Sassoon was born in a house named Weirleigh (which still stands) in the village of Matfield, Kent, to a Jewish father and a Protestant English mother. His father, Alfred, one of the wealthy Indian Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family, was disinherited for marrying outside the faith. His mother, Theresa, belonged to the Thornycroft family, sculptors responsible for many of the best-known statues in London—her brother was Sir Hamo Thornycroft. There was no German ancestry in Sassoon's family; he owed his unusual first name to his mother's predilection for the operas of Wagner.

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