Lord Rothschild

Lord Rothschild0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty four, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:30

Our castaway this week is the head of the branch of a great trading and banking family. He's also a scientist and a writer. It's Lord Rothschild.

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My lord, could you endure loneliness for a long time on an island? I think so.

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I think actually I'm rather a solitary person, normally.

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So it doesn't frighten me that. You have eight discs, a very meagre allowance to help you on your way. Is music important in your life? Yes, it is important.

Presenter0:59

I don't think it dominates my life. It wouldn't be the end of the world if I didn't have it. You play an instrument. You play the piano. Yes, I play the piano myself.

Lord Rothschild1:05

Liesa

Presenter1:07

Did you start very young? Were you put to it or did you take to it? No, no, we had to play our scales and arpeggios, uh supervised by a mother and sometimes a governess. And you still keep in practice? Yes, very much so. And you like jazz music and classical music?

Lord Rothschild1:09

Yeah.

Presenter1:22

Yes, I must say that I think I'm better able to appreciate certain types of jazz than I am classical music. So we may expect a mixed choice. I think that's a fair description, yeah. What's the first one?

Presenter1:36

The first one is by Bach, it isn't jazz at all. When I was fourteen, my sister and I both played this particular piece of Montezuk American fugue.

Presenter1:48

And I suddenly realized, my God, she's better than me, and she always will be. It was at that age, at fourteen, when I could just stumble through this piece, that I decided I'd better stop classical music and switch over to jazz. That's how I became interested in it. But this, of course, is Bach. And who's to play it? Mademoiselle Jacotet is going to play it. And she's a pretty formidable performer.

Presenter3:14

Part of the Bach Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, played by Christian Jacote.

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To the beginnings of the Rothschild story. Over two hundred years ago, some small merchants, grubbing a living in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt,

Presenter3:31

The Jews suffered great indignity in German cities at that time, did they not? Yes, they did in the ghetto, very much so. And there was young Mayer, Rothschild, began dealing in old coins. He got rather good at it. I think that's right, yes, he did. And it was of course he who really stimulated his five sons.

Presenter3:50

to leave the ghetto and go to different parts of the world. Trading all over Europe. I gather a bit of smuggling to get round Napoleonic edicts, which must be a very good thing.

Lord Rothschild3:58

I suspect

Presenter4:02

that my great great grandfather and his brother in Paris were under surveillance by the police, who suspected something was going on, but weren't able quite to cop them. Are one of the sons, Nathan,

Presenter4:18

He pulled off a marvellous coup from his own intelligence service. He heard of the British victory at Waterloo before anyone else. And he went to the stock exchange and looked miserable and sold consoles. And everybody said, Well, he knows something, and they sold consoles. And when the price was at rock bottom, he bought and made the family fortune. In your new book, Random Variables, you try to demolish that story, which seems such a pity because it's such a good story. I'm sorry you think I tried. I hope I succeeded. But I really don't think that the facts live up to the myth. I don't think he did that. He certainly had a very good intelligence service. It wasn't pigeons, it was couriers and fast ships.

Presenter5:05

It is certain that he heard about the result of the Battle of Waterloo twenty four hours before anybody else, but it is equally certain that he tried to go and see the Prime Minister to tell him about it. At the time I think the butler said the Prime Minister is asleep and mustn't be awoken. After that I think he felt free to look after his own affairs, which he certainly did, by buying consoles. But you couldn't buy a hell of a lot of consoles in those days. The stock market wasn't like it is now. You could only buy rather small amounts, so I don't think he really made the family fortune out of that one particular coup.

Presenter5:43

He was a man with um

Presenter5:44

Enormous capability. He bailed out the Bank of England at one time. Yes, he did once bail out the Bank of England. We were.

Presenter5:52

in our usual impoverished condition at that moment in the country.

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And he certainly helped them very much. He was a financial genius, quite a rough type.

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Somebody once said to him, To what do you, Mr Rothschild, do you ascribe your great successes? to which he answered, To minding my own business. You can't argue with that. Let's have another record. What's your second one? My second one is very different from the first.

Presenter6:20

and is by somebody who undoubtedly is the greatest jazz pianist the world has ever known, called Art Tatum. People have said from time to time that he had three extra fingers, sometimes that he had an extra hand. And I think when one listens to this record one can see why those myths have developed.

Presenter7:33

The Great Art Tatum, a tune called Get Happy.

