Lord Rothschild, 1868-1937

Abstract

The trend towards natural sciences, manifest in various members of the house of Rothschild of this and the previous generation, may truly be said to have dominated the life of Lionel Walter Lord Rothschild, who died at Tring on 27 August, 1937, at the age of 68. One might have expected that his early love for butterflies and beetles would be eclipsed by the usual pursuits of a rich man in the environment into which he was born as eldest child of the first Baron Rothschild, the head of the famous banking house. But the education at home which deprived him of the leavening influence of other boys tended to bind him firmly to his collections, where he found solace from the supervision by governess and tutor so irksome for the shy and delicate boy. Having ample means and opportunities to indulge in his pastime, the collections had already assumed a considerable size when he went to Bonn and then to Magdalene College, Cambridge. The contacts he made at these Universities gave him a wider outlook in Zoology, but as he had no intention of going in for examinations—his father had taken a first in Botany at Cambridge—his biological education was general rather than intimate in any branch. The details of morphology did not interest him so much as the animal as a whole, and as he had a keen eye for differences in appearance and a very retentive memory he acquired an astonishingly wide knowledge of species in the many groups of animals (and even plants) in which he was interested. At Cambridge he came under the influence of Professor A. Newton, the great ornithologist, and from that time the study of birds became one of his main pursuits.