LORD ROTHSCHILD

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 132, 5 June 1915, Page 9

LORD ROTHSCHILD

It would be difficult to imagine two men more antipodally different in character, habitj and sympathies than the late' Lord Rothschild, whose death is widely deplored, and the , son who succeeds 'to the title (writes Sir Henry Lucy in the Sydney Morning Herald). The first Peer was dapper, debonair, wideawake to everything going on, not only in the money market, but in the social world. In personal appearance the second Baron more resembles a burly farmer than the heritor to a palace in Piccadilly and an office in New Court, the very centre of international finance. Lionel Rothschild commonly known by his second Christian name, Walter, is a profound student of zoology, on which subject he has contributed to obscure magazines many articles of high repute, if of limited circulation. He is, indeed, joint editor of a magazine published at the Zoological Museum he has established at Tring Park, a retreat where the happiest hours of his life are spent. Sixteen years ago, at the urgent entreaty of his father, he consented to offer himself as a candidate for the representation in Parliament of the Aylesbury Division of Bucks, a constituency in which the Rothschild interest was dominant. Re turned, as a matter of course, he nominally represented the constituency up ' to the period of , the General Election of 1910, when he gratefully disappeared from the political arena, happy in having more time to devote to enrichment and extension of the Zoological Museum at Tring. His appearances at Westminster were rare, but, a loyal opponent of "^e political party whose great chief, Mr. Gladstone, endowed tho family with a peerage, he was obedient to the Unionist Whip that summoned him on the eve of any important division. His one -Parliamentary success was the design of something new in straw hats. In an exceptionally hot summer, which led to the disappearance of the waistcoat, from the House of Commons, and substitution of the kummerbund, AValter Rothschild one afternoon created a profound sensation by appearing in the lobby in a hat made of fine Panama fibre, cylindrical in shape, as opposed to the ordinary low-crowned, widebrimmed straw hat. It was, indeed, as was said at the time, like an ordinary chimney-pot hat, which had suffered a bad passage across the Channel, and had become distressingly , pallid 'in hue. fhe curiosity, probably now in the Zoological Museum, was not often on view at Westminster. Modest almost to the verge of timidity, the member for Aylesbury could not stand the personal attention his appearance on the scene attracted, and, after a third visit, the hat disappeared. At one time a story, doubtless enamatincj .from the Stock Exchange, found publication and wide currency to '\hn effect that he had given £500 for a single flea of exceedingly rare type. In a Scottish paper it was angrily pointed out that here was a man possessing unearned wealth who wasted as much money on a pampered flea as would have warded off for a full week starvation from sdo homes of the widowed and fatherless. In private conversation, Mr. Rothschild repudiated the flea. But he could not be induced publicly to contradict the fable.