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Lord Rothschild, you were brought up in the country to the north of London.

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As a child you learned a great deal about natural history. You couldn't help it.

Presenter7:46

Yes, that's true. My father was a natural history man, though he managed to combine that with going to the family bank that would be quite impossible to do nowadays.

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My uncle was a famous natural history man, too, so I grew up in a

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atmosphere of unrelieved natural history of all sorts so much so, in fact, that I reacted a bit against it, and although I wanted to be a scientist, I wanted to be a very different sort from the scientists that they were.

Presenter8:14

You went to prep school at Stanmore Park. Good at music, of course. And a scholarship to Harrow. That wasn't easy. No, perhaps.

Presenter8:23

Not easy. I don't think I worked terribly hard, though. I think I was a bit idle. Were you schooled with the idea that some day you might have to take over the family business? Yes, I was. My father and mother wanted me to go into Rothschild's Bank.

Presenter8:38

And being a dutiful son in those days, when I was about twenty two I did go into the bank for six months.

Presenter8:45

Then I must tell you that I found it rather depressing and boring.

Presenter8:50

It was a time when there were was a depression going on world wide.

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So after six months

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Put it crudely, I said to hell with this, I'm going to go back and do it my real love, which is to be a scientist at Cambridge University. You had read science at Cambridge University. Oh, yes.

Lord Rothschild9:04

Yeah.

Presenter9:05

Rather curiously. You took your PH D and your MA at the same time? It is rather curious, and uh my professor in fact allowed me to start researching rather prematurely.

Presenter9:17

And so the two things coalesced. It was un you couldn't do it to day, but in those days things were what's called flexible. And something else rather curious w your list of friends included, rather surprisingly, both Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Not a bad double.

Presenter9:35

I don't know what you mean by a bare double. I think if you leave out the word not then just say it was a bad double, that would be more appropriate. How do you remember them? Guy Burgess was very drunk,

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very often physically very dirty, both in appearance and habits.

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He used to chew onions and things like that, which I found rather distasteful. But he was clever and rather good company.

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Blunt is quite different. Blunt was an ascetic type, reserved.

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Highly intelligent, very good mathematician, gave it up for the history of art. Good company as well.

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Altogether he seemed a delightful person, quite different from Burgess. Burgess was a pain in the neck.

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And your ambitions at that time were firmly into biological research? Yes, I was quite clear that

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I wanted to go on being a research worker.

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Little bit difficult. People don't think if you're called Rothschild.

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The job had to be serious as a research worker.

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I had to fight a bit about that.

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Let's have your third record.

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Well, this is a most extraordinary record. I'm afraid this is a jazz piano solo again.

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By a man who

Presenter10:50

manages to introduce into his music a sort of split personality. And if you listen carefully, it's quite clear that one hand of his is doing quite different things to the other, although they're equally coordinated. And the result is quite extraordinary. And who is it? Uh he's a man called Mead Lux Lewis and the record is called Honky Tonk Train Blues and it is of a train going across America. You can hear if you listen carefully that rather melancholy hoot that trains at any rate used to give on the American movies. You could also hear the wheels clattering over points at particular moments.

Presenter11:29

It's a very remarkable piece. Impossible to play, but only all of these are impossible to play.

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Mead Lux Lewis Honky Tonk Train Blues.

Presenter12:36

Now the war came along, you went into intelligence.

Presenter12:40

Now in Meditations of a Broomstick, one of your early books, there's a spine chilling piece, a transcript of your commentary into a telephone as you take to pieces a German booby trap bomb. You did a lot of that sort of thing. Not a great deal, but I did a certain amount of it.

Presenter12:58

And um I think I ought to say that although you say it's spiked chilling, in fact, when one takes a bomb or a fuse to pieces, one really is so busy that one doesn't have time to be frightened. One's also very, very interested.

Presenter13:13

Because some of them are beautifully made, have Swiss watches inside them and that sort of thing. Yes.

Presenter13:18

In the case to which you referred, they looked like a crate of onions.

Presenter13:23

They were all camouflaged. For example, I found one

Lord Rothschild13:25

Uh

Presenter13:27

which was a Thomas flask with real hot tea in it.

Presenter13:31

But when looked at under the X-ray, the T only went down about an inch and a half, and the rest of it was high explosive, with a time fuse in it.

