4 It has recently been suggested that the Rothschilds’ interest in the bullion business had waned by the 1870s because of a lack of commitment on the part of Anthony. However, it is worth noting that as late as 1875 a nominal fine of £5 (plus £1 8s costs) was imposed on him for allowing excessive smoke emissions from the refinery—hardly a sign of inactivity.
5 Pierpont Morgan was resentful of the Rothschilds’ de haut en bas manner: “[H]aving anything to do with Rothschilds & Belmont in this matter is extremely unpalatable to us and I would give almost anything if they were out. The whole treatment of Rothschilds to all the party, from Father downwards[,] is such, as to my mind, no one should stand.” Natty never called on Walter Burns, the resident senior partner at J. S. Morgan; Burns always came to New Court.
6 Between 1865 and 1890, £121 million worth of US railway stocks were issued through London merchant banks, of which Rothschilds were responsible for just £800,000. It was not until 1908-9 that New Court undertook major issues totalling £6 million for the Pennsylvania Railway and the Grand Trunk Pacific line.
7 The other British delegates at Brussels were Sir Charles Rivers-Wilson, Comptroller General of the Public Debt Office, Sir Charles Fremantle, Deputy Master of the Mint and the bimetallist Sir William Houldsworth. The Rothschild plan was in many ways more practicable than the two other plans presented to the conference by Adolf Soetbeer and Moritz Levy.
8 This was around 2.5 per cent of total Rothschild profits; as a percentage of the total Spanish budget, the revenue received by the government was a little less than 1 per cent.
9 In 1887 South Africa had accounted for 0.8 per cent of world gold production; by 1892 the figure was 15 per cent and by 1898 25 per cent.
10 The price was raised still higher—[o above £79—bya similar agreement in 1899.
11 The other life governors were to be Rhodes, Alfred Beit, F. S. P Stow and Baring Gould, though the last was ultimately excluded at the insistence of either Barnato or Rhodes. After much negotiation, it was agreed that the governors should receive 25 per cent of all annual profits in excess of £1.44 million, a right they enjoyed until 1901.
12 Of the £1 million capital, Natty provided £10,000.
13 In later versions of Rhodes’s will, this idea was transformed into the more realistic scheme for Oxford scholarships to encourage (in Natty’s words) “Colonials and even Americans to study on the banks of the Isis and to learn, as Rhodes did there, to love his country and to make it prosperous.” Any remaining interest on his fortune was to be used by the Trustees “in the interest of, for the development of the Anglo-Saxon race.” In this final version Natty had in fact been replaced as a Trustee.
14 The Uitlanders’ main grievance was that in 1890 the Transvaal government had effectively disfranchised them by extending the residence qualification necessary for the right to vote in elections to the First Volksraad and the Presidency.
15 The loan was subsequently issued in Germany.
TWELVE Finances and Alliances (1885-1906)
1 Note also the Goncourts’ comment: “[D]ans cette ancienne cite [Samarcande] ... on ignore qui’ilyaen Europe un pays qui s‘appelle la France, on ignore qu’ilyaun homme politique du nom de Bismarck, on sait seulement qu‘il existe dans cette Europe un particulier immensément riche, qui s’appelle Rothschild.”
2 And by late 1897 McDonnell was negotiating with Natty about the possibility of Rothschild financial support for Sudanese railways.
3 From a low of 3 roubles to the pound in 1874, the rouble appreciated to 4.67 in 1887, then fell back to 3.57 in 1890. It was initially stabilised at a rate of 3.88, then revalued to 9.45 in 1897.
4 Leo added revealingly that “it would have been better if he had refused at once—[but] the finance minister fortunately is a good practical man of business & will do nothing to spite the R[othschild]s as people imagined.”
5 The Gunzbergs were a Jewish family who had made their fortune in the vodka business and then diversified into banking and mining.
6 Alphonse also cited the Tsar’s enthusiasm for the occult as a cause for concern.
7 Alphonse was equally suspicious of the Kaiser’s short-lived aspiration to woo the working classes.
8 In November 1897 the Germans seized Kiao-Chow, the main port of the Shantung province, a move partly influenced by Salisbury’s refusal to give them control of Samoa as they had requested in 1894; the Russian demand for a “lease” of Port Arthur in March 1898 prompted a British naval response.
