Charles Rothschild - Biography

Nathaniel Charles Rothschild (9 May 1877 – 12 October 1923), known as "Charles", was an English banker and entomologist and a member of the Rothschild family.

1 Family
2 Nature conservation
3 Public Service
4 Marriage
5 See also

Family

He was the son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild and Emma Rothschild (née von Rothschild).

Charles predeceased his older brother Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild (1868–1937) who died without issue. The peerage therefore passed to Charles's son Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild.

He boarded at Harrow School, which he found somewhat traumatizing for incidents of bullying on account of his religion. "If I ever have a son," he wrote to his wife, "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".

Charles Rothschild worked as a partner in the family bank NM Rothschild and Sons in London. However, like his zoologist brother, he devoted much of his energies to entomology and natural history collecting. His collection of fleas is now in the Rothschild Collection at the British Museum. He also discovered and named the plague vector flea, Xenopsylla cheopis (Rothschild), also known as the oriental rat flea, at Shendi, Sudan, on an expedition in 1901, publishing his finding in 1903.

Charles went to Rothschild's Bank every morning; despite all his interest in science and in natural history, he never missed a day. He was also very interested in the gold refinery operated by Rothschilds and invented all sorts of things for collecting gold, and working on gold from a scientific point of view.

Suffering from encephalitis, in 1923 Charles Rothschild committed suicide.

Nature conservation

Today Charles Rothschild is regarded as a pioneer of nature conservation in Britain, and is credited with establishing the UK's first nature reserve when he bought Wicken Fen, near Ely, in 1899 and Woodwalton Fen, near Huntingdon, in 1910. During his lifetime he built and managed his estate at Ashton Wold in Northamptonshire to maximise its suitability for wildlife, especially butterflies. He was concerned about the loss of wildlife habitats, and in 1912 set up the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, the forerunner of The Wildlife Trusts partnership. In 1915 the Society produced a schedule of the best wildlife sites in the country, some of which were purchased as nature reserves.

Public Service

He served as High Sheriff of Northamptonshire for 1905.

Marriage

In 1907 Charles Rothschild married Rozsika Edle von Wertheimstein (1870 – 30 June 1940), a Hungarian baroness and descendent of an originally Jewish family, who were one of the wealthiest families in Europe and had made their fortune over a century before the Rothschilds. She was born in 1870 at Nagyvarad, Hungary (now the Romanian city of Oradea), the daughter of a retired army officer, Baron Alfred Edler von Wertheimstein.

Rozsika was one of seven children. She was a very beautiful woman with dark brown eyes. Each eye had a purple ring to it, and they could flicker strangely. She was a voracious reader. Every day she had a Hungarian newspaper, a German newspaper, an English newspaper, and quite often a French one, too, and she read all the political articles in these papers. Rozsika had been a champion lawn tennis player in Hungary.

After their marriage on 6 February 1907, they lived at Tring and in London. Charles, who worked in the family’s banking business was a dedicated naturalist in his spare time: the young couple had met on a butterfly-collecting trip in the Carpathian Mountains. In the evening, the Rothschilds might go together to a concert or a dinner party, but Charles really preferred to sort out his butterflies. Charles's suicide in 1923 when he was 46 years old was a severe shock to his wife and four children. Rozsika von Wertheimstein died on 30 June 1940.

Children

They had four children:

Miriam Louisa Rothschild (1908–2005), a zoologist
Elizabeth Charlotte Rothschild (1909–1988), known as "Liberty"
Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild (1910–1990), known as "Victor"
Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild (1913–1988), known as "Nica", (later Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter), a bebop jazz enthusiast and patroness of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker