CHAPTER X — THE YEARS BETWEEN (1918-39)

 

When the smoke cleared from the battlefield in 1918., wrote a contemporary, ‘nothing was the same, not even the Rothschilds’. Nothing but the legendary cohesion. The first thing that the victorious French and English Rothschilds did was to put the Austrian Rothschilds on their feet again. The Viennese bank, S. M. Rothschild und Söhne, was not run by Rothschild partners, as were the banks of London and Paris, but by a single Rothschild who handed on the sceptre as he saw fit. As two of Baron Albert’s sons, Alphonse and Eugene, had impressed their father with their ability to keep themselves fully occupied as gentlemen of leisure, he had given control to his third son, Louis. This tall, slim, blond Rothschild, ‘the image of an Anglo-Saxon aristocrat, for all his synagogue-going’, was thirty-four years old when the war ended. Like his two brothers he had served in the Austrian army and was lucky to be alive: yet the financial chaos that greeted him was far from heartening.

Before the war the Austrian branch had been the greatest bank in the Habsburg Empire, a force to be reckoned with throughout central Europe. But shortly after the turn of the century, the news of German naval rearmament caused Lord Rothschild to ponder deeply as to what would happen to the Rothschild firm as a whole if hostilities broke out. Because of the system of alliances, it was clear that Austria would be on one side, France and England on the other. And as someone would have to lose, Rothschilds could not win: that, is unless the family reorganized the banks as three separate entities.

Fortunately that is exactly what Lord Rothschild did in 1908, for eleven years later the Treaty of Versailles stripped the Austrian fatherland of thousands of square miles, and turned the monarchy into a republic. The new state was only a shadow of its former self; before 1918 Vienna had been the capital of a country of fifty-three million people; now the population had shrunk to seven million. Needless to say, the Austrian krone (and the German mark) reacted violently and began a long steady descent. Baron Louis bought state securities by the million in an attempt to steady the market, but his rivals felt no such loyalty to the newly demarcated state. Herr Castiglione, Louis’s principal antagonist, sold the currencies short and made a fortune.

People began to whisper that the Austrian Rothschilds were finished and predicted that soon their palaces and treasures would come under the hammer. However, the Germanic currencies were not the only ones to plummet: suddenly the French franc caught the infection, and began a downward lunge, with a see-saw effect on pound and dollar. None of it made much sense. ‘In a manner entirely unintelligible to a layman endowed with ordinary common sense,’ wrote Count Corti, ‘even the most experienced financiers in Germany and Austria speculated on a fall in the currency [of France], the most powerful of the victorious states … A similar fate was prophesied for the franc as for the mark and the krone.’

Once again Herr Castiglione plunged into the fray. French francs were thrown on the market in breath-taking quantities and he sold them short on an equally breath-taking scale. Then the unexpected happened. Overnight the franc righted itself, and with startling speed began to soar. The experts were amazed and poor Castiglione lost so much money that he was put out of business. What had happened? The same old story: the French Rothschilds had formed a secret combine, this time with J. P. Morgan of New York, who realized that if France was allowed to slide into an economic slump, everyone, including America, would suffer.

At a prearranged signal Rothschilds and Morgans boosted the franc, which inevitably caused a fall in sterling; but as they were calling the moves, they coined money on the downward turns as well as the upward swings. Of course they shared the secret with the Austrian Rothschilds, telling them to the very day when the franc would rise. As a result the Vienna house made such enormous profits that they almost recouped the losses of the war. Once again Baron Louis sent out invitations to a ball in his palace on the Prinz Eugenstrasse; once again he organized shooting parties in Bohemia and sported the finest string of polo ponies in Austria.

The French Rothschilds benefited as well, and one by one members of the family began to take up the threads of their life in Paris. Alphonse’s heir, Baron Edouard, opened his huge house at 2 Rue Saint-Florentin off the Place de la Concorde, while Gustave’s son, Baron Robert, brought his young family back to the even larger house at 23 Avenue de Marigny. Baron Edmond, seventy-five years old in 1920, began to receive callers again at 41 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré; while Baron Henri, a few doors away, entertained in a house almost as large as the Élysée Palace, now known as the Cerole Interallié. He also lived at La Muette, newly built, which later became the seat of the organization for European Economic Cooperation, originally founded in 1948 to administer Marshal Aid.

Barons Édouard and Robert ran the bank, but they ran it in a very different way from their grandfather James, and their fathers Alphonse and Gustave. Very rich, very quiet, very passive, they showed more interest in family investments than in acquiring new business. Somehow the war had taken the dynamism out of Rothschild banking. Those who had survived the terrible blood-letting were thankful to be alive, and, like plants climbing towards the sun, reached out for a very unRothschild commodity: leisure.

The means for enjoyment were not in short supply. Rothschilds not only possessed Paris houses and country houses, but in the aggregate: vineyards and racing stables, theatres, yachts, stud farms and holiday resorts. Yet they amused themselves with such circumspection that only two Rothschilds cut a public swathe in the field of pleasure. One, oddly enough, was the doctor, Baron Henri, grandson of the English Nathaniel who had moved to France after his hunting accident; the other Baron Maurice, son of the deeply religious ‘Father of Israel’, Baron Edmond. Henri felt that he had done his share of good works by founding the Henri and Mathilde Hospital in Paris;[135] by publishing papers on pasteurization and hygiene; by inventing ambulances and putting jam into tubes, like toothpaste, for the boys at the front. Now he built the Théâtre Pigalle in Paris, wrote plays under the pseudonym, André Pascal, and invited the prettiest actresses to sail around the Mediterranean in his enormous yacht, aptly named the Eros. Soon Henri’s son, Philippe, had taken over the direction of the Pigalle, and had made history by producing the first talking-picture in France, Lac aux Dames.

