In war and in peace the Rothschilds were bankers to governments and monarchs, underwriting the dreams and fears of European states. As the financiers of armies and industry, it was said that no one went to war or considered peace without first consulting the Rothschilds. During the Franco-Polish crisis of 1836, a Rothschild matriarch claimed, “There will be no war because my sons won’t provide the money for it.” It was not an idle boast: her offspring owned and controlled a multinational banking corporation that exercised unrivalled power over the international markets. Their empire spread from the oilfields of Baku to the railway network stretching from France to Belgium, and from Spain across Austria into Italy. From commodities to arbitrage, and from mines to commerce, the Rothschilds’ reach extended from South Africa to Burma and from Montana to the Caucasus and beyond.
Prosperous financial empires depend on stable political situations. While the family could influence the leaders of countries and their policies, even the Rothschilds lacked the power to hold a continent steady; the family watched in dismay as Europe drifted towards war.
Internally they faced an even greater problem: the lack of male heirs. The family business was founded and administered on the principle that only Rothschild men could inherit and run the business. It was a principle enshrined in his will by the founding father, Mayer Amschel, in 1812 and it is still upheld today.
My daughters and sons-in-law and their heirs have no share in the trading business existing under the firm of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and sons … and [it] belongs to my sons exclusively. None of my daughters, sons-in-law and their heirs is therefore entitled to demand sight of business transactions. I would never be able to forgive any of my children if contrary to these my paternal wishes it should be allowed to happen that my sons were upset in the peaceful possession and prosecution of their business interests.
Furthermore, if any of the partners were to die, their widows and their children had no automatic right of inheritance; ownership of shares reverted to the surviving fathers, brothers or sons. Daughters were expected to marry within the Jewish faith and possibly even within the family. James de Rothschild, a French cousin, writing to his brother in 1824 about his new wife who was also his niece Betty, said, “One’s wife … is an essential part of the furniture.”
Originally there had been five capable sons to run the five European branches but, over the final decades of the nineteenth century, fate and luck had denuded them; this dearth of men had led directly to the closure of the Frankfurt branch in 1901. The two heirs, Mayer Carl and Wilhelm Carl, had ten daughters between them but no male issue. The Naples branch closed in 1863 as Adolph Rothschild had also failed to produce a son to take over. By the turn of the century, the English branch was running dangerously low in Y chromosomes. Although few Rothschilds would admit it, their absolute reliance on males was as undermining to their business as were the vicissitudes of war and the vagaries of taxation.
So it was not surprising that, in December 1913, members of the family waited anxiously for news of the birth of a child to their cousin Charles and his wife Rozsika. It would be their fourth. The couple had already produced an heir, Victor, in 1910 but they needed a spare. So far they’d managed only girls: Miriam in 1908 and Liberty in 1909.
Men ran the banks. Women stayed within the family and ruled the homes. Waiting for the baby at Tring Park in Hertfordshire (as it was then) were the unborn baby’s grandparents, Nathan (Natty) and Emma. Both were born Rothschilds, married Rothschilds and produced Rothschilds. Natty Rothschild was the first non-Christian to take a seat in the House of Lords and the first to be invited to stay with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle (she instructed her chefs to serve him a special ham-less pie). He became head of the British branch of the Rothschild bank in 1879. An international financier, Natty made loans to the governments of America, Austria and Russia; funded Cecil Rhodes in South Africa and the De Beers diamond conglomerate; and put together the financing of the Suez Canal. Natty advised his own government through successive administrations: his closest association was with Disraeli; Randolph Churchill and Balfour depended on his counsel. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, Lloyd George called a meeting of leading bankers, businessmen and economists to discuss the financing of the war: although the future Prime Minister and the Jewish peer had had many disagreements in the past, Lloyd George remarked afterwards that “only the old Jew made any sense.” His business acumen was matched by a philanthropic zeal. Appalled by the pogroms in Russia, Natty refused a lucrative business deal with the Russian government on principle. He donated large amounts of money and campaigned for public support against the persecution of Jews in Romania, Morocco, Russia and elsewhere. In England, he rebuilt all the public housing around Tring, providing 400 new, modernised units, and created and chaired the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company, a combination of business and philanthropy to create 6,500 new homes. The problem for Natty’s offspring was that he was so capable, so demanding and so critical that it would have taken many ordinary sons to maintain his exacting standards. Instead, he had produced three children, and the two boys were not showing much promise. Seventy-three and in frail health, Natty, like the rest of the family, was looking with hope towards the next generation.
