay."

"After only ten years of independent trading, Elias and his sons felt equipped, both psychologically and financially, to give a lead to the more complacent parent firm. Cotton manufacture was an obvious outlet, but Sassoon caution made Elias hesitate until a Parsee had again shown the way. J. N. Tata recovered from his misadventures with Premchand Roychand and indirectly profited by his experiences in the false boom. During the ill-starred attempt to open an Indian Bank in England, he hurried to Lancashire to develop the brokerage side of their business. He interested himself in machinery and the workings of the Manchester Cotton Exchange. On his return, he thought much about the possibilities of manufacturing cotton locally instead of relying on Lancashire's piecegoods. Fourteen mills were now operating in Bombay with about half a million spindles, but many more had closed down through lack of money or bad management. To rebuild his capital Tata had first gone to Hong Kong, exchanging silk goods for the opium his brother shipped out from Bombay. Profits were satisfactory, but he saw little chance of breaking either the Sassoons' hold on this two-way traffic or the handsome rebates and discounts which they and others enjoyed in the freight market. He returned to India in 1869, investing his limited funds in a disused oil-pressing plant which he rapidly converted into a small cotton mill. The output was insignificant and not of good quality, but he familiarized himself with machinery and day-to-day administration. He recovered his whole outlay in two years and sold the plant at a respectable profit."

"A waiting game now opened. It demanded a sense of timing as well as tactical subtlety. The rival Sassoon firms would continue to watch each other, both vigilant for any sign that Tata would either crash or survive. Judging from the first two or three years at the Empress Mills, Sir Albert was being proved right. The stocky Parsee had made the beginner's error of buying inferior looms. His cloth was poor in quality, with production figures even lower than those of his Bombay competitors. His Company stock slumped to half its issue value, and several shareholders started to panic. He hurried back to Lancashire and sank most of his remaining cash in better and more up-to-date plant, scrapping the old machinery. Within a very short time, his bales became saleable and output shot up. He could soon pay stockholders a 16 per cent dividend, but continued to plough every spare rupee back into the business. E. D. Sassoon & Co. had now learned enough. They quickly bought land for factory sites and began looking around for any badly-run mills which might be taken over at cost or even below and put on a paying basis. Their branches had long handled Lancashire piece-goods and would find it comparatively simple to distribute cloth manufactured in Bombay. Tata lacked capital and was buried in the interior, while they had superior shipping facilities as well as warehouses ideally sited on Bombay's splendid harbour and docks. Moreover, immigrant Jews from Baghdad would make a reliable home-based labour force, far less prone to absenteeism than the migrants of Nagpur."

"Production remained a key problem in all the Sassoon mills. The manufacturing boom had stimulated such a demand that it was not always practical to wait for new factories to be built and equipped. Semi-derelict businesses - one of them had been wound up four times in the past twenty years - were therefore bought up cheaply. Ancient plant operated by steam engines and wheezy boilers was scrapped, and the latest machinery imported from England at whatever the cost. Efficient planning by Manchester experts was backed by dedicated Jewish overseers who gradually overcame the endless frictions and chaos of the old Managing Agency system. Working on similar and parallel lines, the two Sassoon firms soon went ahead of all their rivals, including Tata himself, who might have given them much severer competition had he not turned his attention to the richer fields of iron and steel. Even so, his early supporters had no cause to complain. The original £50 Empress Mill shares would be worth £700 by 1914!"