A brother like no other

He rode a giant tortoise and had zebras draw his carriage, kept kangaroos in the garden and fleas dressed in clothes in the house. Charles’ older brother Walter was an extravagantly eccentric character who abandoned the family banking business, but shared a love for natural history. Aged 10 he started a museum in his garden shed. For his 21st birthday his parents built him one at Tring Park which 400 collectors went on to fill with artifacts from 48 countries – 300,000 bird skins, 200,000 eggs, over two million butterflies, moths and beetles, and thousands of mammals, fish and reptiles. That extraordinary collection is now part of the Natural History Museum, but its storied history doesn’t end there. In 2009, Tring was the scene of a feather heist (see p71) and two years later a thief broke in and removed two rhino horns – probably with a hammer – worth a quarter of a million quid. Or so he thought. After a spate of horn burglaries from other museums, the curators had replaced them with resin replicas three months earlier.