The extraordinary life of the eccentric millionaire magician who gave Newstead Abbey to Nottingham

Newstead Abbey is one of Nottinghamshire’s most renowned ancient buildings, and a magnetic draw for tourists from far beyond our county.

But the story of the abbey’s eccentric former owner, the man who gifted us all the unique site and may well have saved it from ruin, is far less well known.

When Sir Julien Cahn bought Newstead in 1931, he was at the peak of a magnificent and magnanimous career.

At the age of 49 the son of Jewish German emigres fleeing persecution in Europe had achieved more than most people could in five lifetimes. 

He had excelled in business, built links all the way to the top of British society, been knighted, donated vast sums of money to philanthropic causes, and fostered a remarkable number of quirky hobbies and passions.

Much of what we know about Cahn is thanks to his granddaughter, Miranda Rijks, who in 2010 published a biography of his life called The Eccentric Entrepreneur.

She says: “He was a genuinely good man and was in a privileged position to give to causes that were close to him and close to the people he respected.

“He very much loved Nottingham. It was the centre of his universe.”

“He had a number of passions, the first one being cricket. And he was very passionate about music, he was a passionate early videographer, he was a magician.

“He was very learned, he studied all the religions and rejected them all. He left money to The Humanist Society.”

It depends which world you are in, which Cahn you might know. 

As a rare Jewish member of high society, Sir Julien, the baronet, was on close terms with interwar cultural and political elites including Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, even becoming embroiled in one of the most sensational scandals of the 1920s.

Rijks says that “without doubt” Cahn’s status as a Jewish refugee was behind both his generosity - a thankfulness for the haven Britain had provided - and his ambitions to climb the ladder of society, as a means of protecting him and his family from the antisemitism that was still rife in Europe.

“It was deep in his psyche,” she says. “He was very grateful to the UK for accepting us as refugees. “He was very keen to be accepted in high society.”

Yet the world of cricket knows a very different man - an eccentric if erratic player, millionaire financial backer and Nottinghamshire Cricket Club President whose Jewishness was even less heard of in that field than it was within the aristocracy.

The team he personally created, paid for, and played in - the Sir Julien Cahn Cricket XI - has been described as the “finest private cricket team ever assembled”, and toured the world, routing professional teams from the West Indies to Sri Lanka.

And if you had lived in his time, you might also have known Julien Cahn the brilliant, mysterious magician, who dazzled audiences at the theatre he had built on his grand Stanford Hall estate.

(He didn’t charge a penny to come and watch the magic shows he put on, or the cricket matches he organised, because he wanted the public to enjoy them).

Cahn’s wealth and success as a Nottingham businessman, in the booming furniture trade, was matched by his generosity as a supporter of needful causes.

As a forward-thinker in a time when childbirth was still perilous for mother and child, he funded the building of the specialist Lucy Baldwin Maternity Hospital in Worcestershire, and established the National Birthday Fund to campaign for improvements in midwifery services.

He provided for and maintained a convalescent home for children on Waverley Street, which was opened in 1933 by the Lord Mayor of Nottingham.

When the Second World War broke out he allowed the Nottingham City Hospital to use his grand and expansive Stanford Hall as a shelter for wounded soldiers returning from battle. 

He sponsored a series of major concerts at the Albert Hall in Nottingham, which attracted some of the era’s top musicians.

And, of course, there is a yet longer lasting legacy to the city - the ancient Newstead estate, ancestral home of the poet Lord Byron. 

Long after the Byrons had left the Newstead, crippled by the costs and debts of managing it, Cahn bought the whole estate which in 1931 he immediately donated to the Nottingham Corporation. 

And there it still stands, where it might have long crumbled into the ground.

“He never wanted Newstead Abbey for himself,” says Rijks. “It was always for the people of Nottingham.”

But you don’t have to travel out to Newstead to see monuments to Cahn’s benevolence, and love for Nottingham. 

Within the Council House in the Old Market Square there is a statue of a woman dressed in Nottingham Lace, known as the Spirit of Welcome, which Cahn donated to the city - there is even a rumour that his dear wife Phyllis modelled for it. 

Yet there is an even more extraordinary theory, which Rijks has researched, that Cahn provided the funds to build the famous Portland stone lions in guarding the entrance to the Council House, by which so many meetings have been made over the decades.

And there is a fitting, contemporary epilogue to the Julien Cahn story, going on in the Nottinghamshire house he bought and treasured, and where he died suddenly 1944. 

Cahn’s former home Stanford Hall has been chosen as the site of a new cutting-edge facility for treating soldiers suffering from life-changing battlefield casualties. 

That centre, The Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre (DNRC), is already in operation as a site for wounded military personnel, but next year after major works the facilities will be extended to treat patients on the NHS, in a groundbreaking new national initiative.

“We are absolutely thrilled that Stanford House has been turned into the DNRC,” says Rijks.

And so the philanthropic spirit of Sir Julien Cahn lives on in the place he called home, the county he loved, and the country he did so much to help.