Despite Baron Henri’s success with the ladies, he ran a poor second to his cousin Maurice. This gross, rather ugly man had the sort of charm that many women found irresistible. Of course his extravagant gifts of jewellery did not harm his reputation and made him a target for the world’s most accomplished adventuresses, but during the last years of his life he was protected by a comely young woman, Milly, a professional nurse who accompanied him everywhere because, he explained, she shared his ‘blood group’. As he was old and infirm, Milly gave him confidence; but some people said that she also was paid to give him a weekly blood transfusion as he was under the impression that the transfer increased his virility.

Yet Maurice had a serious side and for many years served in the French Parliament as Senator for the Hautes-Alpes region. He was a wonderful host, high-spirited and witty and, despite his peculiarities, immensely clever when it came to money. Several of the richest men in France consulted him regularly, and with good reason, for when he died in 1957 he left more money than any other single French Rothschild. His fortune went to his son, Edmond.

*

Meanwhile the English Rothschilds were down to their last millions. Ironically, of all the cousins they were the hardest hit financially. Although Great Britain emerged from the war neither scarred like France nor vanquished like Austria, the English partners were forced to dig deeper into their pockets than any of the continental relations. The deaths of the three magnificent brothers within twenty-four months of each other had tom gaping holes in the firm’s reserves, as huge sums went to the Government in death duties. To make matters worse, Alfred had defied the family rule which insisted that Rothschild money ignore the female of the species and pass unchallenged to Rothschild males. When his will was read in 1917 it was learned that the bulk of his fortune, larger than Natty’s or Leo’s because of his bachelorhood, had been left to his natural daughter, Almina Wombwell, wife of the Earl of Carnarvon. As things transpired, the Countess made history with the money. She encouraged her husband to back Howard Carter’s archaeological expedition which, in 1922, at Thebes in the Nile Valley, uncovered the grave and treasures of Tuthankhamen.

The new generation of English Rothschilds was not greatly concerned by the diminishing standard of luxury. Like their French cousins, they were very different from their fathers. The 1920s had exploded on the scene and were in the process of sweeping away the last traces of Victorian decorum, or hypocrisy, as some called it. Girls bobbed their hair, shortened their skirts and, to be perverse, flattened their chests. Their emancipation was celebrated by the shimmy and the cocktail party. Although it was still nice to be rich, pretentiousness was out of fashion. Liveried servants had faded away with the horse and carriage, and mammoth London houses soon would be as extinct as the dinosaur. The sports car had arrived with a revolutionary new era in tow: easy come, easy go, night-clubs, informality — at least after dark.

The Rothschilds were quick to sense the change and one by one their huge London houses came up for auction, or demolition. Even some of the country houses were sold. Aston Clinton, where Sir Anthony had lived, was turned into a country hotel, while Halton, the scene of Alfred’s luxurious entertainments, was bought by the Air Force and became an officers’ training centre. Gunnersbury Park, the country seat acquired in 1836 by the great Nathan, was turned into a museum and the grounds thrown open as a public park.

One by one the Piccadilly houses changed hands. Some of them became clubs, others were demolished to ease the traffic problem. Alfred’s house at Seamore Place was pulled down to give Curzon Street an outlet into Park Lane, while 148 Piccadilly eventually was razed to make another entrance into Hyde Park. But all this took time, and for a while a few Rothschilds continued to hang on to a few oversized houses. Anthony moved into his father’s residence at 5 Hamilton Place, and spent his weekends at Ascott near Wing. Natty’s widow, the Dowager Lady Rothschild, continued to live at 148 Piccadilly and Tring Park, and Miss Alice continued to administer Waddesdon until her death in 1923. As she had no direct heirs she left the vast property to her great-nephew, Baron Edmond’s elder son, James de Rothschild, who had married a charming English lady, Dorothy Pinto, in 1913, and became a naturalized Englishman in 1919.

A Frenchman by birth, an Englishman by choice and the beneficiary of a second inheritance from an Austrian relation who had taken British nationality, James — or Jimmy as he was called — seemed to be the composite Rothschild. Yet apart from the fact that he was a Croesus — when he died he left £11,000,000 — it was impossible to fit him into any existing mould. A tall, thin, rakish man, he might have been a grandee or a bookie, a librarian or an auctioneer; nothing would have seemed out of character. His absorbing passions, in fact, were horses, politics and art, in that order. His introduction to English sport had begun in 1896 when he was sent to Cambridge. Although as a boy he had been a scholar he became so enthralled with hunting and steeplechasing that when his three years were up he begged his father to allow him to remain for an extra year. Baron Edmond would agree only on condition that Jimmy won a scholastic prize. His friends were astonished to see him lock himself into his room for three months; and even more surprised when he emerged with an essay, ‘Shakespeare and His Day’, that won the Harness Prize. Although Jimmy finally was sent to Hamburg to study banking he still managed to preserve his links with the English equestrian world. By enduring long night journeys, wrote his widow, he contrived ‘to spend his occasional free days hunting or steeplechasing’.

In 1915 Jimmy was awarded the D.C.M. He raised a Jewish Battalion, served under Allenby and ended the war in Palestine. Not long after the Peace Treaty he had the misfortune to lose an eye playing golf at Deauville — a mishit by the Due de Gramont — but, although his remaining eye was weak, he did not allow the incident to dampen his spirits. With his usual panache he simply transferred the monocle he always wore to his blind eye; and to his great joy found that the weak eye gathered strength.

‘Waddesdon is not an inheritance, it is a career,’ pronounced Lord d’Abernon when he heard that the estate had passed to Jimmy. Nevertheless the beneficiary found time to squeeze in other careers as well. For sixteen years he sat as Liberal M.P. for the Isle of Ely, and for thirty-seven years devoted himself enthusiastically to the Turf. He built a stud farm at Waddesdon, worked out an intricate pattern of breeding, and often bet large sums on a ‘hunch’, once winning £40,000.

