Sir Evelyn de Rothschild
Financier who prudently steered the family merchant bank through the Big Bang years
SIR EVELYN de ROTHSCHILD, who has died aged 91, was the head of his family’s banking house in London for almost three decades. He maintained NM Rothschild’s prestigious reputation, particularly as an adviser to governments, as well as its independence; by the end of his tenure in 2003, the firm was unique in the City as the only traditional, family-controlled merchant bank to have survived intact the upheavals of Big Bang and the turbulent years that followed.
As majority shareholder of NM Rothschild as well as chairman, Sir Evelyn was an autocrat of mercurial temperament. He disliked publicity, whether personal or corporate, and discouraged strategic debate among his colleagues, though he interfered little in client relations and deals. It was said that Rothschild executives simply asked each other: “Would Evelyn want us to do this?” If the answer was no, it was not done.
Evelyn joined NM Rothschild as a junior partner in 1957. His early career path there was much intertwined with that of his cousin Jacob, who was five years his junior and joined in 1963.
With Evelyn’s encouragement, the clever, entrepreneurial Jacob (later the 4th Lord Rothschild) rapidly developed the bank’s corporate finance and eurobond activities. Relations between the two were never close, however, and became increasingly strained as they evolved differing visions for the future of the firm in the 1970s.
When Jacob’s father Victor – the 3rd Lord Rothschild, and the former head of Edward Heath’s Downing Street “Think Tank” – became stop-gap chairman in 1975, the competition between Evelyn and Jacob for leadership of the next generation still seemed open. But Evelyn’s shareholding counted strongly, and despite Jacob’s more active contribution to the development of the business, the firm’s other directors regarded Evelyn as a safer pair of hands.
The chairmanship was duly conferred on him in 1976.
At a time when the whole City was at a low ebb, Evelyn de Rothschild strongly opposed any change which would dilute family control of the bank, and took the view that Rothschilds should continue to play to its long-established strength as a discreet, high-level adviser and financier to governments and blue-chip companies.
He placed primary importance on stability, regarding himself as the bank’s “custodian”. Jacob, on the other hand, was convinced that traditional merchant banking had little future: to him, the way forward was to create a broader, more adventurous financial services group through a merger with the rival firm of Warburg.
These differences between the cousins became widely known in the City, and provoked the departure of some of Rothschilds’ brightest managers. “The court just isn’t big enough for Evelyn and Jacob,” said one insider, “not the way they play tennis.” Finally, in 1980, Jacob himself left the bank to create his own successful empire.
Some observers doubted whether NM Rothschild would thrive under Evelyn’s cautious hand, and without Jacob, in the era of deregulation and free-wheeling entrepreneurship heralded by the advent of the Thatcher government. Others disparaged Evelyn’s habit of filling his board table with ex-politicians and Whitehall grandees, noting that the firm’s strongest political links had an unfashionable Heathite flavour – through Victor Rothschild and appointees such as Christopher Soames and Peter Walker.
But any imbalance in that respect was adjusted by Evelyn’s recruitment from Cazenove of the relentless dealmaker (Sir) Michael Richardson, a personal friend of Margaret Thatcher, who amply filled Jacob’s shoes on the corporate finance side. Meanwhile, such men as John Redwood and Oliver Letwin brought intellectual weight and Thatcherite credentials to the bank’s middle management.
After a slow start, Rothschilds emerged in the mid-1980s as a major player in the government’s privatisation programme. It won roles in the sales of British Gas, Rolls-royce, the technology group Amersham International and the water and electricity industries, and emerged with its reputation intact from its role as lead underwriter of the 1987 sale of the government’s remaining stake in British Petroleum, which coincided with the Black Monday stock market crash.
In total, Rothschilds raised some
£35 billion for the Conservative government through share sales. It also acted on behalf of leading take-over exponents of the era such as Lord Hanson – re-establishing its status, last held in the late 1960s, as a top corporate finance house. At the same time, its international network was considerably extended.
But the temptations of Big Bang in 1986 – in which other merchant banks sold themselves to new owners to become part of larger, riskier securities businesses – were largely shunned. Sir Evelyn restricted himself to taking a 30 per cent stake in the stock-jobber Smith Bros, from which emerged a powerful new trading firm, Smith New Court; Rothschilds eventually sold its interest to Merrill Lynch at a handsome profit.
