The House of Rothschild (120 page)

15
The total debt was reduced from 237 million to 142 million Turkish pounds and the annual charges from 15 to just 3 million—i.e. from 6 per cent to just 2 per cent of the capital sum. This was a generous if realistic settlement.

16
By 1914, Germans held 22 per cent of the Ottoman public debt, compared with figures of 63 per cent for France and 15 per cent for Britain.

17
Baring had been a member of the board of the Caisse since 1877 and served as one of the Anglo-French Comptrollers in 1879. After a brief tour of duty in India, he had returned to Egypt in 1881 to become consul-general. With the abolition of dual control in 1883. financial power was effectively transferred to him as British Agent, a post he retained until 1907.

18
The surviving balance sheets indicate substantial holdings of Egyptian paper, e.g. £144,348 of Suez Canal shares in 1886.

1
Disraeli was created Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876, but he will continue to be referred to as “Disraeli” to avoid confusion.

2
Emma requested that Gladstone send her, by way of “remembrance,” “a little chip when you remove a branch from one of your beautiful trees.”

3
Most of the documents detailing Disraeli’s financial dealings with the Rothschilds were apparently destroyed when he died, so it may be that they assisted him in more ways than this account suggests.

4
Other regular visitors included Henry Calcraft (twenty visits), Permanent Secretary to the Board of Trade, the banker Horace Farquhar, the Austrian diplomat Albert Mensdorff and the Russian ambassador Baron de Staal.

5
Harcourt’s Ground Game Act had given tenants equal rights with landowners to kill ground game and was much resented by dedicated hunters like the Rothschilds.

6
It is impossible to establish the details of this extraordinary affair because “papers in the case were put away in the drawer of the Secretary’s cupboard.”

7
As Bouvier notes, the Rothschilds now shared the spoils of government bond issues with an elite of joint-stock banks: the Credit Lyonnais, the Société Générale, the Comptoir d’Escompte and Paribas.

1
Revelstoke had in fact been a guest at Tring in February 1890: “It is rather amusing to see the heads of the two great rival financial Houses together,” noted Edward Hamilton. “They take stock of each other with jealous eyes, the jealousy being somewhat ill-disguised.”

2
As usual, the Rothschilds charged a fee and costs amounting to £6,000, though in fact the money does nor even seem to have crossed the Channel.

3
The other members were Walter Burns of J. S. Morgan, Everard Hambro, Charles Goschen of the Bank of England, Herbert Gibbs; George Drabble of the Bank of London and the River Plate. There was also a French representative (Cahen d‘Anvers) and a German (Hansemann). The committee met regularly until December 1897.

4
It has recently been suggested that the Rothschilds’ interest in the bullion business had waned by the 1870s because of a lack of commitment on the part of Anthony. However, it is worth noting that as late as 1875 a nominal fine of £5 (plus £1 8s costs) was imposed on him for allowing excessive smoke emissions from the refinery—hardly a sign of inactivity.

5
Pierpont Morgan was resentful of the Rothschilds’
de haut en bas
manner: “[H]aving anything to do with Rothschilds & Belmont in this matter is extremely unpalatable to us and I would give almost anything if they were out. The whole treatment of Rothschilds to all the party, from Father downwards[,] is such, as to my mind, no one should stand.” Natty never called on Walter Burns, the resident senior partner at J. S. Morgan; Burns always came to New Court.

6
Between 1865 and 1890, £121 million worth of US railway stocks were issued through London merchant banks, of which Rothschilds were responsible for just £800,000. It was not until 1908-9 that New Court undertook major issues totalling £6 million for the Pennsylvania Railway and the Grand Trunk Pacific line.

7
The other British delegates at Brussels were Sir Charles Rivers-Wilson, Comptroller General of the Public Debt Office, Sir Charles Fremantle, Deputy Master of the Mint and the bimetallist Sir William Houldsworth. The Rothschild plan was in many ways more practicable than the two other plans presented to the conference by Adolf Soetbeer and Moritz Levy.