*

No one thought it at all strange that the lovable Jimmy should be odd; after all he possessed a highly individual father and had spent a highly individual youth. But why should the two sons of that dutiful, magnificent, Victorian figure, the first Lord Rothschild, married to a Rothschild, oracle of the City, pillar of the State, have turned out to be cuckoos in the nest? What defiant element had crept into the breeding to transform Rothschilds bred of Rothschilds into such startlingly un-Rothschild patterns; not bankers but scientists, not doers but thinkers, not sophisticates but recluses?

The first Lord Rothschild had been so infuriated by his eldest son’s ineptitude at the bank, his pursuit of chorus girls and his zoological extravagances that he had disinherited him in favour of his second son, Charles. Before he rewrote his will, however, he settled on Walter a sum which guaranteed him the life to which he was accustomed.

After Walter’s brief spell in the limelight as recipient of the Balfour Declaration he had returned to his natural history museum at Tring, more convinced than ever that he had discovered the only satisfactory existence. Although the first Lord Rothschild left his house to Charles, Walter continued to live at Tring Park and 148 Piccadilly with his mother until her death in 1933.

Walter struck many people as a grotesque figure, as his bashfulness, his whispers and his inability to look people in the eye offered a strange contrast to his spectacular height and his 300 lbs. Everything about him was massive, not only his size, but the scale of his collection, the scope of his contributions. In conjunction with his two brilliant curators he produced over eight hundred scientific papers, and described several hundred species new to science. ‘Few, if any, zoologists during their lifetime have had so many living creatures named after them,’ wrote Walter’s niece, Miriam Rothschild. ‘Suddenly Rothschilds appeared among the giraffes, the zebras, the cassowaries, the mice, the fish, the birds of paradise, the silk-moths, the swallowtails, the flies and the lilies of the fields.’[136]

Walter’s collection proceeded to grow on an equally impressive scale until the museum boasted over a hundred thousand bird skins and two million sets of butterflies and moths. But the costs mounted as dizzily as the acquisitions, and in 1932 Walter Rothschild was obliged to sell his precious birds to the New York Museum of Natural History to prevent both Tring Museum and himself from going bankrupt.

This setback did not dim his enthusiasm and he continued to search assiduously for new species. Once, by an extraordinary chance, he managed to add to his collection of tree kangaroo pelts in Park Lane. As a chauffeur opened the door of a stationary car he caught sight of a lap rug that made his pulse race. He went up to the vehicle, took a closer look, found out the owner’s name, and finally bought the tree-kangaroo rug for £30. 

Walter’s younger brother Charles, a highly gifted but gentle, unassuming man, was senior partner in the bank. Although he was an able financier he worked at Rothschilds out of deference to his father, for his true love, like that of his brother, was science. In 1907 he had married a handsome and amusing Hungarian Jewess, Rozsika von Wertheimstein, who had produced a noisy and vibrant brood of children, three girls and a boy. Charles liked nothing better than to take the children into the fields to catch butterflies. ‘Had I my way England would see little of us,’ he wrote wistfully. ‘What I really like is to live in a nice island or settle in Japan and Burma and be a professional bug-hunter.’[137]

As far as the children were concerned, however, England seemed to offer the carefree island life for which Mr Rothschild longed. The family lived in Palace Green, in a house that is now the Rumanian Embassy, facing Kensington Gardens; and although it should have been an easy task to take the little ones out to play, the expeditions invariably degenerated into a melee of shrieks and kicks. The fact that the children were all fast runners resulted in a rapid turnover of nursery maids, until one enterprising miss solved the problem by tying them together to the surprise of passers-by.

Victor and his sister Miriam, two years his elder, were the most precocious of the flock, but whereas Miriam was Mrs Rothschild’s little darling, Victor was sensationally naughty. He not only carried on a running war with his sisters but plagued his nanny relentlessly. No sooner had she finished packing his suitcase than he burrowed through it, throwing everything on to the floor on the pretext of searching for something. Even at the age of six he knew how to create a stir, once walking through the drawing-room and sweeping all the objects from the mantelpiece on to the floor. Apparently old Lord Rothschild liked the boy’s spirit, for when Victor was four years old he threw a plate of spinach at his grandfather, who subsequently left him £25,000.

Frequently the intrepid Charles Rothschild took Miriam and Victor on zoological outings. Years later Victor described how, at the age of four, his father sent him into the garden ‘to try and catch a very rare butterfly, a gynadromorph orange tip, that is one which is half male and half female and which, therefore, only had the orange tip on one wing. I remember being punished a few years later,’ he continued, ‘for going into the long grass without my galoshes on, to catch another rare butterfly. The punishment was terribly severe; I had to give the butterfly to my elder sister. She gave it back to me, beautifully mounted, as a twenty-first birthday present.’[138]

One of Charles Rothschild’s specialities was fleas. He had become interested in these insects as disease spreaders while an undergraduate at Cambridge, and in 1902 the Daily Express had carried a headline: ‘10,000 FLEAS MR. ROTHSCHILD’S HOBBY’.

