Lord Rothschild has died aged 87, his family have said. The Rothschild family told PA on Monday, ‘our father Jacob was a towering presence in many people’s lives’ and that he would ‘be buried in accordance with Jewish custom in a small family ceremony.’ Rothschild’s life was an incredibly significant one in many different areas. He was a major figure in the banking industry as well as an enormous contributor to national culture. He also held major public posts, such as the chairmanship of the National Gallery.
Rothschild was born Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild on 29 April 1936, the only son of Victor, 3rd Lord Rothschild and his first wife, Barbara Hutchinson, whose mother was a member of the Bloomsbury Set and mistress to Clive Bell and Duncan Grant. In the skeins of the wider Rothschild dynasty, Victor was the great-great-grandson of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the founder of the family’s British branch. Nathan was sent by his father, Mayer Amschel Rothschild from Frankfurt to buy cloth in Manchester in 1798 and subsequently established a counting house on St Swithin's Lane in the City of London in 1810. With a father who was a Cambridge Zoologist and a Bloomsbury mother, Jacob was born with considerable intellectual pedigree.
Jacob’s upbringing was an intense and difficult one, with a disparaging father. In one anecdote, Jacob recalled being summoned to a drawing room at five years old, packed with guests and asked by his father whether he believed in God and if not, why not. Onloookers sometimes commented that Victor sought revenge for the failure of his marriage to Barbara Hutchinson (his first marriage) by taking it out on Jacob, his only son from that match. Jacob was educated at Eton, did National Service as a lieutenant in the Life Guards and then matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he won a First under the tutelage of Hugh Trevor Roper (Lord Dacre). At Oxford he was a member of the Bullingdon Club.
Jacob worked briefly for the accountants Cooper Brothers and Morgan Stanley before joining the family bank, NM Rothschild as a junior partner in 1963. Though he rapidly made his mark on the business, Jacob’s elder cousin Evelyn de Rothschild had been pre-ordained as a leader of the firm’s next generation. Jacob clearly outstripped his cousin in terms of acumen and appetite for risk – this led to an emergent tension which gradually developed over the years.
Jacob built up various areas of the business and helped the Rothschild Investment Trust (RIT) to flourish. Ever the risk-taker, Jacob gradually became convinced that the traditional approach to merchant banking was antiquated and tabled numerous grand plans to evolve the family model, one such plan was codenamed ‘War and Peace’. Jacob increasingly became a rival to Evelyn for chairmanship of the bank – but other influential figures, including Jacob’s father, were not inclined to support him. When Evelyn succeeded as chairman in 1976, Jacob had seen enough. In 1980, he sold his stake in the bank for and resigned as a director, taking with him the management of RIT.
Heading up various businesses he subsequently founded, Jacob became known as a punchy player during the wild west days of 1980s takeovers. He played a role in the huge Guinness takeover of Distillers but his biggest gambit came in the form of a 1989 bid for British American Tobacco, a manoeuvre conducted in coordination with Sir James Goldsmith and Kerry Packer. The £13bn coup ended in failure.
In 1990, Jacob succeeded to the peerage (along with a baronetcy dating from 1847). By this time, his business commitments had been scaled back, though he continued to preside over a private investment group, RIT Capital Partners and Five Arrows (referring to Mayer Amschel Rothschild's five sons.) RIT became one of the largest investment trusts on the LSE, with billions of pounds worth of net assets. Between 2003 and 2008, Jacob was chairman of BSkyB television. He was also a Member of the council for the Duchy of Cornwall, assisting Charles, then Prince of Wales in the running of his estates.
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Alongside Jacob’s tour de force in the world of business, his life included massive contributions to the arts. The conservative peer Ed Vaizey, who was culture minister between 2010 and 2016, praised Rothschild as ‘one of Britain’s greatest cultural philanthropists who did so much to support the arts in this country’.
Jacob’s close friend, Sir James Goldsmith once said of him, ‘It depends which day it is: on one, Jacob is an excellent banker. The next, he is absorbed by art and heritage. He has been torn between the two strands all his life.’ His potency as a patron of the arts was bolstered by his deal-making skills, his ability to support his interests with his own money and the friendship of other wealthy patrons with whom he could coordinate.
The former Chancellor, George Osborne, now chair of trustees at the British Museum, paid tribute to Lord Rothschild on X today: ‘He made the very most of the privilege he was born into, contributing hugely to the cultural and commercial life of Britain. His contributions to the Waddesdon gallery make it one of the jewels of the British Museum. Smart, curious, full of new projects and with a dry humour. He will be missed.’
