the world of private banking

26
THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
them ‘blows where it hurts’. 100 Their father’s classic advice on this subject – much
repeated down the generations – was ‘If you can’t make yourself loved, make
yourself feared’. 101 James in particular never lost his competitive edge. ‘[M]y heart
breaks when I see how everyone is trying to push us out of the business deal.’ he
wrote to his nephews in 1844. ‘The stone on the wall is envious and is an enemy
of us.’ 102 His campaign against the Pereire brothers after they broke with him and
set up the Crédit Mobilier was relentless, and ultimately successful.
One of the crucial ways in which the Rothschilds consistently outdid their
rivals was by having superior political and financial intelligence. In this period,
postal services were slow and insecure: letters sent from Paris to Frankfurt usually
took just 48 hours in 1814; but mail from London could take up to a week to
reach Frankfurt, and the service from Paris to Berlin took nine days in 1817. 103
Compulsive correspondents as they were, the brothers were always trying to find
ways of speeding the postal service up. So anxious was Amschel to have up-todate
exchange rates from London in June 1814 that he asked Nathan to send his
letters by more than one route – via Paris and Amsterdam as well as Dunkirk
– and to use colour-coded envelopes so that his contact at the post office could
tell at a glance whether the exchange rate was rising (blue) or falling (red). 104
Increasingly, however, they dispensed with the post, relying instead on their own
private couriers, including agents at Dover who were authorized to charter boats
for Rothschild business. 105 In 1815, Nathan famously got the news of Napoleon’s
defeat first, thanks to the speed with which a Rothschild courier was able to relay
the fifth and conclusive extraordinary bulletin (issued in Brussels during the night
of 18/19 June) via Dunkirk and Deal to reach New Court roughly 24 hours later.
This was at least thirty-six hours before Major Henry Percy delivered Wellington’s
official despatch to the Cabinet. 106 By the mid-1820s, such couriers were being
sent regularly: in December 1825 alone, the Paris house sent 18 couriers to
Calais (and hence to London), three to Saarbrücken, one to Brussels and one to
100
RAL, XI/109/0/3/4, Carl, Frankfurt, to Salomon, 29 June 1814; RAL, T29/63,
XI/109/0/3/5, Amschel, Frankfurt, to Salomon, 29 June; RAL, XI/109/0/3/7, Carl, Frankfurt,
to Salomon, 30 June; RAL, T30, XI/109/2/3/26/1, Amschel to James, Paris, 26 Jan.; RAL,
T30, XI/109/2/3/49, Amschel, Frankfurt, to Carl and Nathan, 31 Aug.
101
RAL, T27/216, James, Paris, to Salomon and Nathan, 8 March 1817.
102
RAL, X1/109J/J/45, James, Paris, to his nephews, London, 18 March 1844.
103
RAL, T29/181; XI/109/0/7/21, Carl, Frankfurt, to Salomon, 23 Aug. 1814; RAL,
T63/28/1, XI/109/8, Carl, Berlin, to his brothers, 4 Nov. 1817.
104
RAL, XI/109/0/2/1, Amschel, Frankfurt, to Nathan, London, 19 June 1814; RAL,
XI/109/0/2/5, Amschel to Salomon, 29 June.
105
RAL, T5/29, Braun, [James’s clerk in] Paris, to James, London, 13 Sept. 1813.
Cf. L. Wolf, ‘Rothschildiana’, in idem, Essays in Jewish History, ed. by C. Roth (London,
1934), pp. 266f.
106
Wolf, ‘Rothschildiana’, pp. 281ff.; Corti, Rise, p. 137; Lord [Victor] Rothschild,
The Shadow of a Great Man (London, 1982), pp. 135–7.