The wildlife bank
As today’s billionaires reach for space, we discover a magnate with ambitions much closer to earth – to whom walkers and wildlife lovers owe a huge debt.
Where one man invested his fortune.
EVERY MORNING HE got dressed in a smart suit and set off for the bank in the City of London. It’s said he never missed a single day at the desk, despite being one of the richest men on Earth. But his real love wasn’t trading bullion and bonds: it was wildlife.
Nathaniel Charles Rothschild – always known by his middle name – was born into the famous financial dynasty in 1877. Between shifts at the family bank he would go out chasing butterflies and moths, propagate irises and orchids, write scientific papers, and study fleas. These jumping parasites were a particular obsession: Charles gathered over a quarter of a million specimens and identified 500 new species, including Xenopsylla cheopis, the vector of bubonic plague.
But most important was his vision for conservation in Britain. Rothschild was one of the first to understand there was more to protecting wildlife than stopping the killing and collecting. For nature to thrive, you had to protect the places it called home. ▶
The First Reserve
It began with £10 and two acres in Cambridgeshire. In 1899, a 22-year old Rothschild bought a bit of Wicken Fen and donated it to the National Trust as Britain’s inaugural nature reserve. It was the tiniest fragment of the ancient Fens that once covered 850,000 acres of East Anglia with peat, reedbed, meadow, stream and mere, yet the reserve – now expanded to almost 2000 acres – provides a home for a staggering 9000 different species.
This low-lying waterworld fascinated Rothschild and in 1910 he bought another surviving ‘island’ of fen at Woodwalton, and that’s where I’m walking today with Henry Stanier, Great Fen Monitoring and Research Officer. “We call the Fens the big blue,” he says, as we set off down a long straight path through the tall grasses. “People love mountains and hills but they can be exhausting, and you don’t get the big sky with marvellous sunsets and clouds.”
“This was the last wilderness in England,” Henry explains. “Lots of people tried to tame it – the Romans, the Fen Adventurers of the 17th century, and then the Wells family came and mechanised the draining in the 19th century which changed everything.”
The Fens’ winding waterways were straightened to a grid of dykes and lodes channelling water to the sea, the peat bogs dried out and were turned to agricultural field, and the largest lake in lowland England disappeared. “Whittlesea Mere wouldn’t have had defined banks like we think of lakes now,” says Henry. “It would have been twice as big in winter, with marsh and reeds, and the landscape would have been used sustainably by locals for hunting, fishing and grazing. Some were so angry with the changes they formed the Fen Tigers and tried to break the drainage machines.”
Rothschild’s plan was to pass Woodwalton Fen to the National Trust but they, somewhat infamously, refused to take it, arguing upkeep was too expensive and it ‘was of interest only to the naturalist’. Charles kept it as a private reserve and in 1911 built himself a wooden bungalow – reminiscent of an African safari lodge – for weekend expeditions looking for butterflies and moths. Some 900 different species can be found here and as if on cue, a rare purple emperor flits over the thatched roof and down to the grass at our feet. Lepidopterists know this elusive insect as His Majesty. The male’s dark brown wings turn a regal purple when sunshine hits the scales just so, but its appetite is less refined, as it eats rotting carrion and carnivore faeces for salts and minerals. Some enthusiastic entomologists bring fish paste or dirty nappies to tempt the emperors down from the treetops.
The bungalow was built on stilts to cope with fluctuating water levels and Henry points to a pile marked with the height and date of different floods from 1947 to December 2020. He then moves to the next pile which shows the soil surface level when it was built; a line that is now about two feet above the ground. “As the peat dries out, it breaks down,” says Henry. “You can also get something called Fen blow, which is like a sandstorm of dried peat.” Peat forms very slowly at about one millimetre a year, or a metre a millennium: “Thousands of years of history are getting blown away.”
Rothschild’s List
The distinctive blue envelopes of the Rothschild Bank usually carried information about securities and bonds, but in 1913 they were flying about the British Isles on a very different mission. In the summer of 1912, Charles had convened a meeting at London’s Natural History Museum to establish a new organisation to forward his conservation vision: The Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves. An article in The Times set out its aim to find areas of Britain which ‘retain their primitive conditions and contain rare and local species liable to extinction owing to building, drainage and disafforestation or the cupidity of collectors’. (An adjacent advert selling ‘Furs for Xmas gifts’ maybe reinforced the pressing need for wildlife protection.)
Questionnaires were stuffed in envelopes and sent to society members and local natural history groups, and suggestions for sites ‘worthy of preservation’ invited from the public. Many responses bubbled with enthusiasm: Lucy Tate of Dawlish submitted a 19-page document about a tiny site at Crundale Bank in Kent. ‘I have seen people coming away from the woods in the district with literally armfulls not handfulls of fly orchids for instance,’ she wrote. She also warned that the landowner was ‘a man of a rather nasty temper’. Who owned a site was crucial, as it was the SPNR’s intention to buy up the best as reserves and donate them to the National Trust.