8
This was around 2.5 per cent of total Rothschild profits; as a percentage of the total Spanish budget, the revenue received by the government was a little less than 1 per cent.

9
In 1887 South Africa had accounted for 0.8 per cent of world gold production; by 1892 the figure was 15 per cent and by 1898 25 per cent.

10
The price was raised still higher—[o above £79—bya similar agreement in 1899.

11
The other life governors were to be Rhodes, Alfred Beit, F. S. P Stow and Baring Gould, though the last was ultimately excluded at the insistence of either Barnato or Rhodes. After much negotiation, it was agreed that the governors should receive 25 per cent of all annual profits in excess of £1.44 million, a right they enjoyed until 1901.

12
Of the £1 million capital, Natty provided £10,000.

13
In later versions of Rhodes’s will, this idea was transformed into the more realistic scheme for Oxford scholarships to encourage (in Natty’s words) “Colonials and even Americans to study on the banks of the Isis and to learn, as Rhodes did there, to love his country and to make it prosperous.” Any remaining interest on his fortune was to be used by the Trustees “in the interest of, for the development of the Anglo-Saxon race.” In this final version Natty had in fact been replaced as a Trustee.

14
The Uitlanders’ main grievance was that in 1890 the Transvaal government had effectively disfranchised them by extending the residence qualification necessary for the right to vote in elections to the First Volksraad and the Presidency.

15
The loan was subsequently issued in Germany.

1
Note also the Goncourts’ comment: “[D]ans cette ancienne cite [Samarcande] ... on ignore qui’ilyaen Europe un pays qui s‘appelle la France, on ignore qu’ilyaun homme politique du nom de Bismarck, on sait seulement qu‘il existe dans cette Europe un particulier immensément riche, qui s’appelle Rothschild.”

2
And by late 1897 McDonnell was negotiating with Natty about the possibility of Rothschild financial support for Sudanese railways.

3
From a low of 3 roubles to the pound in 1874, the rouble appreciated to 4.67 in 1887, then fell back to 3.57 in 1890. It was initially stabilised at a rate of 3.88, then revalued to 9.45 in 1897.

4
Leo added revealingly that “it would have been better if he had refused at once—[but] the finance minister fortunately is a good practical man of business & will do nothing to spite the R[othschild]s as people imagined.”

5
The Gunzbergs were a Jewish family who had made their fortune in the vodka business and then diversified into banking and mining.

6
Alphonse also cited the Tsar’s enthusiasm for the occult as a cause for concern.

7
Alphonse was equally suspicious of the Kaiser’s short-lived aspiration to woo the working classes.

8
In November 1897 the Germans seized Kiao-Chow, the main port of the Shantung province, a move partly influenced by Salisbury’s refusal to give them control of Samoa as they had requested in 1894; the Russian demand for a “lease” of Port Arthur in March 1898 prompted a British naval response.

9
Chamberlain favoured an alliance of powers against Russia, foreseeing the piecemeal partition of China if Britain continued to act alone as over Wei-hai-wei.

10
However, there was no substance to the suspicion that Natty tried to push Moberly Bell out of Printing House Square during the financial reorganisation of The Times in which he had a hand in 1907-8. In Schwabach’s view Natty was “by no means particularly pro-German” and “would not dream of allowing German influence on the paper.”

11
Warburg applied for £1 million but had to be content with £26,000—still a substantial sum.

12
Hamilton to Asquith, Jan. 22, 1907: “[T]he state cannot raise an indefinite amount of money. We all thought so during the Boer War, but we now know that we have damaged our credit very materially by the amount we borrowed during that war.”

13
He was also awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Francis Joseph of Austria.

14
As usual in the Third Republic, there was a political dimension to this financial problem: Paul Cambon claimed that Rouvier had speculated on a rise in Russian bonds on the basis of Delcassé’s assurances that there would be no war. Delcassé called Rouvier a man “who would sell France for a speculation on the stock exchange.”

15
“Naturally,” Natty reported in a revealing postscript, “I have given the most categorical denial & I have done all in my power to prevent the Jewish writers in the International Press from attacking Russian Finance.”