Presenter13:39

So they were an interesting, rather different sort of bomb used by saboteurs. Mhm. They weren't the sort of whopping great things that fell out of aeroplanes or were thrown out of aeroplanes. Well, not surprisingly, you were awarded the George Medal for that work.

Presenter13:53

Another fascinating job, I should think, was to protect the person of mister Winston Churchill.

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He was obviously one of the key targets in the country.

Presenter14:04

And so it was generally agreed that he must be protected. They're extremely difficult to do in his case because he got very cross, for example, if he didn't get his cigars on time. Well, we examined all his cigars. Now people were sending presents to Mr. Churchill all day long. I mean, you had to vet everything that went in. Not everything, because there was a general rule that if somebody sent him a box of chocolates, it was diverted, or if they sent him a brace of pheasants, or something like that. It was only...

Presenter14:32

rather serious things, or things that he happened to see and wanted.

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which then I was called in to look at.

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I think I've recorded somewhere that one of these was a beautiful Virginia ham that he happened to see when walking from number ten Downing Street to the House of Commons.

Presenter14:51

Yeah.

Presenter14:52

Have that for breakfast to morrow. So there's absolute panic. How can we examine it in the time available to see a, that it hasn't got a bomb in it, b, that it isn't coated with botulinostoxin or some other microbes or something like that?

Presenter15:06

And this was a very difficult job indeed, but we managed to get through it. Well, the war over, a couple of years as the director of BOAC and back to Cambridge, the Research Department of Zoology. That's your special interest? Yes. I suppose one might say the best part of my life was spent in a lab at Cambridge, twenty-five years ago. Yes, you produced a book, A Classification of Living Animals. That must have been a pretty considerable amount of work.

Presenter15:35

Yes, I did that for a particular purpose. I kn knew nothing about the classification of animals, and didn't know their Latin names sufficiently well, so I thought the best way of learning it would be to write a book about it.

Presenter15:48

Sold quite well, actually, because there wasn't a small, relatively inexpensive book of that sort. You're also playing cricket for Northamptonshire? Yes, I was a bit earlier. I played soon after I left Cambridge as an undergraduate. I played for North Anse for a couple of seasons.

Presenter16:03

But I gave it up under rather

Presenter16:06

Shaming circumstances. What were those? Well, at the time I was playing.

Presenter16:12

There was a man who very few of your listeners, I think, would have heard of, called Larwood.

Presenter16:16

I've heard of him. I think perhaps you have. And it was body line bowling absolutely in full swing. And in those days, of course, you were not allowed to appear like a fencer, like you do now, with a mask over your face, and all that sort of thing.

Presenter16:31

And Larwood really was very frightening, and the other man who played for Knotts, Vose, was at that time a fast left hand burrower, he later changed to a slow one.

Presenter16:40

And he hit me very badly, Pose. And I felt, you know, I mean, I'm supposed to be doing this for fun, but why on earth should I be bashed about like this?

Presenter16:49

So I decided to give up first-class quick. Right. Another record.

Presenter16:53

My next one, by Maurice Bourg, is an oboe solo.

Presenter16:58

Again, wonderful technical ability. I think everybody will agree about that. This is something that you admire above all, isn't it? The technical ability, yes. I've always admired that. I mean, whether it's uh Jack Nicklaus or McEnroe or Steve Davis

Lord Rothschild17:06

Yes.

Presenter17:15

So there is a thread running through these records, to go back to it, of

Presenter17:19

Great.

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Expertise and dexterity. Well, let's listen to this unaccompanied oboe sailor.

Presenter18:26

Maurice Burg playing the cadenza from Mozart's Oboe Concerto in C major, K three one four.

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You were very happy at Cambridge as research biologist and Don, but you decided, in your forties, to go into the cut and thrust of commerce. Yes, that's right.

Presenter18:45

I I felt when I was about forty eight that my scientific work, though competent,

Presenter18:49

lacked a certain

Presenter18:51

vigour and zest which it had had before, and coincidentally at that time.

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The Rolldot Sher Group.

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made an invitation, gave an invitation to me, made a pass at me in a way.

Presenter19:04

Why don't you come and take an interest in our activities? And so I did. Yes. And my first job there was to be the research director in England.

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where they have a number of labs doing very interesting things. Then, after I'd as it were graduated from it, I became their research director worldwide.

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And that was an extremely interesting job.

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Not at all only to do with oil. There were many other things that

Presenter19:34

I think one of the most interesting ones is the transport of coal along pipelines. Really?