Walter Rothschild driving his team of zebras. Partly hidden from view is the fourth animal, a pony, essential to keep the untameable zebras on the road. (Photographic Credit 3.1)
Natty’s wife Emma was born in 1844 and would live to be ninety-one. Arriving from Frankfurt in 1867 to marry her cousin, Emma was told that a house had already been chosen for her, Tring Park, which lay in the Rothschild heartland of the Vale of Aylesbury. To make life easier, the family extended the local railway to its door. Emma saw the house for the first time on the day after her marriage, a typically generous if presumptuous gift.
Like many of the Rothschild women, Emma was indomitable and forthright. She thought nothing of summoning Prime Minister Disraeli to criticise his novels, telling him that while they were quite well written, he did not understand women. She spoke three languages, all with a slight German accent, and laughed differently in each. Perhaps her longevity was due to her taking vigorous daily exercise or her regular habit of having a cold bath every morning.
Charles’s brother Walter, Lord Rothschild—her eldest son, the heir—was also waiting. A child of delicate health, he was educated at home. He grew into a huge stuttering bear of a man, weighing more than twenty stone and, according to his nieces, he could keep the whole house awake with his snores. He never married although he did have two mistresses; one bore him an illegitimate daughter; the other blackmailed him for most of his life, threatening to tell his mother about their relationship. His two great loves were his mother Emma and animals, dead or alive. As Lord Rothschild, he was the recipient of the famous Balfour declaration, the letter written in 1917 by the British government, acknowledging that it viewed with favour the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. This letter paved the way for the creation of the State of Israel. But although he was interested in Judaism and Palestine to an extent, nothing really got in the way of Walter’s first passion, the study of animals and insects.
Walter had not inherited the family’s aptitude for making money. For years he had a desk at the bank but while he pretended to be working on financial matters he was actually using his personal inherited fortune to create the greatest collection of animals ever assembled by one man. These included over two million specimens of butterflies and moths, 144 giant tortoises, 200,000 birds’ eggs, 300,000 bird skins and other rare and fabulous specimens, ranging from starfish to giraffes, which today form an important part of the collections of the natural history museums in London and those in the United States. What made his collection so extraordinary was not just its size and reach but the meticulous way it was catalogued. Every tiny creature was labelled, logged and cross-referenced.
Walter employed agents the world over to forage and gath
er on his behalf. There was, for example, Meek, who looked for birds in the Louisiade Archipelago and in Queensland; Captain Gifford on the Gold Coast; Dr. Doherty in the Sula Islands; Mr. Everett in Timor; two Japanese men in Guam; and Mr. Waterstrade in Lirung. These were only a few of the bird seekers. What he couldn’t catch, he bought. A compulsive shopper, Walter combed auction rooms and private sales for treasures to augment his collection. Among the animals named in Walter’s honour are a giraffe, an elephant, a porcupine, a rock wallaby, a hare, a fish, a lizard, a cassowary, a rhea, a bird of paradise, a Galapagos finch and an improbable fly species, the females of which have eyes on the end of large stalks. Walter, in turn, named some of his discoveries after people he admired, including Queen Victoria and Princess Alexandra, whom he visited at Buckingham Palace in his zebra-drawn carriage.