9 Chamberlain favoured an alliance of powers against Russia, foreseeing the piecemeal partition of China if Britain continued to act alone as over Wei-hai-wei.
10 However, there was no substance to the suspicion that Natty tried to push Moberly Bell out of Printing House Square during the financial reorganisation of The Times in which he had a hand in 1907-8. In Schwabach’s view Natty was “by no means particularly pro-German” and “would not dream of allowing German influence on the paper.”
11 Warburg applied for £1 million but had to be content with £26,000—still a substantial sum.
12 Hamilton to Asquith, Jan. 22, 1907: “[T]he state cannot raise an indefinite amount of money. We all thought so during the Boer War, but we now know that we have damaged our credit very materially by the amount we borrowed during that war.”
13 He was also awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Francis Joseph of Austria.
14 As usual in the Third Republic, there was a political dimension to this financial problem: Paul Cambon claimed that Rouvier had speculated on a rise in Russian bonds on the basis of Delcassé’s assurances that there would be no war. Delcassé called Rouvier a man “who would sell France for a speculation on the stock exchange.”
15 “Naturally,” Natty reported in a revealing postscript, “I have given the most categorical denial & I have done all in my power to prevent the Jewish writers in the International Press from attacking Russian Finance.”
16 Stolypin replied vaguely that he was “contemplat[ing] legislation for the amelioration of the lot of the Jews in Russia.”
THIRTEEN The Military-Financial Complex (1906-1914)
1 Natty also kept Lord Salisbury informed about foreign purchases of Maxim guns, which he regarded as a sign of bellicose intent.
2 The meeting was certainly not a purely Conservative affair: Schuster and Avebury were both present and also signed the earlier petition, but their criticisms of the budget were very different from Natty’s and Schuster declined to join the Budget Protest League set up to continue the campaign.
3 As Leo commented, “It certainly wants a great deal of tact to steer clear of Scylla and Charybdis, i.e. to work for Haldane on Friday and to speak publicly against his policy on Tuesday.”
4 Cutting from Western Daily Mercury, Jan. 10, 1910: “Lord Rothschild ... knowing that this is a Free Trade country with a good deal of money to spare, gathers his money together and loans it to foreigners. And very properly! In a speech in the House of Lords not so long ago, he quoted his father as saying that there was nothing more fruitful for the trade of a country than the fact that it was able to advance money to foreign lands. I don’t know why he quoted his father, unless he wanted to prove that wisdom is not always hereditary (laughter).” The two continued to quarrel publicly for many months. In 1913 Natty attacked Lloyd George’s use of funds from the National Insurance scheme for building houses as “jerry building speculation.”
5 Sassoon was nevertheless adopted as the Conservative and Unionist candidate and won the seat.
FOURTEEN Deluges (1915-1945)
1 Rumour had it that his debts were in excess of £750,000. Thereafter, Walter was effectively pensioned off with an allowance to finance his researches and the Tring museum.
2 Though it should be noted that like his brother he did dismally at Cambridge, obtaining a Third in finals: theirs was a talent unsuited to established academic institutions.
3 When he came across the property he was delighted to di
scover that his father already owned it.
4 I am grateful to Miriam Rothschild for details of her father’s life.
5 He was killed on the same day that Evelyn died of his wounds in hospital.
6 According to Cohen, “Her immaculate butler, Lester, used to open the door and proclaim, as though he were announcing a visitor: ‘The Zeppelins, my Lady.”’
7 Walter served on committees of the Jewish Board of Guardians and the Jewish Peace Society; Lionel succeeded Leo as treasurer of the Board of Deputies; and the presidency of the United Synagogue remained in Rothschild hands until 1942.
8 He and his wife asked to be buried in Palestine after their deaths (in 1934 and 1935 respectively), though this did not happen until 1954. The PICA’s assets were donated to the state of Israel after Jimmy’s death in 1957.
