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Up for sale a RARE! "3rd Baron Rothschild" Victor Rothschild Hand Signed 4X6 Card. This item is
certified authentic by Todd Mueller Autographs and comes with their Certificate
of Authenticity.
ES-3142
Nathaniel
Mayer Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild GBE GM FRS (31 October 1910 – 20 March 1990) was a British
banker, scientist, intelligence officer during World War II, and later a senior
executive with Royal Dutch Shell and N M Rothschild & Sons,
and an advisor to the Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher governments of the UK. He was a member
of the prominent Rothschild family. Rothschild
was the only son of Charles Rothschild and Rózsika Rothschild (née Baroness
Edle von Wertheimstein). Both parents were Jewish, his father a member of the
Rothschild banking family and his mother the daughter of the first titled Jew
in Austria. He grew up in Waddesdon Manor and Tring Park Mansion, among
other family homes. He had three sisters, including Pannonica de Koenigswarter (who
would become known as the "Jazz Baroness") and Dame Miriam Louisa
Rothschild. Rothschild suffered the suicide of his father when he
was 13 years old. He was educated at Harrow School. At Trinity College, Cambridge,
he read physiology, French, and English. Later he
worked in the Zoology Department before gaining a PhD in 1935. He played first-class cricket for the Cambridge he was known for his playboy lifestyle, driving a Bugatti and collecting art and rare books
Rothschild joined the Cambridge Apostles,
a secret society, which at
that time was predominantly Marxist, though he stated himself that he
"was mildly left-wing but never a
Marxist". He became friends with Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby; members of the Cambridge
Spy Ring. In 1933, Rothschild gave Blunt £100 to purchase "Eliezer and Rebecca" by Nicolas Poussin. The painting was sold by Blunt's executors in
1985 for £100,000 and is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.
His flat in London was shared with Burgess and Blunt. This later aroused
suspicion that he was the so-called Fifth Man in the Cambridge Spy Ring. Rothschild
inherited his title at the age of 26 following the death of his uncle Walter
Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild on 27 August 1937. He sat as
a Labour Party peer in
the House of Lords, but spoke
only twice there during his life (both speeches were in 1946, one about the
pasteurization of milk, and another about the situation in Palestine). Rothschild was
recruited to work for MI5 during World War II in roles including bomb disposal,
disinformation and espionage, winning the George Medal for "dangerous work in was the head of B1C, the "explosives
and sabotage section", and worked on identifying where Britain's war
effort was vulnerable to sabotage and counter German sabotage attempts. This
included personally dismantling examples of German booby traps and disguised
explosives.
With his assistant Theresa Clay, he ran the "Fifth
Column" operation, that saw MI5 officer Eric Roberts masquerade
as the Gestapo's man in London in order to identify hundreds of Nazi
sympathizers. In Who Paid the Piper? (1999),
an account of CIA propaganda
during the Cold War, author Frances Stonor Saunders alleges
that Rothschild channelled funds to Encounter, an
intellectual magazine founded in 1953 to support the "non-Stalinist
left" in advance of US foreign policy goals. After the war, he joined
the zoology department at Cambridge University from
1950 to 1970. He served as chairman of the Agricultural Research
Council from 1948 to 1958 and as worldwide head of research
at Royal Dutch/Shell from
1963 to 1970. Flora Solomon claims
in her autobiography that in August 1962, during a reception at the Weizmann Institute, she
told Rothschild that she thought that Tomás Harris and Kim Philby were Soviet spies. When Anthony
Blunt was unmasked as a member of the Cambridge Spy ring in 1964, Rothschild
was questioned by Special Branch (though
Blunt was not publicly identified as a Soviet agent until 1979 in the House of
Commons by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). Rothschild was cleared, and continued
working on projects for the British government.
Rothschild was head of the Central Policy Review
Staff from 1971 to 1974 (known popularly as "The Think Tank") a staff which researched policy
specifically for the Government until Margaret Thatcher abolished it. In 1971
Rothschild was awarded an honorary degree from Tel Aviv University for
''the advancement of science, education and the economy of Israel''. It was
followed in 1975 by an honorary degree from Jerusalem's Hebrew University. The annual "Victor
Rothschild Memorial Symposia" is named after Rothschild.
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