Jenni Frazer

From fleas to film stars: Dame Miriam Rothschild

This piece originally appeared in the Jewish Chronicle on July 23 2004.I’m posting it now after a request.

I am receiving a lesson in natural history from one of the world’s greatest living naturalists. With great patience, Dame Miriam Louisa Rothschild is describing the astonishing behaviour of the tiger moth ear mite. “The tiger moth has developed an extremely superior ear in order to avoid capture by bats in the dark. The thing about the moth is that it appreciates movement in the air as well as hearing the bats. The mites, which live in their ears, wait for the moths in flower heads. When the moth puts its long tongue into the flower, the mite uses the tongue like a ladder in order to find its way into the ear.”

What is really interesting, however, is that if another mite should come along and want to live on the tiger moth, it knows it can only go and join its fellow mite in the already occupied ear. If it went to live in the moth’s second ear, it would render the moth deaf — and thus an easy prey for predatory bats.

Rothschild was born in August 1908, in the house in which she still lives in Northamptonshire, Ashton Wold, a grand country mansion — now a sprawling maze of book-lined corridors — built at the turn of the last century by her grandfather, the first Lord Rothschild. Dame Miriam jokes that she was allowed to become “unfinished and uneducated”, which may or may not explain her becoming a world authority on fleas, butterflies and conservation.

She is the author of more than 300 research papers, whose subjects range from the jumping capabilities of the flea to the effect of cannabis on caterpillars. Her many honours include a Czech gold medal, another from the Royal Horticultural Society — for wild-flower cultivation — and a silver medal from the International Association of Chemical Ecology.

Talking to her is to be treated to a series of glittering snapshots of another world in which the Rothschilds knew everybody. To them, the extraordinary seemed commonplace.

Who else but Miriam Rothschild has had a volcanic eruption from Vesuvius named after her (“Monte Miriam”)? Who else was trapped in a wartime London air raid with the “most amusing” future Israeli president Chaim Weizmann for five hours? Who went rook-shooting with Clark Gable, and was on nodding terms with another Hollywood icon, James Stewart? Whose mother had her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent? And who, when asked to serve as a decoder at Bletchley Park, was able to consult her brother Victor, who, naturally, was in MI5 at the time?

Once upon a time, says Rothschild, “it was cheaper to hire a train than go by car”. So she, her two sisters, her brother, her father, Charles, her beautiful mother, Roszika von Wertheimstein, a champion tennis player in the Austro-Hungarian empire — together with “a governess, probably a maid,” and, of course, some dogs and ponies — herded on to the train from Aston Wold to Tring. “After my grandfather died, I think my mother felt her mother-in-law would be unhappy alone at Tring, so, for her sake, we’d spend the winter there”.

In another vignette, Rothschild recalls being presented at court to Queen Mary, wife of George V: “My grandmother [Lady Rothschild] was on especially good terms with the police in London.” The Rothschild home, at 148 Piccadilly, was frequently visited by the Hyde Park police in accordance with an instruction given by Lord Rothschild that police were to be given beef and beer in the household wherever possible. When the time came for Miriam to be presented at court, Lady Rothschild decided her granddaughter, complete with a debutante’s aigrette of Prince of Wales feathers in her hair, should not wait but instead should go in her mother’s car, in the queue wending its way to Buckingham Palace, directly to the Palace courtyard. “I said to my grandmother, how will I get in? She said, ‘Why, the police will take you in.’ And they did.”

The Queen Mother, Queen Alexandra, was especially friendly towards Rothschild’s uncle, the eccentric Walter, who became the second Lord Rothschild. “She invited him to bring his carriage, pulled by zebras, into Buckingham Palace courtyard, so that she could pat them.”

Walter, described by his niece as “tremendously gifted with animals”, kept a tame wolf at his home in Tring, taking it, with a collar and chain, to the pub in the evenings.

Having grown up on the Ashton Wold estate, Dame Miriam recalls that “we never thought of natural history and science as subjects to study — they were a way of life. Every weekend, my father would come home from the bank and we would go out together and I would catch butterflies with him… I could milk a cow when I was four.”

