Walter Rothschild

Lionel Walter Rothschild was the man to whom the Balfour Declaration was addressed, and one of the most productive private zoologists who ever lived. He was the eldest son of the first Baron Rothschild and was expected to run the family bank, which he did badly and unhappily; his actual vocation was natural history, and he had announced at seven that he would build a museum. He did. The collection at Tring grew to over two million mounted specimens, three hundred thousand bird skins and two and a half million butterflies, the largest ever assembled by one person, and he employed collectors across the world and described hundreds of new species. He was also a Zionist and, from 1915, president of the Board of Deputies representing British Jewry's Zionist wing. In 1917 he worked with Chaim Weizmann on the text of a British statement of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine, and the letter Arthur Balfour sent on 2 November 1917 was addressed to him personally, asking him to bring it to the Zionist Federation. It ran to sixty-seven words and its consequences are still being argued over. He was blackmailed for decades by a former mistress and was forced to sell most of his bird collection to the American Museum of Natural History in 1932 to pay her. He rode a carriage drawn by zebras to Buckingham Palace. He is the reason the Tring museum exists as a public collection, having left it to the nation. Around a hundred and fifty species and subspecies are named after him, including a giraffe and a zebra. He never married and was, by the account of his niece Miriam, terrified of his mother into middle age.

• Lived: 1868 CE – 1937 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: banker, scientist