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The coal is ground into coal dust and then suspended, usually in water, possibly sometimes in oil.

Presenter19:49

and is transmitted along the pipelines which normally carry petrol or oil.

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is quite difficult to do.

Presenter19:57

It's equally possible to do it just with the dust, because if you grind coal small enough, it behaves as if it was a fluid.

Presenter20:05

Yes. Just to make it clear, I'm talking about hydrodynamics. And this was one of the research projects that was going on. It works. Yes, it does work. Economically? I am not sure whether it is now used economically. I don't know that, that would be after my time, though. But, nevertheless, an interesting project. Very interesting indeed.

Presenter20:25

But there were hundreds of interesting projects. I mean, just too many to keep track of. You did ten years of that? Yes. And then to the city? No. Then, just before I reached the age of sixty, I was extremely worried.

Presenter20:38

Because I had nothing to do. Everybody retires from shell when they're sixty, and I don't like gardening.

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And um

Presenter20:45

I was within three weeks of going when the Prime Minister sent for me.

Presenter20:50

and said, Would you like to run the government think tank? So uh I didn't know what it was, of course, and as an alternative to gardening I said yes at once.

Presenter21:00

Had there ever been a think tank before? Was this a brand new idea? Of this sort they had never had one. But of course Prime Ministers very often have what are called kitchen cabinets. Yes. A group of people round them. But this particular sort wasn't centred round the Prime Minister. It was supposed to serve the Cabinet as a whole.

Presenter21:19

And I don't think anything like that had happened before.

Presenter21:22

Which Prime Minister's idea was it? The idea was.

Presenter21:26

of Prime Minister Heath.

Presenter21:28

Towards the end of 1970. Were you to consider particular problems or work on an ad hoc basis and think up ideas for the benefit of the country and the government? Well, essentially both. We had an annual programme handed down to us by the cabinet, but equally it was made clear that if we had ideas of things we thought ought to be done, that the cabinet or the prime minister would look at that sympathetically. So we did have a few ideas. At any point do you think we'll change the policy of the government? Yes.

Lord Rothschild21:54

I don't know.

Speaker 421:54

Yeah.

Lord Rothschild21:54

Uh

Presenter21:58

One mustn't exaggerate the effect of an organization like this.

Presenter22:02

It may have an influence on policy, but it is of course rare for a complete change of policy. I think there's a nuance there which has to be made.

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Your fifth record, please.

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Well, this is absolutely terrific, this one.

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and it's by the great master Horowitz.

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May I tell you a story about Horaby, please?

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he and an almost equally great master, Schnabel,

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were found in a terrible dive in New York, a smoke-filled, dirty dive on Forty second Street.

Presenter22:34

Sally says, What on earth are you doing here?

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They said, We're listening to that coloured man play the piano. Listening to him? Why?

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Horowitz said, He's better.

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That was our update.

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Ha ha ha ha.

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What is Horobitz playing on this record? Well, he's playing something by Moskowski called The Etude in A Flat.

Presenter23:59

Vladimir Horovitz playing Moskovsky's Etude in A Flat.

Presenter24:05

Book collecting was a great hobby of yours. When did that start? Was that something that you began as a boy? No, it started when I was still an undergraduate at Cambridge University.

Presenter24:15

And I came into contact with a very brilliant English scholar called George Rylands.

Presenter24:22

who stimulated my interest in book collecting. Was it the the thrill of of touching the actual first look of a book, or was it the thrill of of the chase and tracking them down? I think really the second. I I I must tell you that the whole of the Rothschild family is engaged in collecting something or other. They seem to have got a collecting gene, and some of them collect fans, some of them collect limerge enamel. They collect everything.

Presenter24:50

And I happen to start on books of English eighteenth-century first editions.

Presenter24:57

Now your own books.

Presenter24:59

Two pleasant assemblies of bits and pieces, Meditations of a Broomstick, which we have already mentioned, and a new one, Random Variables. I think both those titles need a little explanation. Meditations of a Broomstick is a sort of quotation from Jonathan Swift.

Presenter25:15

He wrote a famous poem.

Presenter25:19

likening himself to a broomstick, which, when it was younger,

Presenter25:24

was a beautiful young sapling with leaves and so on and look what it had come to in the end just a broomstick.

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That is the origin of meditations of a broomstick. Random variables is a little bit different.

