A PORTLY man in a bowler hat rides a carriage down the grimy streets of London. Pulling the carriage are six zebras, their black-and-white markings clearly visible through the London pea-soup fog. It’s 1898, and he is on his way to Buckingham Palace to prove to the perpetually not-amused Queen Victoria that zebras can be tamed just like horses. Nevertheless, he watches with ill-suppressed panic as Princess Alexandra reaches out to pet the lead zebra, or so the story goes.
It sounds a little crazy, but when you’re as wealthy as Lionel Walter Rothschild, the second Baron de Rothschild and an heir to the Rothschild & Sons banking empire, you get an automatic upgrade to “eccentric”.
And that extended to his looks. With small feet and – particularly in his later years – great roundness, Rothschild looked, some said, like a grand piano on castors. A decade earlier, crippled by shyness and uninterested in accumulating money, he had no desire to enter the family business. Instead, he was obsessed with nature. Even so, in 1889, at the age of 21, he went to London to begin working for the family firm. But he hated it, and was distracted by his expanding natural history collection – more enchanted by the idea of a rare butterfly from Peru, or an undescribed flea. So after a few years, his father did what any sympathetic parent keen to indulge their child’s hobby would do: he built his boy a zoological museum at the family pile in Tring, about 50 kilometres from London.
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When Lionel retired from banking in 1908, he was free to devote himself – and his mountain of cash – to collecting. He retreated to the museum, already the largest privately owned natural history collection in the world.
Rothschild collected biological specimens from far and wide in an era when exotic travel was a difficult, costly and dangerous job; one the timid baron was happy to outsource. He sent scientists to all corners of the world, some of them renowned experts, such as entomologist Karl Jordan and ornithologist Ernst Hartert. In 1928, Rothschild sent 24-year-old Ernst Mayr – later a superstar evolutionary biologist – on his first expedition. In search of birds of paradise, Mayr was sent to New Guinea, an island populated by cannibal tribes. Sometimes, walking into mountain villages, Mayr was the first white person the locals had ever seen.
Death in paradise
Mayr survived, but many of Rothschild’s collectors did not. Entomologist William Doherty died of dysentery in Nairobi in 1901; George Ockenden was lost to typhoid in 1906 in the Peruvian Andes. Ornithologist Noël van Someren was killed by a charging buffalo in 1921. In India, a leopard bit Stuart Baker’s left arm off. Some collectors simply disappeared. “Collecting in the tropics is a risky business,” wrote Rothschild’s niece Miriam, dryly.
Rothschild himself made just one long-haul collecting trip, a six-month expedition to North Africa and the Sahara in 1913. “Great numbers of moths were caught on most of the evenings with acetylene lamps,” he wrote, “sometimes many hundreds within 3 hours.”
Rothschild’s appetite for specimens was rapacious. The collection quickly became vast. It included more than 300,000 bird skins and 200,000 bird eggs. He had around 300,000 beetles, arranged in drawers and display boxes and stacked on chairs, in rooms and outhouses. His Lepidoptera holdings were almost as large as the entire butterfly collection at what was then the British Museum in London: more than 2 million pinned butterflies and moths representing more than 100,000 species. He had exotic mammals from New Guinea, gorillas from Africa, reptiles from India and the Galapagos Islands. Amphibians. Fish. The entire natural world was represented.
He kept a living menagerie too. He was obsessed with cassowaries, and owned a flock of more than 60. Kangaroos and ostriches roamed his estate. Pangolins clung to the trees. And 144 giant tortoises trundled across the manicured lawns. Rothschild – in top hat, with his handlebar moustache elaborately waxed – was photographed riding one, dangling a lettuce leaf in front of its mouth to entice it to move. He also introduced the edible dormouse (Glis glis) to the UK, some of which made their escape: the British population is still at its highest in the countryside around Tring.
A collection like Rothschild’s was more than just an eccentric’s folly. It was a key scientific resource, boosting our understanding of Earth’s biodiversity. In the years following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, it became a vital tool for probing evolution and speciation. In 1862, after studying the structure of a species of Madagascan orchid, Darwin deduced that there must be a species of moth with an incredible 28-centimetre-long proboscis that lived where the orchid grew. It would be the plant’s only means of pollination. In 1903, Rothschild and his insect curator Karl Jordan found the moth: Xanthopan morganii praedicta.
“Rothschild rode a giant tortoise, dangling a lettuce leaf in front of it”
In time, Rothschild grew scientifically influential. Along with his collaborators, he named thousands of new species. Other people named more than a hundred after him. Many of the specimens in his collection were holotypes – the single specimens used as representatives to describe entire species.
For 40 years, Rothschild ran his natural history empire from Tring. Eventually, though, all empires collapse. And in time, Rothschild’s crumbled too.
In 1931, he found himself in a tricky spot. Apparently, his shyness hadn’t extended to the ladies. For decades, he had been juggling relationships with at least three mistresses. For two of them he bought houses and paid monthly stipends. But a third woman, identity unknown, blackmailed Rothschild. He agreed to the terms, but needed a chunk of cash, fast.
Looming ruin was an unfamiliar situation. The museum and his mistresses had taken a huge toll on his finances, and his extended family was in no mood to bail him out. So he decided to sell his most valuable asset – his superlatively stocked, irreplaceable collection of bird skins – to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It went for $225,000, perhaps a tenth of its true value. Rothschild stipulated that he needed $25,000 immediately. And with that, his bird collection was gone. The unique, brightly coloured specimens that some had given their lives to accumulate left Tring forever.
Rothschild’s birds had defined him. Their loss must have broken him. One by one, the other animals died at Tring – the pangolins, ostriches and wolves. Cassowaries from the flock were stuffed and mounted as each bird died.
Then, in 1937, Rothschild died too. He was not stuffed and mounted. Like the zebras walking through the fog at Piccadilly Circus, Rothschild was gone, but not quite forgotten. Thankfully, the collections of this eccentric banker were too big to fail, and they continue to pay cultural and scientific dividends. His bird collection remains in New York, the butterflies and beetles, along with the mammals and a few remaining bird skins, became part of the Natural History Museum collection in London. The still houses a key part of his collection and, like Rothschild, bulges with Victorian charm.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The financier who bought all of nature”
