Charles Rothschild

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Charles Rothschild, 1908

Nathaniel Charles Rothschild , called Charles, (born May 9, 1877 ; † October 12, 1923 ) was a British banker from the Rothschild dynasty , entomologist and conservationist. He was an internationally recognized specialist in fleas .

Life

He was the son of the banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild and Emma Rothschild, attended Harrow School from 1891 , studied natural sciences in Cambridge from 1895 to 1898 (1898 BA, 1901 MA) and, after several trips, joined the family company NM Rothschild & Sons as a partner. Although more interested in natural history, he took his company responsibilities very seriously. He was also the chairman of the board of the Alliance Insurance Company . During the First World War, after the death of his father in 1915, he was very much involved in the family company and suffered a nervous breakdown in 1916, from which he recovered only slowly. He committed suicide in 1923 after suffering from chronic meningitis.

plant

He has been interested in entomology since childhood. During his studies and in professional life he also dealt with chemistry and metallurgy (handling of gold). As an entomologist, he had scientific ambitions.

Rothschild collected and dealt primarily with fleas (and other ectoparasites), a passion his daughter continued. His collection (with over 1 million specimens of fleas) is now in the Rothschild Collection in the Natural History Museum. He discovered and first described the oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) as a carrier of the bubonic plague in 1903 . He found him in 1901 on an expedition in Shendi in Sudan. The find also provided an explanation as to why some districts in India remained plague-free (the transmitting Flohart was missing). In addition to fleas, he also collected butterflies and some families of beetles (such as longhorn beetles), mainly from Great Britain and Hungary, and was an expert on wild plants. In his gardens in Tring and Ashton Wold he devoted himself mainly to wild irises , about which he kept a detailed book, which was included in the monographs of the botanist William Rickatson Dykes (1877-1925) on the iris.

He supported nature conservation in Great Britain by buying up the wetland Wicken Fen in 1899 (Great Britain's first nature reserve), in which other personalities such as George Henry Verrall participated. He transferred Wicken Fen to the National Trust. In 1910 he bought another nature reserve, Woodwalton Fen, where he built a stilt house and hunted butterflies at night. His country estate, Ashton Wold, in Northamptonshire, was designed for conservation, especially as a home for butterflies. In 1912 he founded the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, a forerunner of what would later become The Wildlife Trust, after drawing one of the earliest consequences from the observation that the natural environment had to be protected in order for the species to survive. By 1915 a list of 284 prospective wildlife sanctuaries had been drawn up in Great Britain (Rotschilds Reserves).

He worked as an entomologist with his friend Karl Jordan and supported, for example, the research of ornithologist and malacologist Tom Iredale and other entomologists and entomological institutes who were financially in difficulty. Numerous first descriptions come from Rothschild.

1915/16 he was President of the Royal Entomological Society of London . In 1905 he became High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire. He was Deputy Lieutenant of the City of London and Justice of the Peace.

family

He was married to the Hungarian Rózsika Rothschild (Rozsika Edle von Wertheimstein) since 1907 , with whom he had four children. They met while hunting butterflies in the Carpathian Mountains. They lived in Tring and in London. His daughter Miriam Rothschild was also an entomologist and flea expert like her father (she compiled a catalog of the flea collection of Charles Rothschild), another daughter Pannonica de Koenigswarter was a legendary patroness of bebop in New York . Another daughter was Elizabeth Charlotte Rothschild (1909–1988), called Liberty. His son Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild (1910–1990), inherited the peerage ( Baron Rothschild ), since Charles died before his older brother Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild . Victor Rothschild was also a zoologist. His brother Lionel Walter Rothschild was also very interested in zoology and put together one of the largest private zoological collections, especially of birds, at his residence in Tring (Tring Zoological Museum).

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Miriam Rothschild, Peter Warren, Rothschild´s Reserves, Time and Fragile Nature, Harley Books 1997
personal data
SURNAME Rothschild, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rothschild, Nathaniel Charles (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British Rothschild dynasty banker, entomologist and conservationist
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1877
DATE OF DEATH October 12, 1923