Although Charles’s research was limited to after-hours at the bank, weekends and holidays, it absorbed much of his thoughts. In 1908 he published a paper in conjunction with Karl Jordan entitled Revision of the Non-Combed Eyed Siphonaptera. ‘Jordan and I are just publishing an article in the Journal of Hygiene about the fleas associated and allied to P. Cheopis, the plague carrier,’ he wrote to a fellow entomologist. ‘We have taken a lot of trouble with it and I think it is good … Please criticize it fully …’

In 1913, after years of meticulous work mounting and labelling, he donated his flea collection to the British Museum. A year later he published a paper on the three species of Xenopsylla occurring on rats in India, suggesting that fleas probably were responsible for the spread of the bubonic plague. Fabian Hirst, who subsequently proved the theory, wrote that his contribution was ‘the natural outcome of the purely zoological researches of Rothschild and Jordan on the systematics of Siphonaptera’.[139]

Charles was also concerned with the preservation of plants and animals and founded and financed a Society for the Promotion of Natural Reserves which received a Royal Charter in 1916. Before the outbreak of war, he spent many years working on a map of England, at the behest of the Ministry of Agriculture, marking areas for conservation. When, after the Second World War, the Attlee Government set up committees to do a similar survey, the members came up, roughly, with the same recommendations. What was remarkable about Charles Rothschild was that all his work was done outside office hours. Tragically, in 1916 he contracted sleeping sickness, then an incurable disease, which plunged him into bouts of deep depression. He consulted doctors all over Europe, spent long and lonely sojourns in the rarefied air of Switzerland, but finally, in 1923, went to his room, turned the key in the lock, and killed himself.

Charles’s widow did not find her high-spirited children easy to handle; but the three daughters were less exhausting than the rebellious and brilliant boy, twelve-year-old Victor, who was sent to Harrow in the autumn. Mrs Rothschild never did things by halves and when Victor’s history master reported that his grasp of the Carthaginian Wars left much to be desired she not only made him work in the holidays but worked herself. At two desks, side by side, they wrote essays on the hated subject and compared results.

Victor inherited £2,500,000 from his father, apart from 148 Piccadilly and Tring Park. The money remained in trust until October 1930 when he celebrated his twenty-first birthday. By this time he had acquired an arrogance which made him very unpopular with his contemporaries, particularly as it was based on merit. At Cambridge he had taken a triple First in English, French and Physiology, but this was not as impressive as it seemed, as it had been an Ordinary, not an Honours degree. However, in 1935 he became a Prize Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, every bit as grand as it sounded.

One of the few people who occasionally could get the better of him was Miriam. Although higher education was still thought to be a waste of time for females, and Miriam consequently had not been encouraged to attend a university, she knew almost as much science as Victor. Not only had her father and uncle tutored her through the years, but she spent many hours doing research at Tring Museum with the celebrated Karl Jordan. She adopted her father’s particular interests and in the late 1930s people frequently saw a tall, dark-haired handsome girl striding through the streets of London on her way to a laboratory, a box of fleas under her arm.

In the best tradition of elder sisters Miriam bullied Victor about everything, even manners. Once they were lunching with a friend who had an exceptionally pretty daughter. Miriam gave her brother sternly reproving glances. Afterwards she drew him aside and hissed: ‘Stop looking at her like that or she’ll think you want to marry her.’

Marriage clearly was an ominous threat, for Victor was very much admired by the opposite sex, not only because of his fast sports cars, his Oxford bags and his talent as a jazz pianist, but because of his dark, romantic looks and his biting tongue. Some people referred to him as a modem Lord Byron; others, more struck by the rudeness with which no one could compete, save for Winston Churchill’s boy, nicknamed him ‘the black Randolph’.

When Victor was twenty-one his mother begged him to enter the bank. ‘It came as rather a shock,’ he later recalled, ‘to learn that my parents, while realizing that I was a scientist, were most anxious for me at least to try the life of a banker in the City of London. This I did but the moment was unfortunate. In 1930 there was a world recession and the City seemed dead, boring and rather painful, so after six or so months, I returned to Cambridge University to be a science don … where I lived in a relaxed and somewhat unworldly atmosphere.’[140] However, an explosive element was introduced in 1932 when he married Barbara Hutchinson, daughter of St John Hutchinson, K.C. Barbara was clever and attractive and much preferred to cut a dash in sophisticated London than in the academic world of Cambridge. She produced two daughters and in 1936 a son, Jacob; but the marriage ended in divorce after the war.

*

With the march of the 1930s the Rothschilds boasted only two bankers, Leo’s sons, Lionel and Anthony. Lionel had become senior partner when Charles died in 1923. At that time he was forty-one and Anthony thirty-six. Like their French cousins, the English brothers felt no urge to add to their worldly possessions, and tended to regard the financial competitiveness that was beginning to spring up as a sordid pastime. N. M. Rothschild & Sons had sufficient réclame to run on its own momentum; and the two partners, like all civilized men, had other interests besides business.

While Lionel’s passion for motoring had become less acute — now that cars had shock absorbers the excitement was gone — and he sought the more static delight of a magnificent, 2,600-acre estate in the New Forest at Exbury, which he bought in 1919. Flanked on one side by the River Beaulieu, on the other by the Solent, he was able to indulge his new enthusiasms: fishing and sailing. Before long, however, he had acquired a new interest which threatened to eclipse the other two: breeding rhododendrons. Like all Rothschilds, he became increasingly absorbed in his hobby and increasingly professional in the pursuit of it. He left his London office at 3.30 p.m. every Friday, in his sports car, and when he arrived at Exbury his senior gardening staff, consisting of some twenty men, would be assembled, awaiting him. He would hand each a cigar, then give his orders for the weekend’s operation.

Lionel created many of his plants by effecting crosses, 1210 in all. He named and registered 416 new varieties, and did most of the hand-pollinating himself. If he heard that there was a superior specimen of a plant in Scotland, for instance, he would not hesitate to send his chauffeur a thousand miles there and back to secure the pollen. He personally determined the position of all plants of importance, pushing his walking stick into the ground and saying: ‘Plant it there.’ And they planted them with such effect that at the outbreak of war in 1939 his rhododendron gardens contained a million plants and was the best in the world.