He built a private museum at Tring Park to house his collection. During wet weather his nieces and nephew played hide-and-seek among the racks of stuffed creatures. I also went there as a child and have since taken my own daughters on visits to wonder at it all. On special occasions we go behind the scenes, into the vaults that hold the birds’ eggs and even the bird skins, including those found by Darwin on his voyage on the Beagle. In one case there is a skeleton of the now extinct dodo and in another a pair of fully dressed fleas, once performers in a Mexican circus.
Looking at the huge collection amassed by Walter in his museum and by other relations in their houses, I wondered where this impulse to acquire comes from and why so many members of my family seem to share it. Part of it is a form of hoarding, one-upmanship and conspicuous display. But concurrent with this ostentation is the collector’s desire to create a perfect, ordered world over which they have some control, a sense of power and security; perhaps at the heart of collecting is the simple need to create external order out of internal chaos.
Walter, like everyone else, longed for his brother and sister-in-law to produce another son. He knew that he had failed to live up to the family’s expectations, and that his financial incompetence had dashed so many dreams.
Charles—the father in waiting—was an extremely handsome man with a delicate mental constitution. He had from an early age been susceptible to mood disorders. Charles also loved animals but his misfortune was to be just good enough at banking. Had he, like Walter, been allowed to indulge solely in a manic passion for naturalism, Charles’s life might have turned out differently. Instead, all the expectations of his father and relations were projected onto him, an intolerable weight for any person.
Sent to prep school at age eight, Charles wrote pathetically to his mother that he loved home “10,000,000,000,000 times better than anything.” The hint of homesickness was not taken and, aged thirteen, Charles was sent from prep school to Harrow, where his fellow pupils included future dukes, generals, bishops and politicians such as Winston Churchill. It was hoped that introducing Charles early on to England’s movers and shakers would enhance his professional life. Later he wrote, “If I ever have a son, he will be instructed in boxing and jiu-jitsu before he enters school, as ‘Jew hunts’ such as I experienced are a very one-sided amusement and there is apt to be a lack of sympathy between the hunters and the hunted.” While at Harrow, Charles was regularly released like a fox and told to run for his life while his fellow students, baying like hounds, tried to catch him. Once tracked down, he was beaten till he bled. The teachers turned a blind eye. The hunters didn’t record their memories but a fellow pupil, the historian George Trevelyan, confirmed his friend’s intense unhappiness and his lasting memory was of Charles mounting small animal skins or setting butterflies.
I imagine poor Charles hunched over his collection of Swallowtail butterflies, piercing them with a sharp pin, rubbing formaldehyde down their delicate bodies and then carefully, in his precise hand, writing their details on a tiny card. He bequeathed these butterflies to the school in the hope that other young men would find comfort in their study. The Jew hunts partially explain why Charles refused to send his daughters away to school but does not answer why he decided to send his son, my grandfather Victor, to Harrow, his hated alma mater. Perhaps he thought his butterflies would protect him.
Recently, Harrow decided to auction off this legacy and just before the hammer came down, I went there to see Charles’s collection. In a damp basement under the science lab, behind a pile of old computers, broken lights and other educational detritus, I found Charles’s butterflies, a lepidopterist’s dream: the most complete collection of Swallowtails remaining in private hands, rivalled only by three major museums. There were more than 3,500 specimens comprising 300 different sub-species stored in glass drawers in handsome mahogany cases.
Swallowtails are the Goliaths of the butterfly world. They include the Birdwing from Papua New Guinea among their species. It is the largest known butterfly and was caught, or literally blasted out of the forest, by collectors using shotguns. But the real thrill of the Swallowtail is not its size but its looks. Nothing man-made, no painting by Ingres or Velázquez, none of the jewels of Catherine the Great or the intricacies of Mogul art can come close to the shocking beauty of these creatures. Each species of Swallowtail is noticeably different, distinguished by its shape and by its hues. A butterfly’s wing is made up of thousands of tiny, loosely attached pigmented scales which individually catch the light but together create a depth of colour and iridescence unmatched elsewhere in nature.* A pupil there told me how “gutted” he was that the collection was going, but admitted that he was one of the few who appreciated this cache.
