the world of private banking

268
THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
shooting with the gamekeeper, riding, cruises on the family’s 800-ton yacht – it
was a golden childhood marred only by anti-Semitic abuse when he was sent away
to school. A round-the-world tour followed Cambridge, and in Auckland some
spontaneous words about Hitler to a local journalist earned a parental rebuke:
It has always been a tradition of the Rothschild family never to give interviews. I
always refuse. I sometimes see the City Editors of The Times and Daily Telegraph
and I talk to them quite freely because they know that if they ever once quoted
me, they would never see me again...
Soon after the war, just as he became a partner, Edmund was sent to New York
for a period of training at the investment bank Kuhn Loeb. There the ‘drudgery’
in the book-keeping, stock transfer and credit departments was bad enough, but
the statistical department proved ‘even worse’, and ‘it soon dawned on me that the
nuts and bolts of banking were never going to be my greatest strength’. Nor they
were, though over the years Edmund provided valuable continuity at Rothschilds,
especially after his uncle Anthony’s stroke in 1955, and he was good at ensuring
a happy ship. Through the memoirs as a whole, there is a sense of the author
moving comfortably enough through the upper reaches of British society – though
relatively seldom perhaps the stratospheric heights, and with little sense of being
near the political action of the day. Domestic life in his Hampshire country-home
during the 1950s and 1960s seems to have been resolutely middle-brow (tennis,
croquet, Mickey Mouse film shows, mah-jongg, card games), consistent with the
almost entire absence in his book of either the world of art, literature and ideas,
or any sense of changes in British life and society, or indeed almost any reflection
on even the City itself. A book for which the adjective ‘amiable’ might have been
invented, and the only autobiography we have of a twentieth-century merchant
banker born into the purple, it will be mined almost as much for what it does not
say as for what it does. 16
It was mid-way through Edmund de Rothschild’s career, in 1957, that there
occurred the celebrated Bank Rate ‘leak’ and ensuing tribunal. Powerful City
figures like William Keswick of Mathesons and Lord Kindersley and Oliver Poole
of Lazards were acquitted of wrong-doing, but for the first time the City’s inner
circle found itself subjected to public gaze and even mockery. Much was made
of intimate links with Tory ministers and of decisions taken to sell gilts while
grouse-shooting on the Scottish moors. 17 ‘We cannot defend a system’, declared
the shadow Chancellor, Harold Wilson, in the Commons debate on the Tribunal,
‘where merchant bankers are treated as the gentlemen and the clearing bankers
as the players using the professionals’ gate out of the pavilion.’ 18 A year later,
16
Edmund de Rothschild, A Gilt-Edged Life (London, 1998), including pp. 66, 133–4,
220–1.
17
P. Ferris, The City (London, 1960), pp. 129–57.
18
Hansard, 3 Feb. 1958, col. 859.