Of course he spent a fortune doing it. For ten years 150 men dug bore-holes and enriched the soil. Altogether twenty-two miles of pipeline were laid ensuring a water supply of 250,000,000 gallons a day. Rothschild blacksmiths made 150 tons of metal fittings for the greenhouses, and a nearby hamlet was doubled to house the scores of under-gardeners.

Fortunately Lionel’s wife, Marie-Louise Beer, a sister of Baroness Robert de Rothschild of Paris, had unlimited vitality. She not only ran Exbury House with traditional regard for food, drink and comfort, but sailed and fished with her husband in all weathers, and occasionally accompanied him on motor trips to North Africa and Greece. Exbury was covered with family trophies, stuffed fish and stags’ heads, silver yachting trophies and racing prints belonging to Lionel’s father Leo, and to Leo’s uncle, Mayer. Also present, of course, were the inevitable masterpieces — Romneys, Reynoldses, Cuypses — that were part and parcel of all Rothschild homes.

Lionel was not bothered by changing times. He was a rich man with expensive tastes which he made no attempt to conceal, with the result that some of the employees of the bank tended to regard him as a divinity. When one of the clerks died an envelope was found inscribed: ‘Pellets from a pheasant shot by Mr Lionel’. Mr Lionel drove to work every morning in an open two-seater Rolls Royce, the envy of all the young men in the building; and when he was invited to address the City Horticultural Society, composed of suburban members, he did not mince his words. ‘No garden,’ he said, ‘however small, should contain less than two acres of rough woodland.’ On another occasion, Lionel saw a box lying on the table in the Bullion Room. When he was told that it contained table mats and was a wedding present from the staff to one of the accountants, he said: ‘Let’s have a look.’ When it was opened he was disappointed. ‘Well, that not much good. You could never have more than twelve people to dinner.’

Anthony was less exuberant than his brother, a quiet, donnish sort of man who had taken a double first at Cambridge and did not suffer fools gladly. His tastes were eclectic and over the years he build up a remarkable collection of Chinese porcelain at his home at Ascott, mainly of the Ming and K’ang Hsi Dynasties. Although he was apt to be stand-offish with his employees, he was much respected in the City where he had a reputation as ‘a great gentleman’. In those days it was considered inexpressibly vulgar for a merchant bank to solicit new business, even to advertise; and to cultivate men whom one did not like for the sake of valuable contacts was nothing less than a gross breach of integrity. Anthony de Rothschild scrupulously observed the unwritten rules. ‘He did not travel himself,’ wrote Palin, and he did not sit on the boards of the numerous public companies which would have been delighted to have him. “They know where we live,” he would say of potential clients, “if they want to do business with us let them come and talk to us”.[141] And when they did come, if he did not like their faces or their manners, at the end of the conversation he would bow them out with his customary old-world courtesy, but find an excuse for letting the matter drop.

The truth was that N. M. Rothschild & Sons was an autocracy ruled by feudal and dynastic lords. In the inter-war years subordinates accepted the system unquestioningly. To many men, including Palin, the family seemed to be a higher order of creation than ordinary mortals.

It was in the nature of things [he wrote] that a young male Rothschild should inherit a partnership in the family business when he attained a suitable age in the same way as he inherited material possessions and it did not enter anybody’s head that any other qualifications could ever achieve the same result. When I heard in 1926 that Anthony was going to get married, I asked Hugh Miller if this was a dynastic marriage, thinking that it was perhaps an alliance ‘arranged’ by the family for political or business reasons. It did not occur to me that a Rothschild, particularly one who was in the firm, could marry for love like anyone else.[142]

Yet this was what Anthony had done. His fiancée was a charming French lady, Yvonne Cahen d’Anvers, but at least the match was in the best tradition as the bride came from a Jewish banking family.

Despite the advent of aggressive new rivals in the City, N. M. Rothschild & Sons remained in the front rank of merchant banks; but now, instead of being ‘first of the firsts’ it was merely among the firsts. Even so it retained privileges that sprang from the days of its unchallenged supremacy. Every morning at 10.30 experts from the London bullion market met in ‘Mr Anthony’s room’ and solemnly fixed the price of gold, just as the great Nathan had done long ago only less comfortably, often standing in a courtyard. The Rothschild name still had magic, for foreigners and bankers and industrialists from all over the world continued to call at New Court to discuss loans, floatations and mergers. On more than one occasion bright-eyed Rothschild subordinates were forced to bite their lips to keep from laughing out loud. This happened when the firm was acting for Charringtons the brewers, in their merger with Hoare and Co. Lionel, who seldom if ever had entered a pub, turned to Hoare’s auditor and said: ‘Tell me, where are those Hoare houses? Are they in the West End or in the East End?’ The accountant replied gravely: ‘They are all over London, Mr Rothschild.’ Apparently it was even more difficult to keep a straight face when a German industrialist described a rival as having ‘how do you say? — a finger in every tart’.

The fact that Rothschilds was run on ‘feudal lines’ meant that the employers had obligations towards their employees; and in the 1930s many men had reason to be grateful for the protection they received, for these were the years of depression, unemployment, financial crises, and ‘defaults one after another of the debtor countries’. While other firms laid off members of the staff no one at Rothschilds, no matter how insignificant his contribution, was asked to leave or to accept a reduction in salary.