Walking away from the school, I saw hundreds of boys, all dressed as Charles would have been in blue jackets and flat straw boaters, rushing through the streets towards their next lesson. A sudden sharp gust of wind blew, sweeping hats from heads high into the air. I stood and watched as the boaters floated and twisted down to earth like a mass of pale yellow butterflies and was reminded about my gentle great-grandfather and the comfort he found in nature.
Charles was at his happiest acting as assistant to his brother Walter or conducting his own field research. In 1896 at age nineteen, he was allowed one fleeting fortnight of independence, and chose a collecting expedition along the Nile. His letters home comment on the strange and wonderful sights he witnessed en route. “The Cattle in Shendi are very interesting beasts.” Or “I have been trying very hard to get a turtle for Walter.”
On his return to England, Charles went to the office diligently but his investment ideas were met with a polite but resounding rebuttal. No one thought that there was enough future in copper to justify building a smelting factory; few agreed with him that opening a branch in Japan had prospects; and in the view of his fellow bankers a recent invention in which Charles wanted to invest, the gramophone record, would be a failure.
Kept under his mother’s thumb at home and in the shadow of his forebears at work, Charles made a great strike for independence in marrying a beautiful Hungarian Jewess whom he met while hunting butterflies and rare fleas in the Carpathian Mountains. Writing to a friend who also suffered from mood disorders, Charles said, “I am so glad that you really are better and that the ‘blues’ are getting less. Marry as I have done and you won’t have any at all.” Rozsika von Wertheimstein was the only woman he ever loved.
Charles Rothschild in 1907 with his wife, Rozsika, taken outside her family home at Csételek in Hungary (Photographic Credit 3.2)
Rozsika von Wertheimstein came from an eminent but poor family. She was known in her native land as the Rose of Hungary on account of her looks; her dark-brown, purple-ringed irises caught the light like butterfly wings. Nica later admitted that everyone was “absolutely terrified” of Rozsika. Even so, Miriam, when asked if she could have anything, any dream in the whole world, replied, “I would like to have just one more hour with my mother again.”
Rozsika Edle von Wertheimstein, Nica’s mother, a great beauty, was known as the Rose of Hungary (Photographic Credit 3.3)
Born in 1870 in Nagyvár
ad, Hungary (now the Romanian city of Oradea), Rozsika was the daughter of a retired army officer. When she met Charles in 1907, she was already thirty-four and many assumed her best prospect was to become postmistress in the village. According to Miriam, “She was brought up in a country where anti-Semitism was perfectly open. Only a very small percentage of Jews were allowed to go to the university. In Hungary, if you were Jewish, it really was a way of life. You were completely separated.” Denied a formal education, Rozsika was self-educated and could read Hungarian, German, French and English.
Nica and her sisters with their nannies on Queen Alexandra Rose Day (Photographic Credit 3.4)
Rozsika was considered rather “fast.” Her days were filled with waltzing on the ice in the winter and tennis parties in the summer. She smoked openly and liked to challenge the boys to barrel jumping on the ice. She was the first woman in Europe to serve a tennis ball overarm, a rather daring movement as it exposed the shape of the breast. Rozsika was summoned to Vienna to demonstrate the move to the Archduchess when the news of this latest exploit got out.
Marrying a Rothschild was considered not just a stroke of good luck but a huge achievement, akin to winning the Derby, and the engagement was reported across Europe. The couple’s wedding vows were “solemnised” in Vienna in a simple ceremony for which the temple was decorated in white and evergreen, while the bride wore ivory-coloured satin. Arriving back in England from their honeymoon in Venice, Rozsika saw her new home for the first time and was informed that she would spend her married life there, bringing up her children alongside her mother-in-law, Emma, and her husband’s brother, Walter. She is listed as attending various state balls at Buckingham Palace and at court, but Miss von Wertheimstein had been erased: she had become Mrs. Charles Rothschild.
The Baroness Page 3