Scouting for sites wasn’t easy after war broke out in 1914: people tooling about the countryside were more likely to be taken for spies than keen conservationists. But they persisted nonetheless. ▶
“Each generation is the guardian of the existing resources of the world; it has come into a great inheritance, but only as a trustee.” DR CHALMERS MITCHELL, ABOUT THE LAUNCH OF THE SPNR, THE TIMES 1912
By 1915, the SPNR had compiled a list of 284 sites across the British Isles from the ‘fine mountain cliffs’ of Ben Hope in the far north of Scotland to the sand-dunes of Braunton Burrows in Devon, from Brandon Mountain in County Kerry to Tregaron Bog in Cardiganshire to the shingle spit of Orford Ness in Suffolk. They were a testament to the extraordinary diversity of this nation’s habitats and if you wanted to know where to walk to see the best of British wildlife, this was your ticklist.
The findings were bound and presented to the Board of Agriculture. And nothing happened.
Profit and loss
“The society never intended to own nature reserves,” says Henry, as we continue our walk through the lush paths of Woodwalton Fen. “The goal was to promote the idea.” But frustrated by inaction, Rothschild donated this site to his own nascent organisation in 1919 – an organisation that went on to become the Society for the Promotion of Nature Conservation in the 1970s, the Royal Society of Nature Conservation in the 1980s and then The Wildlife Trusts in the 1990s, an umbrella organisation of
46 local trusts who now own or care for more than
across the UK.
There was – eventually – government action too. The nation in 1915 had been preoccupied with the urgent needs of war, but it was at the height of the next world war 25 years later that Rothschild’s List was resurrected. A few years on, the National Parks Act 1949 established powers to declare National Nature Reserves (NNR), Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and local nature reserves (LNR).
“Many of today’s National Nature Reserves were on that original list,’ says Henry. It’s an impressive testament to Rothschild’s vision, but there was loss as well as hope. 88% of the sites on the list are now designated SSSI, NNR or Special Area of Conservation (SAC), but others were ploughed up, tarmacked over, turned to conifer plantation. And some of the protected sites are only a ghost of what they once were, like Northamptonshire’s Harlestone Heath where all that remains of a rare acid heath is a thin strip left as a fire break beside a railway line. A government report in 1947 declared it ‘a depressing exercise to examine the Rothschild list of 1915 in the light of those same sites only 30 years later. Some have been irreparably destroyed, others are well on the way to destruction, and more have so declined that they can no longer be rated as of outstanding national importance.’ It’s a reminder how fast these special places can slip away. ▶
There was tragic personal loss too. Rothschild struggled with his mental health for many years, as well as chronic encephalitis, and in 1917 he had a nervous breakdown. “I think people often try and connect with nature for mental health reasons,” says Henry, and the benefits of green spaces for people as well as wildlife are now well understood. But on 12th October 1923, Charles took his own life.
The Great Fen
Almost a century later his legacy lives on. It seems fitting that his Woodwalton Fen is now a cornerstone of one of The Wildlife Trusts’ most ambitious projects. Henry and I climb up onto a raised bank at the fen’s western edge to look around. On the northern skyline a crowd of birches indicate another reserve at Holme Fen – home to the lowest point in England at nine feet below sea-level – and the goal is to buy and restore the agricultural land that lies between the two and reconnect them into one Great Fen. Henry turns and points to the south where the land starts to rise ever so slightly. “Those are the uplands of Huntingdonshire,” he says with a smile. “The massif if you like. Some of it is within the Great Fen area which will be an incredible mosaic of habitats – bluebell woodland, wetland, meadow, heath.”
The project is being delivered by the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, and its partners, and over 55% of the land has already been purchased. It has just won a Heritage Horizon Award of more than £8 million to help fund the next stage. “You can tell which land we own,” says Henry. “It’s grass, rather than a crop. We seed it with a special mix, most from local sources. That’s the first step. The second is to control the water level. It was really wet this spring and we had redshanks, lapwings, shelduck and whimbrels on what used to be fields.”
Working with local farmers is crucial. “This is valuable agricultural land at the moment,” Henry explains, “but it will eventually be some of the worst if it dries out further. We’re talking to farmers about commercial crops that grow more easily in wet ground like comfrey, cuckoo flower, reed, bulrush and sphagnum moss which can be used for things like dressings. We don’t currently grow enough moss in this country for our needs.” Henry’s enthusiasm for this Rothschild reserve, and the charity Charles created, is clear. In the 1990s he volunteered at the Rothschild estate at Ashton Wold, half an hour west of here, before starting with The Wildlife Trusts. “There was a dragonfly museum in Ashton’s old watermill and I used to volunteer. We served teas there, and I remember
drinking Appletiser and eating the out-of-date crisps after work. That’s what got me volunteering: wildlife and free food.”
We talk about climate change and the ongoing challenges facing wildlife in Britain, but Henry thinks there is room for optimism. “When I was growing up talking to naturalists it was all about what you would have seen 10 years ago. It was quite depressing to realise what species had gone. But now they’re coming back. Red kites are back, with some help; buzzards without help. And the heron family is interesting – little and great white egrets were here before and now they’re recolonising. It’s nice to see things here. Things are improving.”
“This was the last wilderness in England… 9000 different species can be found here.”