16
Stolypin replied vaguely that he was “contemplat[ing] legislation for the amelioration of the lot of the Jews in Russia.”

1
Natty also kept Lord Salisbury informed about foreign purchases of Maxim guns, which he regarded as a sign of bellicose intent.

2
The meeting was certainly not a purely Conservative affair: Schuster and Avebury were both present and also signed the earlier petition, but their criticisms of the budget were very different from Natty’s and Schuster declined to join the Budget Protest League set up to continue the campaign.

3
As Leo commented, “It certainly wants a great deal of tact to steer clear of Scylla and Charybdis, i.e. to work for Haldane on Friday and to speak publicly against his policy on Tuesday.”

4
Cutting from
Western Daily Mercury,
Jan. 10, 1910: “Lord Rothschild ... knowing that this is a Free Trade country with a good deal of money to spare, gathers his money together and loans it to foreigners. And very properly! In a speech in the House of Lords not so long ago, he quoted his father as saying that there was nothing more fruitful for the trade of a country than the fact that it was able to advance money to foreign lands. I don’t know why he quoted his father, unless he wanted to prove that wisdom is not always hereditary (laughter).” The two continued to quarrel publicly for many months. In 1913 Natty attacked Lloyd George’s use of funds from the National Insurance scheme for building houses as “jerry building speculation.”

5
Sassoon was nevertheless adopted as the Conservative and Unionist candidate and won the seat.

1
Rumour had it that his debts were in excess of £750,000. Thereafter, Walter was effectively pensioned off with an allowance to finance his researches and the Tring museum.

2
Though it should be noted that like his brother he did dismally at Cambridge, obtaining a Third in finals: theirs was a talent unsuited to established academic institutions.

3
When he came across the property he was delighted to discover that his father already owned it.

4
I am grateful to Miriam Rothschild for details of her father’s life.

5
He was killed on the same day that Evelyn died of his wounds in hospital.

6
According to Cohen, “Her immaculate butler, Lester, used to open the door and proclaim, as though he were announcing a visitor: ‘The Zeppelins, my Lady.”’

7
Walter served on committees of the Jewish Board of Guardians and the Jewish Peace Society; Lionel succeeded Leo as treasurer of the Board of Deputies; and the presidency of the United Synagogue remained in Rothschild hands until 1942.

8
He and his wife asked to be buried in Palestine after their deaths (in 1934 and 1935 respectively), though this did not happen until 1954. The PICA’s assets were donated to the state of Israel after Jimmy’s death in 1957.

9
By contrast, Rothschild links to North America were few: the French house raised money for the Compagnie du Nord with a $15 million bond issue in New York, and returned the compliment by investing—unwisely, as it proved—in the New York City Interborough Rapid Transit.

10
By 1928 it was operating in twenty-two different countries with a host of different interests in metallurgy and chemicals.

11
After an initial period when the bidding was done by telephone, it was decided to hold a formal meeting in the Rothschild office. Represented were the four bullion brokers—Mocatta & Goldsmid, Pixley & Abell, Sharps & Wilkins and Samuel Montagu—and the other major refiner Johnson Matthey. Quaintly, all the bidders were given a small Union Jack flag which they could raise when they needed to telephone their head offices. When a flag went up, the bidding was suspended until it was lowered again.

12
The South African mines entrusted their agency to the South African Reserve Bank in 1926 and in 1932 the Bank of England took over the role of principal seller, though N. M. Rothschild continued to act as the Bank’s agent.

13
Interest on the loan was charged at 4 per cent until the end of 1933 and 5 per cent thereafter; the money itself was from the French Rothschilds’ private fortunes: Edmond put up 70 million francs, Edouard 35 million, Robert 15 million, Henri 10 million, his son James 3 million and Philippe also 3 million.

14
After dabbling in cinema, Philippe eventually devoted his energies to developing the vineyards on his father’s estate at Mouton. It was he who introduced the practice of château-bottling after the war.