Presenter25:39

The pieces in it are variable.

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In length, very much.

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They are no doubt variable in quality.

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and they are somewhat random.

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But attached to that there is a pun.

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because the phrase random variable is one which relates to a very abstract concept in mathematics, and I'm interested in mathematics and therefore I used the pun, as it were, for this purpose. Record number six.

Presenter26:09

Well, this has a special meaning for me, this record by Teddy Wilson.

Presenter26:14

Because he taught me to play jazz on the piano in New York, and so I've got a special affection for him. He's still alive.

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And he is the most phenomenal player.

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As any jazz aficionados who happen to be listening to this programme will immediately realize, and this is a most astonishing piece of dexterity and brilliance.

Presenter27:35

Teddy Wilson playing every now and then. How did you come to get lessons from him? Now did you go and ask him, or did you play together in a club or something?

Lord Rothschild27:45

So much of it.

Presenter27:47

I suppose rather an impertinence, really. I was in New York and uh rang him up and said, Can I come and see you?

Presenter27:55

to which he said yes.

Presenter27:57

And I said to him, Do you ever give lessons? I'm a great fan of yours. And he said, Yes, I do from time to time.

Presenter28:03

I think they cost, if I remember rightly, five dollars a lesson.

Presenter28:06

Can't complain of that. No, I felt that was quite reasonable. So I had eight.

Presenter28:12

lessons from him. They were quite rigorous. I had to practise my left hand with him in the dark, so that it became automatic. It doesn't become as automatic as his, but still it developed a bit. Have you played with other people? Have you played with a band?

Lord Rothschild28:25

Ignore that.

Presenter28:26

Never. Do you sometimes regret that you didn't become a professional musician, a professional jazz man? No, because I don't think I was good enough. There was a moment when I thought I might have got a rather lowly job at a nightclub.

Presenter28:38

uh sort of strumming a little bit in the background, but I never really had any great ambition to get down to it properly. Well, let's go back to records. What's number seven? Number seven is also a very famous piano work.

Presenter28:51

List played by Bolle.

Presenter28:55

and it's one of the most famous pieces of Liszt's funerae.

Presenter30:00

An excerpt from Liszt's Funerae played by George Bollitt.

Presenter30:05

Have you any skills that might be useful to you on this island? Are you good with your hands at constructing things? Could you put up a shelter?

Presenter30:13

I think I'm going to be absolutely ghastly at this,'cause I'm not at all good with my hands, and I'm not at all I'd have a shot at putting up a shelter, but I'd be very nervous it might not fall down on me when I dropped off.

Presenter30:26

Done any fishing? No, never done any in my life. Are you a good cook? Bangers.

Presenter30:31

and scrambled egg and an omelette.

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That's all I can do.

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Would you construct a raft and try to escape? I don't think I would try to escape at all. No, I'd try and.

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Come to terms with it. I think you're wise. Let's have record number eight, your last one.

Presenter30:48

Well, this is rather a sad record.

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It again has great technical merit.

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It um is sung by Cantor and is to remind me that I am what I am.

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and that we sat by the waters of Babylon and wept.

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And that's why it's so sad.

Speaker 331:09

We sartoire kits aut le

Speaker 331:16

Lefort, video escap

Speaker 331:31

Very visible.

Speaker 331:43

Over yonder time for seven months.

Speaker 332:00

We will go more We will

Presenter32:15

A sacred song in Hebrew by Cantor Samuel Malewski, on the first day of the year it is inscribed.

Presenter32:22

If you could take only one disc out of the H you played, which would it be? I think it would be the one by Art Tatum.

Presenter32:29

I have great difficulty in getting to that decision, but I think I

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And

Presenter32:34

One luxury to take with you, one object of no practical use whatever, that w it would give you pleasure or comfort to have with you. May I be allowed to have a very thick pad of ruled A four paper with the associated barrow and spurs? Yes, of course. You're going to write a book, a diary? I hope that

Presenter32:53

I shall write something. And one book. You already have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare as a standard issue. You may choose one other work. I think it would have to be a very long book on pure mathematics with examples so that my luxury would come in useful. Have you one in mind? I have a book on pure mathematics in mind by a man called Bostock and someone else. I should think it's about 700 pages, so it'll keep me very busy for quite a while. It certainly sounds like it. And thank you, Lord Rothschild, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much. Goodbye, everyone.

Lord Rothschild33:36

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