the world of private banking

34
THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
two complications however is the particular problem of the handwriting of each
of the brothers, each highly individualistic and unrelenting in its individuality.
Amschel, in particular, in Frankfurt, had devised a way of joining up separated
Hebrew characters which is almost unique to himself. Once this barrier is passed,
there remain the problems of a fairly idiosyncratic German – often ungrammatical
and ambiguous, with a sprinkling of Hebrew words within the text. Finally – and
ironically, perhaps, least impenetrable of all – there remain the use of code words
for key places, players and commodities in their transactions – Jerusalem for
London, Pheasants for Gold, etc.
The complications which have hitherto kept historians away from this material
were sufficiently clear to the brothers themselves in writing the letters for them
to feel confident of the medium as a safe haven from prying external eyes. The
letters are therefore extremely frank, open, uncompromising, and often earthy in
their comments on contemporary personalities and situations. From the campaign
to fund Wellington, through the years of revolution, 1830 and 1848, and beyond, a
succession of the major financial, economic and political events of the nineteenth
century are described from the extremely well-informed perspective of the
Rothschild brothers, by then major players on the world financial scene. All this
alongside the humdrum and the everyday. Alongside the haute politique, you will
find the news of a child’s health or a request to send some small, favourite item
of confectionery or a fashionable piece of clothing, for example. There can be no
doubt that these letters, in their own right, constitute the core of the richness of
The Rothschild Archive.
The only disappointment is that we have only a handful of Nathan’s own letters.
Given their essentially private nature, copies of his letters were not systematically
kept or stored by him in the Bank and sadly, among the French bank’s archives
– the only other of the banks to have a substantial series of records from the time
– the private correspondence between the brothers was not retained. We can only
guess, therefore, from the brothers’ responses and the few items that survive, at the
tone he adopted in his letters, and imagine the dyspeptic outbursts which produced
squeals of outrage and hurt from the others.
Around and beyond this series are letters from the Rothschilds’ correspondents
and agents around the world. As with other merchant banks of the period, it
was upon this increasingly developed body of informants that the Rothschilds
depended for up-to-date information. The network stretched from Manchester
to Macao, from St Petersburg to Valparaíso. Among the letters arriving at New
Court are, for example, items from Benjamin Davidson in San Francisco giving
a graphic description of the town in the gold-rush years of the 1840s or from J.B.
Montefiore describing Australia in its own first flush of gold fever. These letters,
of which there are not tens but hundreds of thousands (not all of them, of course,
equally riveting), remain largely unexplored, though it is clear that an increasing
body of scholars are becoming aware of them and there are promising signs of
their developing use. In recent years, the value to national economic and financial
history of the detailed accounts of conditions, supplied by local agents, has been