9 By contrast, Rothschild links to North America were few: the French house raised money for the Compagnie du Nord with a $15 million bond issue in New York, and returned the compliment by investing—unwisely, as it proved—in the New York City Interborough Rapid Transit.
10 By 1928 it was operating in twenty-two different countries with a host of different interests in metallurgy and chemicals.
11 After an initial period when the bidding was done by telephone, it was decided to hold a formal meeting in the Rothschild office. Represented were the four bullion brokers—Mocatta & Goldsmid, Pixley & Abell, Sharps & Wilkins and Samuel Montagu—and the other major refiner Johnson Matthey. Quaintly, all the bidders were given a small Union Jack flag which they could raise when they needed to telephone their head offices. When a flag went up, the bidding was suspended until it was lowered again.
12 The South African mines entrusted their agency to the South African Reserve Bank in 1926 and in 1932 the Bank of England took over the role of principal seller, though N. M. Rothschild continued to act as the Bank’s agent.
13 Interest on the loan was charged at 4 per cent until the end of 1933 and 5 per cent thereafter; the money itself was from the French Rothschilds’ private fortunes: Edmond put up 70 million francs, Edouard 35 million, Robert 15 million, Henri 10 million, his son James 3 million and Philippe also 3 million.
14 After dabbling in cinema, Philippe eventually devoted his energies to developing the vineyards on his father’s estate at Mouton. It was he who introduced the practice of château-bottling after the war.
15 Rothschild, Garton and Rothschild, Rothschild gardens, pp. 148ff. The offer was refused.
16 I am grateful to Miriam Rothschild for this information.
17 33 rue du Faubourg St Honoré was acquired by the Cercle de l‘Union Interalliée in 1920; two years later the house in the rue Berryer was given to the state; and the villa Ephrussi on the Riviera was left to the Académie des Beaux Arts in 1934.
18 Anthony’s daughters Annie and Constance died in 1926 and 1931; Natty’s widow Emma in 1935; and Leo’s widow Marie in 1937.
19 According to Bower, he went so far as to stuff a bundle of Ultra documents through the Soviet embassy’s letter-box.
20 The fact that the government explicitly denied that Victor Rothschild was the “fifth man” in 1986 did not prevent an entire book being written in 1994 insisting—on the basis of wholly circumstantial evidence—that he was. To some extent, Victor’s dabbling in the Byzantine internal politics of MI5—in particular, his relationship with Peter Wright—was to blame for encouraging this notion. As Victor discovered while at the CPRS, Wright firmly believed that the former director-general of MI5, Roger Hollis, had been a Soviet agent. (Victor also knew of Wright’s involvement in the MI5 attempt to smear Harold Wilson and other Labour politicians as communists after 1974.) When speculation began about his own role following the exposure of his friend Anthony Blunt in 1979, Victor rashly turned to Wright, now living in embittered retirement in Australia. In the belief that the allegations against Hollis would distract attention from himself, Victor encouraged Wright to collaborate with Chapman Pincher on the book Their trade is treachery (1981). This backfired badly when, five years later, Wright decided to publish his own book Spycatcher in defiance of the British government. The ensuing trial brought Victor more unwelcome publicity. In a final effort to clear his name, Victor wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph in which he demanded public exoneration from the head of M15. Mrs Thatcher’s response, though formally sufficient, was frosty in its tone—reflecting her reluctance to comment on intelligence matters: “I am informed that we have no evidence that he was ever a Soviet agent.”
21 The phrase derived from the fact that only the 200 largest shareholders in the Banque de France could vote at its General Assembly.
22 They were the Clementine Interdenominational Girls’ Hospital at Bornheimer Landwehr; the Baron Carl von Rothschild public library; the Anselm Salomon von Rothschild Foundation for the Arts and the Old People’s Home for Jewish Gentlewomen named after Wilhelm Carl and Mathilde.
23 The Grüneburg house was destroyed by bombs in 1944, but the house at Königstein survived.
24 This was a complex operation for two reasons: first, the other major shareholders, the Gutmanns, had to be bought out; second, the transfer had to be made indirectly via Swiss and Dutch institutions to avoid possible confiscation by the British government in the event of a future war.
