De Stein, Sir Edward Sinauer

(1887-1965)

   Born in London, the son of Baroness Clara de Stein, and Sigmund Sinauer, who took his wife's name. After Eton College, and Magdalen College, Oxford, he became a lawyer. During World War I he served as an officer in the King's Royal Rifle Corps, then formed the De Stein merchant bank. During World War II he was director of finance at the Ministry of Supply, for which he was knighted in 1946. He was a philanthropist and founded and fully endowed a boys' club near Shepherd's Bush. He bought Lindisfarne Castle on Holy Island, where he acted as a philanthropist to the islanders and gave the castle to the National Trust. He was chairman of the British Red Cross finance committee from 1949 to 1963. He created a remarkable water-garden at his fishing cottage at Fulling Mills near Easton on the River Itchen, Hampshire, where he died. He left a large sum to form the Easton Trust to found hostels where boys from schools for the maladjusted could be helped to enter normal life. Two of his poems: "Chloe," "Elegy on the Death of Bingo Our Trench Dog."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Never Such Innocence: A New Antholog y of Great War Verse. Martin Stephen, ed. Buchan and Enright, 1988. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org).