It was in Ashton Wold, during the war, that Rothschild met her husband, George. He was a wounded officer who was recuperating at the family hime, temporally turned into a hospital. The world knew him as George Lane; in fact, he was a Hungarian Jew called Georgi Lanyi, a former international water-polo player, who won the Military Cross for his work in a secret Commando/Special Services unit. Almost all the members were German-speaking Jewish refugees, mainly from Germany and Austria, but some also from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other European countries.

Rothschild herself spent two years at Britain’s famed decoding unit in Bletchley Park, where she, in common with other scientists, was sent after agreeing not to join up in the armed forces. “I was working in Plymouth reporting on weather ships, and, among other things, working on devising different sorts of animal feed, such as chicken-feed made from seaweed. I had signed to say I wouldn’t join the forces, but we then had to remain suspended until we were told where to go. At Bletchley, we lived in Nissen huts. We came on at 4pm and left at 8am and I was always short of sleep. I was required to translate German messages into English codes.”

When she married Lane (whom she later divorced in 1943 — the couple had six children and adopted another: four children survive), she was, to her great relief, officially no longer allowed, as someone married to a foreigner, to remain at Bletchley. (“Actually”, she recalls, “they asked me to stay on. I refused because I hated it”.)

It was when she was on leave from Bletchley that Rothschild encountered Clark Gable and James Stewart, part of the 5,000-strong US army contingent who were based in and around Aston Wold. Some of the men were stationed at Polebrook Air Field, just up the road. Rothschild moved into a small cottage on the estate, “where I kept complete open house”, which included gatherings attended by members of the US Bomber Command. Clark Gable, she says dismissively, “lacked all sense of humour. I once asked him who were the rising stars in American films. He said, there are no stars except me”.

Being a member of the Rothschild family, she says, did not really impinge on her consciousness when she was young. “We were brought up in a very simple manner. I didn’t know, or appreciate, the fact of being a Rothschild until I was 18 or 20.” All too clearly, however, she understood what was happening to the Jews in Europe during the war. Her mother’s family, the von Wertheimsteins, whom Rothschild believes were probably the first Jewish family ennobled in Europe, were almost all killed during the war.

Long before the state of Israel was declared, Rothschild went “regularly and consistently”, except during the Second World War. After the war, she often went as much as four times a year, sharing a house with her cousin [Baroness] Alix de Rothschild, president of the society for the rescue of children from Europe with Youth Aliyah.

She was only 15 when her beloved father died suddenly, aged just 46. “When I realised that there would be no more weekend walks with my father, and no more collecting…there was terrible grief and shock. I gave up all collecting and interest in natural history for two years.” She devoted herself to learning about Russian life and literature, and only returned to the natural world when her brother Victor came home from Harrow School and asked for her help in dissecting “a luckless frog”.

Rothschild’s astonishing breadth of interest in the natural world is reflected in her innate curiosity. “I daren’t look down a microscope,” she jokes, “because I would instantly want to start work on something.”

Discussing the champion collies that were instantly at her side, she tells a story about a dog belonging to Lady Salisbury which always knew when its mistress was coming home from a trip abroad. Rothschild tried every way to narrow down how the dog knew, and though she failed, still believes that dogs have either a sixth sense or a supremely sensitive version of the existing five. It’s one more mystery she would love to solve.

Throughout her long life, she has concentrated more work on fleas that any other scientists, inspired by her father, who identified the vector of plague. She once sent out a Christmas card with a picture of a flea’s muscle. “Everyone who got it thought it was art,” she rejoices. She has also been a pioneer in butterfly studies, making significant discoveries leading to the improvement of wildlife facilities throughout the country.

For a number of years, she was interested in marine biology, which is what led her to Plymouth at the beginning of the war, working in the marine biology unit there. Earlier, she had worked in a marine biology laboratory in Naples which is how a small sea-based eruption from Mount Vesuvius came to be named “Monte Miriam. (While she was in Naples, her research ship came under sustained bombing from the Italian Navy. “There were heavy bombs for five or six hours. The captain’s knees were absolutely knocking.”)

At 96, Rothschild keeps up with scientific developments on a daily basis and indeed, still studies and does research wherever possible. What, I ask at the end of our long interview, is she working on today? Her smile is charming: “It’s a secret. But it’s a very interesting secret”.

  • 24 January, 2025
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