Although N. M. Rothschild & Sons was still an international name, writers who scrutinized the family in the late 1920s referred to their accomplishments in the past tense. Of course times had altered, and governments had stepped into the happy breach once occupied by Nathan Rothschild. But even taking the changes into consideration, it looked as though Rothschild wizardry had disappeared as silently and magically as the word implied. The historian of Anglo-Jewry, Cecil Roth, believed that the death of the three English magnificos in the Great War had marked the end of an epoch. ‘When, after four years’ nightmare, the darkness lifted again, all had passed away. There was no one who could take their places.’ Mr R. E. Ravage declared that ‘the incentives of the fathers do not spur the descendants … So the lustre of the House of Rothschild is sadly dimmed, and but for the survival of its fortune the latter-day banking corporations would hardly think it worthwhile consulting.’ Only Count Corti reserved judgement, pointing out that although Rothschild power had declined ‘it would be a mistake to believe that they have lost all influence … Throughout the centuries, one factor has remained constant — the power of money: indeed the importance of this factor has increased … since the total population, and therefore the numbers who lack money, has expanded to an extraordinary degree.’

*

Corti was right, for the day of the Rothschilds was far from over. The advent of Hitler in 1933 did not at once grip the attention of the world, but it began to stir the Rothschilds from their slumbers. Oddly enough, the first English Rothschild to realize the full implications of what was happening was French-born Yvonne, wife of Anthony. By the autumn of 1933 Yvonne had become president of a society ‘to aid German Jewish women and children’. She organized a fund-raising women’s lunch at the Savoy Hotel on 10 December at which Lady Violet Bonham Carter was the main speaker. This was only the beginning; a few months later Yvonne persuaded the distributors of The House of Rothschild, starring George Arliss, to give the proceeds of the first night to her society. She collected all the great names of English Jewry and scored a financial triumph. A year later she repeated the success with an Eddie Cantor first night.

During the latter half of the 1930s, Baron Robert de Rothschild of Paris became President of an organisation for Jewish refugees, and with his beautiful wife, Nelly, one of the great hostesses of the day, embarked on an arduous programme of fund-giving and fund-raising. Meanwhile in London Miriam Rothschild had made herself responsible for a number of children who had arrived in England from Germany, while Jimmy de Rothschild imported from Frankfurt a whole orphanage consisting of two dozen boys between the ages of five and fifteen, accompanied by a warden and his wife, with two daughters and a sister-in-law. He provided a house for them in Waddesdon and sent the children to the local schools. ‘They were marvellously accepted,’ wrote James’s widow, Dollie, many years later, ‘a tribute not only to the refugees but to the village who took these children and their guardians to their heart — no means feat on both sides considering the feelings about Germans, refugees or not, at that time.’ 

Walter Rothschild died in 1937 and Victor succeeded to the title. As Lord Rothschild he became, of course, head of the family, and as head of the family he received thousands of letters begging for help. He took an active interest in the Central British Fund for German Jewry, founded by Simon Marks and Herbert Samuel, which had its headquarters at New Court. The pressures were unabating after November 1938 when a Jewish boy living in Paris, whose parents had been sent to a concentration camp, shot and killed Herr von Rath, the third secretary of the German Embassy. The Nazi Party used the occasion to incite a pogrom in which thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps and millions of pounds’ worth of Jewish property was destroyed.

On 12 November 1938, Lord Rothschild wrote a letter to The Times calling the attention of the British public to what was happening in Germany. Although some people warned, he said, ‘that criticisms made in foreign countries of the treatment of the Jews would only increase their torments,’ he had ‘no fear of doing this because their torments cannot be increased except by such refinements of torture as would create general horror in Germany itself …’[143]

The following month, however, Lord Rothschild apologized to a large gathering at the Mansion House for his optimism. The occasion was the launching of Lord Baldwin’s Fund for German Refugees which Victor himself had been instrumental in setting up. ‘I have discovered that I was wrong. Tortures have been invented and have been inflicted, and the word medieval which has so often been used to describe what is going on is an insult to the past.’ A few months later, in May 1939, Lord Rothschild put to auction at Christie’s his most valuable picture — The Braddyll Family by Joshua Reynolds — and donated the proceeds to the Baldwin Fund.

*

While the English and French Rothschilds were raising money for refugees, Baron Louis of Austria was arguing with Herr Heinrich Himmler in a Viennese prison.

The Third Reich had cast its grim shadow over Austria from the moment of Hitler’s accession. Those who bothered to read Mein Kampf knew that Hitler regarded the reunion of Germany and Austria as £a task to be furthered with every means our lives long’. It was not surprising, therefore, to learn that German Nazis were supplying Austrian Nazis with weapons and dynamite. Soon a reign of terror had begun in which railways, power stations and government buildings were blown up, while officials were kidnapped and murdered. In July 1934, 154 members of the Viennese Nazi Party, wearing army uniforms, burst into the Federal Building and shot Chancellor Dollfuss in the throat at a range of two feet. Hitler received the news while listening to Das Rheingold at the annual Wagner Festival at Bayreuth. Friedelind Wagner, a granddaughter of the great composer, was sitting near him and later wrote that ‘he could scarcely wipe the delight off his face’.

Despite the assassination of Dollfuss the Nazis failed in their attempt to seize power. Thirty-seven-year-old Kurt von Schuschnigg, a deputy, rallied government forces, led them into action and quickly regained control. Shortly afterwards he assumed the chancellorship but like most of the statesmen of Europe he was no match for Hitler’s twists and turns, lies and promises and frenzied ravings. In May 1935 Hitler declared that Germany ‘neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria not to conclude an Anschluss’. Yet at the same time Hitler’s minister in Vienna, Herr von Papen, was writing to Berlin: ‘National Socialism must and will overpower the new Austrian ideology.’

The Rothschilds were on close terms with Dr von Schuschnigg, who kept them informed on his dealings with Germany. As there was no place for a leader without hope, it was inevitable that Schuschnigg should cling to the belief that he could preserve Austria’s independence; and no doubt a logical consequence that he tried to do it by adopting a policy of appeasement. Although neither Baron Louis, nor his two brothers, Eugene and Alphonse, shared his optimism, they could offer no alternatives. In July 1936 Schuschnigg signed an agreement with Germany which he called a compromise but which proved to be Austria’s death warrant. In secret clauses he agreed to pardon Nazi offenders and to allow Nazis to occupy important government positions.

