Charles Rothschild
Hon. Nathaniel Charles Rothschild (9 May 1877 – 12 October 1923) was an English banker and entomologist and a member of the Rothschild family. He is remembered for The Rothschild List, a list he made in 1915 of 284 sites across Britain that he considered suitable for nature reserves.
The HonourableCharles Rothschild
12 October 1923 (aged 46)
Miriam Rothschild
Elizabeth Charlotte Rothschild
Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild
Pannonica Rothschild
Nathan Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild
Emma Louise von Rothschild
Career[edit]
Entomology[edit]
Like his zoologist brother Walter, Charles devoted much of his energies to entomology and natural history collecting. His enormous collection of some 260,000 fleas is now in the Rothschild Collection at the Natural History Museum; he described about 500 new flea species.[3] One of these, which he discovered and named, was the Bubonic plague vector flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, also known as the oriental rat flea, which he collected at Shendi, Sudan, on an expedition in 1901, publishing his finding in 1903.[4]
In 1907, Rothschild married Rózsika Edle von Wertheimstein (1870–1940), a descendant of an old Austrian-Jewish family that was ennobled long before the Rothschilds.[13] She was born in 1870 at Nagyvárad, Hungary (now the Romanian city of Oradea), the daughter of a retired army officer, Baron Alfred Edler von Wertheimstein. Alfred's sister Charlotte was married to Moritz von Königswarter.[14] Rózsika was one of seven children and had been a champion lawn tennis player in Hungary.[15]
After their marriage on 6 February 1907, they lived at Tring and in London. Rothschild, who worked in the family's banking business, was a dedicated naturalist in his spare time: the young couple had met on a butterfly-collecting trip in the Carpathian Mountains. In the evening, they might go together to a concert or a dinner party, but he really preferred to sort out his butterflies. Together, they had four children:
Suffering from encephalitis, in 1923 Rothschild died by suicide. He was found with his throat slit, locked alone inside his bathroom at his home at Ashton Wold, Northamptonshire.[16] His suicide, when he was 46 years old, was a severe shock to his wife and four children. Rózsika died on 30 June 1940.[17]