By the second half of the 1990s, after the disappearance of Barings and other British competitors, Rothschilds stood almost alone as a historic merchant banking business which had found a secure niche for itself in the modern financial world. Sir Evelyn, one City commentator wrote, had controlled his bank’s risks and held the loyalty of its staff, while avoiding the crippling expense of an American-style bonus culture. His “crablike caution” had paid dividends in the end; he could “look his magnificent ancestors in the face”.
Evelyn Robert Adrian de Rothschild was born on August 29 1931, the son of Anthony de Rothschild, a Gallipoli veteran who was described as “formidable, aloof and slow to smile”. Anthony was in turn a greatgrandson of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the young Jewish textile trader who arrived from Frankfurt to buy cloth in London and Manchester in 1798, and established his “counting house” at New Court in St Swithin’s Lane in the City of London in 1810-11.
Nathan and his sons and cousins developed a network of banking houses across Europe, and became financiers to successive British, French and German governments. Having financed Wellington’s armies and the building of the Suez Canal, they were acknowledged as the most powerful bankers in the 19th-century world. Their partnerships remained dynastic and exclusive, epitomising everything suggested by the phrase “haute banque”.
Anthony de Rothschild’s contribution, as senior partner in the decade following the Second World War, was to rebuild the London bank’s international business and to reorganise the family shareholdings on a basis which gave him (and in due course Evelyn) 60 per cent of its voting shares.
Anthony’s wife, Evelyn’s mother, was Yvonne Cahen d’anvers, from a family long associated with the Rothschild family’s French branch.
The young Evelyn de Rothschild spent three years in America before going to Harrow in 1943. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, but did not complete his degree. Before joining the bank, he performed his National Service in the Royal Navy and spent periods of training with the mining group Rio Tinto in New York and RD Smith & Co, a trading firm in Toronto.
Having been inducted into the partnership, de Rothschild spent the first years of his career at an antique desk in “the Room”, a spacious, panelled office shared by the family partners – the first non-family partner was not appointed until 1960.
It was at de Rothschild’s suggestion that the original New Court building containing the Room was demolished in 1962 to make way for the glass and marble structure which housed the bank until its turn to be torn down and replaced came in 2008.
Evelyn de Rothschild was knighted in 1989. His shareholding in the bank was estimated (in 2003) to be worth about £350 million. He had for some years groomed as a potential successor Amschel Rothschild, Jacob’s younger half-brother, but Amschel was found hanged in a Paris hotel room in 1996, and the succession was settled on another cousin, Baron David de Rothschild, who ran the family’s French bank and was in a position to bring the Paris and London businesses under one management.
De Rothschild was also chairman of The Economist from 1972 to 1989, and of the British Merchant Banking & Securities Houses Association (the successor to the far more exclusive Accepting Houses Committee, of which Rothschilds had been a leading member).
He was chairman of St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, a governor of Imperial College, and a benefactor of many charitable causes. The Eranda Foundation, which he chaired for more than 50 years, gave more than £70 million to medical research, education and the arts.
Among his other charitable endeavours he was Honorary Life President of Norwood, a Jewish charity supporting people with learning difficulties and autism; and he was a trustee of the Snowdon Trust, which provides grants to help disabled young people take up higher education or training.
A dashing polo player in his youth, de Rothschild became a devotee of the Turf and was chairman of United Racecourses, which owns Epsom and Kempton Park. His own best horse was Crystal Ocean, an eight-times winner (including the Hardwicke Stakes at Ascot in 2018) trained by Sir Michael Stoute. He also bred Notnowcato, who raced in the names of his sons.
His country home was Ascott House, a sprawling half-timbered Victorian mansion (in fact, a much enlarged 17th-century farmhouse) at Wing, near Leighton Buzzard, in Buckinghamshire. The house had been created as a hunting lodge in the 1870s and 1880s by his Rothschild grandfather, Leopold.
Anthony de Rothschild inherited Ascott in 1937, and reshaped the house to provide a suitable setting for a splendid art collection, to which Evelyn in due course added. The house was made over to the National Trust on Anthony’s death, but remained a family home.
In London, de Rothschild and his third wife, Lynn, bought and refurbished John Singer Sargent’s house and studio in Chelsea; they also had homes in France and the United States.
Evelyn de Rothschild married first, in 1966, Jeanette Bishop, a former model. The marriage was dissolved and he married secondly, in 1973, Victoria Schott; they had two sons and a daughter. The second marriage was also dissolved and in 2000 he married Lynn Forester, an American telecommunications entrepreneur who later campaigned for inclusive capitalism; she survives him along with his three children and two stepsons.