When the Rothschilds learned of this deal they were convinced that Austria’s days were numbered. Alphonse and Eugene moved their families and transferred their money to France and Switzerland. But Louis, who was a bachelor, settled down to a legal tussle in Vienna. He summoned lawyers from London and Prague and began the long complicated process of transferring Vitkowitz, the vast iron and steel works in Czechoslovakia, acquired by his grandfather, Salomon von Rothschild, from Austrian ownership to British ownership.

The legal proceedings exploited the fact that a minority shareholder, another Jewish family called von Gutmann, needed cash and wished to sell its holding. This excuse was seized upon to revise the company’s corporate structure. It was not difficult to persuade the Czech Prime Minister that Austrian control of Vitkowitz could prove dangerous because of the growing Nazi Party; nor to persuade Schuschnigg that the Czech Government itched to seize an Austrian company, an event that would shatter relations with Hitler. Both agreed that the company shares should be transferred to the great British company, Allied Assurance, which happened, of course, to have been founded by Nathan Rothschild and was still controlled by the family.

Louis’s brothers begged him to leave Austria while there was still time. But the cool, sophisticated, fifty-five-year-old bachelor Baron did not believe that disaster could overtake a Rothschild. Indeed Louis’s celebrated company, the Kreditanstalt, had recovered from a threat that seemed almost as dangerous as Hitler. In 1930 the Kreditanstalt tottered on the verge of bankruptcy, and was forced to suspend all payments. This was because the Federal Chancellor had begged Louis to take over the BodenKreditanstalt, the country’s largest agricultural bank, which was nearing collapse; and to extend credit to Balkan firms and governments, once part of the Austrian Empire, but which now were too impoverished to meet their obligations. Louis was unwise to accept, for a year later his life-saving operation landed his own company in the quagmire. However, the Rothschild family closed ranks and came to the rescue in a dramatic way, for Louis had pledged the Rothschild name. Years later Baron Guy explained: ‘My family raised the sum of eight million dollars, nearly a hundred million francs, a staggering sum at the time, so that it could never be said, not even once in History, that a Rothschild had failed to honour his signature.’[144]

The money enabled Louis to recover his position, and once again he controlled a network of industries throughout Central Europe. To flee from the enemy before his business empire was irrevocably lost would be, he decided, abject behaviour for Austria’s most famous Jew. Whatever he did, it would have to be done with panache.

In February 1938, scarcely eighteen months after Hitler’s assurances that he had no design on Austria, Schuschnigg was summoned to Berchtesgarten. All vestige of self-control had vanished and the German leader was wild-eyed and hysterical. Unless Schuschnigg appointed the Nazi leader, Seyss Inquart, to the Ministry of the Interior, German troops would invade his country. ‘Here is the draft of the document,’ cried Hitler, almost flinging the paper at him. ‘There is nothing to be discussed. I will not change one single iota. You will either sign it as it is and fulfil my demands within three days, or I will order the march into Austria.’

When Schuschnigg returned to Austria he did as he was told and gave Seyss Inquart the ministry. But at the same time he broadcast to the nation saying: ‘This far and no further.’ In Graz a mob of twenty thousand Nazis, infuriated by his speech, invaded the town square, tore down the Austrian flag and raised the German swastika. On 1 March a courier from Baron Édouard in Paris knocked on the door of Baron Louis’s chalet at Kitzbuhel, where he was skiing, begging him to leave Austria with no further delay. But although the nonchalant Louis put away his skis, he returned to Vienna.

Meanwhile rebellion fomented by Germany had broken out in many parts of the country and Schuschnigg announced that a plebiscite would be held to determine Austria’s future. This decision threw Hitler into such a fury that he sent Schuschnigg an ultimatum: unless he resigned, and appointed Seyss Inquart his successor, German troops would cross the frontier. Schuschnigg capitulated to both these demands but in the end, at 9 p.m. on the evening of n March, the German troops came anyway and Schuschnigg was arrested and thrown into jail.

The next morning Baron Louis, accompanied by his valet, went to the airport to fly to Italy where he was due to play polo. But it was too late. The S.S. were in charge of the field and confiscated his passport. ‘After that,’ said the valet, Édouard, ‘we went home and waited.’

In the evening two men with swastika arm bands knocked on the Rothschild door. A butler appeared and told them that Baron Louis was not at home. The next day six steel-helmeted soldiers called to take him away and this time the Baron received the spokesman. He would accompany the men, he said, but after luncheon, which was just about to be served. The soldiers held a whispered consultation and apparently could think of no reason why the Baron should not have his lunch. After coffee and liqueurs he departed with them and when he had not returned by nightfall, the valet packed his master’s toilet kit, books, bed-sheets, embroidered slippers, clothes for indoors and out. But when he arrived at police headquarters with the pigskin case embossed with the Rothschild crest, he was greeted with furious laughter and told to go home.

Baron Louis scarcely turned a hair at the hardships to which he was subjected. An athlete who climbed mountains and played polo, who rode the famous Lippizaners in the Spanish Riding School and was a scratch golfer, he possessed a body that was hard and fit. Indeed, when he was told to busy himself moving sandbags in the cellar, along with a number of Communist prisoners, he found that he could work quicker and better than his companions. ‘We got on rather well,’ he recalled later. ‘We agreed that it was the world’s most classless cellar.’