Rothschild's first public post was as chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery in 1985. He was appointed shortly after Charles, then Prince of Wales, made a public injunction against a proposed avant garde redevelopment, which he described as ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’. Rothschild oversaw the imposition of a plainer design, which he persuaded the Sainsburys to finance. Rothschild also buttered up his neighbour, Sir Paul Getty to give the gallery £50m, massively boosting its ability to bid for important works of art.
When Rothschild stepped down as chairman in 1991, he himself paid for the restoration of the central hall. In recognition of this parting gift, a new inscription was added by the National Gallery to the frieze: Jacobi Rothschild Munificenta Integrum Restituta (‘Restored to its former state by the generosity of Jacob Rothschild’).
Another iconic restoration project carried out by Rothschild was that of Spencer House. In 1985, his company bought a lease on Spencer House, the 18th-century Palace of Earl Spencer (right round the corner from the King's Clarence House.) At the gala dinner in which the principal rooms were unveiled for the first time, the Princess of Wales described the project as ‘the most exciting present of her life’.
The other towering restoration project completed by Jacob is that of the Rothschild’s own estate at Waddesdon. In 1988 he inherited the bulk of the £92m estate of Dollie de Rothschild, widow of James de Rothschild, a scion of the family’s French branch. Waddesdon manor is a bona fide French chateau in the leafy-birchy Bucks countryside. It was originally built to function more as a showcase than a house, displaying the magnificent collections of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, along with his exceptional wine cellar. The house had originally been given to the National Trust but once Jacob took it over, he oversaw its restoration at his own expense.
As owner of Waddesdon, Rothschild once gave an interview to Tatler about the frivolous new folly there. The cake-like sculpture-folly called ‘Wedding Cake’ was made in collaboration with the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos and was known by Rothschild as the ‘gâteau in the château’. The gateau is not the only piece of wacky art Lord Rothschild accumulated in the garden: he also had the Pavilion de Thé, an enormous wrought iron teapot and the Lafite Candelsticks (made from Lafite magnums in supersized form), which were positioned in front of the dairy. These eccentric, exuberant and hedonistic installations were part of a general creative vision of Jacob’s. ‘You could say that Waddesdon is an ode to pleasure, romance and beauty at every turn,’ he told Tatler.
When asked by Tatler’s Delilah Khomo how he would spend a dream evening at his folly, he replied: ‘I have had a lifelong love affair with the music of Bach, mostly piano and cello, so those sounds would fill the air.’
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‘In terms of my perfect dinner guests, they might include the historian and philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin (the cleverest man I have ever met, who taught me while I was at Christ Church, Oxford). He once came to my student room with Greta Garbo, who was intimidatingly silent but ravishing. Then Rudolf Nureyev and Lynn Seymour from ballet, and Nabokov from literature would always be welcome.’ It seems fair to say that, had they all been alive at the same time, Rothschild was probably one of the few people with the social clout to bring such a guest list into reality.
Rothschild also acted as chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, a body which later incorporated responsibility for the distribution of national lottery funds. Two of his great successes included the acquisition of Lord Nelson’s letters as well as Sir Winston Churchill’s papers for the nation.
His other great restoration triumph was that of Somerset House, the vast palatial mass of masonry between the Strand and the Embankment. Rothschild helped turn Somerset House from a car park and a bland lump of Civil Service offices into one of the most important arts venues in London.
In his leisured life, Jacob also had a long standing connection to Greece, through his mother’s third marriage to a Greek artist, Niko Ghika. He kept a house in Corfu, overlooking the Corfu Straits between Corfu and Albania. There his yacht could often be seen moored in summer, complete with the red helicopter on its rear-oriented helipad. In Corfu, Jacob pursued his interest in Byronic memorabilia and also supported archaeological work at the ancient city of Butrint in Albania. Hannah Rothschild Brookfield, Jacob’s daughter, once told Sotheby’s, ‘Spending every summer on the island was etched into my earliest memories.’ The Rothschild family have attracted all kinds of powerplayers to Corfu – as well as royalty, with Charles and Camilla visiting in 2017.
Lord Rothschild was a figurehead of the Anglo-Jewish community, acting as president of the Institute of Jewish Affairs and also a longstanding member of the Reform Jewish synagogue at Marble Arch. He harboured an enduring dedication to Israel and led a delegation of 20 family members to open the Supreme Court Building in Tel Aviv, a gift from the Rothschild’s Yad Hanadiv foundation. He was appointed GBE in 1998, joining the Order of Merit in 2002 and knighted CVO for services to the Duchy of Cornwall in 2020.
In 1961 he married Serena Dunn. Dunn is the granddaughter of a Canadian Baronet on her father’s side and of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn on her mother’s. She died before Jaocb, in 2019. Lord Rothschild is survived by three daughters, Hannah, Beth and Emily, and one son, Nat, who succeeds him as 5th Baron and 6th Baronet.