25 Anthony became appeal chairman in 1939 as well as being chairman of the Emigration Planning Committee for Refugees. He, Lionel and Jimmy were also on the appeal committee of the Council for German Jewry set up in 1936.
26 Victor had experienced at first hand the English version of anti-Semitism: at Harrow he remembered being called a “dirty little Jew,” and in 1934 (when he was twenty-four) he had been refused membership of a “road house” and country club in Barnet on religious grounds.
27 The second sentence did not appear in the official minutes, but was reported in the press.
28 For example, Edouard was incensed when, following the recovery of Algeria in 1942, the Free French General Giraud failed to restore the Crémieux legislation granting citizenship to the Algerian Jews.
29 The proceeds supposedly went to French war orphans.
EPILOGUE
1 I am grateful to Sir John Plumb for this reference.
2 Jimmy had been one of those who donated £5,000 towards the purchase of the cash-strapped Churchill’s house at Chartwell in 1946 to allow the Premier to go on living there.
3 Construction on the Churchill Falls did not begin until 1966; but in 1974, just three years after the plant had been opened, a new government in Newfoundland decided on nationalisation, paying Brinco $160 million in compensation (compared with total construction costs of $1 billion).
4 Anthony gave Palace House at Newmarket to the Jockey Club in 1944 and Ascott to the National Trust in 1950; Jimmy left Waddesdon to the National Trust in 1957; Mentmore and its contents were sold in 1977 and Tring is now a school run by the Arts Education Trust. In France, the villa Rothschild in Cannes passed out of family hands, as did the house at Boulogne, the châteaux des Fontaines, de la Muette and de Laversine, and the houses in the rue Saint-Florentin and the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré.
5 Siegmund Warburg had proposed such a merger to Edmund as early as 1955.
6 Other examples from this period included the former chairman of the Electricity Council, Sir Francis Tombs, who became a non-executive director in 1980, and the former Under-Secretary for Trade, lain Sproat, who joined N. M. Rothschild as a consultant after losing his seat in the 1983 election.
7 N. M. Rothschild paid $9.2 million for a 9.9 per cent shareholding in Smith Brothers and $7 million for a 51 per cent stake in what became Smith New Court—in all, an investment of around £10 million. Big Bang ended the strict separation of banks, brokers (who dealt with the public) and jobbers (who executed transactions on the stock exchange).
8 Clients included Sir James Goldsmith, the Reichmann brothers’ Olympia & York and the Hanson Trust—not to mention Robert Maxwell, whose campaign to acquire an
American publishing house Pirie backed, earning fees worth $17 million in the process. When Maxwell died in 1991, leaving a legacy of peculation and towering debt, it was N. M. Rothschild which was called in to investigate his books and arrange the sale of his heirs’ 54 per cent stake in Mirror Group Newspapers.
9 It had at least symbolic significance that many of the French family’s most treasured houses, including Ferrières, were disposed of in this period. The house in the rue du Monceau was destroyed; 23 avenue de Marigny was sold to the state in 1975; Ferrières was given to the Sorbonne in 1975; Sans-Souci, Gou- vieux, was sold in 1977 and is now a hotel, as is the abbaye des Vaux-de-Cernay; the château d’Armain villiers was sold in the 1980s to the King of Morocco.
10 The others are Schröders, Flemings and Lazards.
INDEX
Abdul Aziz, Sultan
Abdul Mejid, Sultan
Aberdeen, Lord
ABN AMRO
Acton, Lord
Acton, Sir John
Addresses to Young Children (Charlotte Rothschild)
Adelaide, Princess of Hohenlohe
Adler, Hermann
Adler, Nathan Marcus
Afghanistan
A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust)
Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Prince Consort of England
Alexander, David
Alexander, King of Bulgaria
Alexander 11, Tsar of Russia
Alexander III, Tsar of Russia
Alexandra, Queen Consort
Alfonso, Prince of Asturia
Alfred, Prince of England
Algeciras conference (1906)
Aliens Act (1905)
Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums
Alliance Assurance company
Almadén mines
The House of Rothschild Page 92