However, Louis was not relegated to the basement for long. Soon he found himself at the Hotel Metropole in Vienna which had been requisitioned by the Gestapo. He was placed in a room next to his old friend, Chancellor von Schuschnigg. Now he had twenty-four guards — ‘my grenadiers’, he called them; and he whiled away the tedious hours by lecturing them on geology and botany. Outside, only a few streets away, his home was being looted, not by unruly mobs, but systematically by the country’s new rulers. ‘I myself from our apartment in the Plosslgasse,’ wrote William Shirer, ‘watched squads of S.S. men carting off silver, tapestries, paintings and other loot from the Rothschild palace next door.’

Baron Louis was interviewed by a man named Weber, who introduced himself as an intermediary of Hermann Goering. The Baron could have his freedom if he paid Goering £40,000 and turned over Vitkowitz to the German Reich. But, the Baron explained with exaggerated apology, Vitkowitz no longer belonged to him. A few weeks later Weber was arrested. ‘Apparently internecine war had broken out in Berlin, and Goering suffered a set-back in favour of Heinrich Himmler. Himmler did not send an intermediary but travelled to Vienna and interviewed the Baron himself. He offered the prisoner a cigarette but Louis declined, his eyes searching the dreaded face of his inquisitor. Later he said indignantly: “That fellow had a sty in his eye, and was trying to hide it.”’

Louis, not the Nazis, dictated his own ransom terms, in conjunction with his family. For his freedom he would assign to the Third Reich all his Austrian assets. (He knew that the Nazis would seize them anyway.) But Vitkowitz would only be surrendered after he was safely out of the country — and for £3,000,000. This also was a bluff as Louis believed that war was inevitable, in which case the iron and steel works would pass out of his possession anyway.

Apparently Himmler did not share this view, as he did his best to persuade Louis to modify his terms. He began by trying to make the room of his distinguished prisoner more comfortable. His guards carried out his order by bringing in a number of hideous objects, including an orange velvet bed-cover, an ugly Louis XV vase, and a radio with a skirt sewed around the base. ‘The place looked like a Cracow bordello!’ Louis reminisced.

The Baron refused to bargain over the ransom terms and a few days later, he was told that Himmler had accepted his conditions. He was free to leave at once. But Louis was not a man to be ordered about, and to everyone’s astonishment he announced that he would remain until the morning. Eleven p.m. was too late an hour to disturb his friends, he explained, as the servants would be in bed.

A few days later Louis arrived safely in Paris, and two months later in July 1939, the Reich undertook to buy Vitkowitz for the agreed sum. But war broke out in September and the contract was never signed. However, when the holocaust was over pressure was applied to Communist Czechoslovakia to honour the agreement. The Rothschilds finally were compensated to the tune of £1,000,000, which everyone agreed was better than nothing at all.

*

While Baron Louis was busy transferring Vitkowitz to the care of his British relations, twenty-six-year-old Lord Rothschild, was instructing Messrs Sotheby and Co. to offer for sale the contents of his grandfather’s vast house at 148 Piccadilly. The house was almost a museum, packed with pictures and furniture and objets d’art acquired by the great Nathan’s son, Lionel. As Victor was a scientist, living at Cambridge, he had no use for the house; and without the house no place for the contents. So he came to the conclusion that there was no option but to sell the lot.

The sale began on 19 April 1937 and lasted four days, while a further three days were devoted to the auction of his grandmother’s wonderful silver collection, which had belonged to her father, Baron Willy von Rothschild of Frankfurt. On the opening day twenty-one pictures were sold. ‘In realizing £41,252 the first day’s sale at 148 Piccadilly far exceeded expectations,’ wrote the correspondent of The Times. This was because The Courtyard by Pieter de Hooch went for £17,500, while in 1928, only nine years earlier, a work by the same artist had fetched but £11,600. A Maidservant Returning from Market by Rembrandt’s pupil, Nicholas Maes, which had sold in 1822 for £76 went for £1,100; an interior by Eglon von der Heer which in 1823 had fetched £430, for £800; an inn scene by Philips Wouvermans, sold in 1832 for £120, for £850.

Almost all the prices were regarded as high. Frank Partridge paid a thousand pounds for a Louis XV marquetery bureau de dame; a rock-crystal chandelier, inscribed ‘F. Rinnaldi, 1648 Milan’, went for £340; a sixteenth-century Augsburg clock for £620. Duveen bid against a number of French dealers for a secrétaire by Martin Carlin, cabinet maker to Louis XVI, which he secured for £8,000; a pair of Gobelins tapestries designed by Charles le Brun went for £1,300.

The proceeds from the sale of continental silver which took place in Sotheby’s auction rooms totalled £40,000, which also was considered ‘eminently satisfactory’. The two rarest items were a painted ostrich egg cup mounted in silver gilt, the work of a sixteenth-century Leipzig craftsman, Elias Geier, which went for £2,900; and a Strasburg crystal and gilt double cup, of the same date, which fetched £2,000. Altogether the contents of the house brought a grand total of £125,000.

That same year 148 Piccadilly was sold to a Garden Club. When a reporter asked Lord Rothschild whether he was planning to buy another house in London he replied laconically: ‘I’ll think about that when the forthcoming war has come and gone.’

Although it was rare for a Rothschild to dispose of a Rothschild inheritance, Victor was not entirely devoid of family characteristics. One of his most strongly developed traits was a collector’s instinct. Throughout the 1930s he bought a few pictures (among them several Cézannes), a few pieces of early eighteenth-century silver, a few rare books and manuscripts, which today, in the aggregate, are valued at £2,000,000. However, many of these pictures and pieces are no longer in his possession. For instance in 1951 he donated to Trinity College, Cambridge, the library he had assembled which included such items as Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge with corrections in Coleridge’s hand-writing; Gibbon’s annotated copy of Herodotus; and Gray’s Odes, annotated by Horace Walpole.