Meet Alice the ‘All Powerful’
A new exhibition focuses on an unknown Rothschild, reports
SHE WAS a pianist and an art collector, a gardener and a farmer who made sure that some of her prizewinning Shorthorn cattle were slaughtered according to the rules of kashrut. But Alice de Rothschild was a mostly overlooked member of her famous family, rather cruelly labelled as plain and over-shadowed by her brother Ferdinand.
Now the custodians of Waddesdon Manor, the Buckinghamshire pile where she was chatelaine for more than 20 years, hope to put that right with a new exhibition celebrating Alice and her many achievements.
“It’s a misperception that she was just the preserver of her brother’s creation,” says Dr Mia Jackson, Waddesdon’s curator of decorative arts. Alice inherited Waddesdon from her brother, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, and her family seems to have failed to notice that she was enhancing the estate while faithfully tending Ferdinand’s collections and adding to them.
She was born in Frankfurt, a member of the Vienna branch of the family rather than the London strand. Ferdinand commissioned the magnificent house in the mid-1870s and died a childless widower, and on his death in 1892 left his estate to Alice, who had been sharing the house with him since it was built. That she took great care of the manor and everything in it has been acknowledged, but not so much the subtle changes she made and her contribution to the collections.
“She added Renaissance paintings, Italian pottery of the same period and early English earthenware,” says Jackson, adding the latter category was “interesting” for someone of her class and wealth to be buying. “It’s not the refined porcelain that others were acquiring, but I would term Alice a ceramics connoisseur with an academic as well as aesthetic interest.”
The colourful English plates are among several objects in the exhibition on display for the first time. There will even be an Alice angle in the gardens, where she was seen with a tool in hand to pluck out every weed that caught her eye and she pioneered planting techniques such as three-dimensional carpet bedding.
Alice had a reputation for being fierce — this is a woman nicknamed ‘The All Powerful’ by Queen Victoria, whom, it is rumoured, she lectured not to walk on the grass. To her servants, she was an exemplary employer. She built a reading room to help them educate themselves, vaccinated them against smallpox and made sure even the under-gardeners, who lived in the bothy beneath the house, had their own private quarters rather than being forced to share a dormitory.
Alice never married, but she formed close friendships with several women, including her cousins and a governess who became a lifelong companion. One room in the new show displays Alice’s sketchbooks and letters to her friends and also to the head gardener with whom she shared her views on the wider world including the Great War. She was distraught, not only about her cousin Evelyn, to whom she had hoped to leave Waddesdon, dying in action in Palestine and the fate of Rothschild relatives all over Europe, but also worried about how she would provide for the widows of the many servants who went to fight and did not return.
Whether the absence of romance from her life was down to her looks we shall never know: “Comments about her ‘plainness’ led to a real dislike of being photographed and we found no portraits of her while researching the exhibition,” says Jackson. When she was just a girl of 19, newly-arrived in England, her aunt Charlotte, Baroness Lionel de Rothschild, was particularly cruel, writing: “Poor Alice — what a pity we cannot cut her head off and give her a new one — feels her ugliness, thinks no person can take pleasure in her society and shrinks from the world on that account.”
Dorothy, wife of James de Rothschild, Alice’s successor, was a little kinder: “She had never been good-looking but had keen, bright eyes, a thoughtful brow and something unusual and arresting in appearance and expression,” she wrote in her book The Rothschilds at Waddesdon Manor. Alice seemed wary of reactions to her sharp wit, adds Dorothy, who found Alice a “sparkling conversationalist” with a nervewracking idiosyncracy: “Whenever she said something amusing, as often happened, and one laughed, she would round on one and ask with machine-gun speed: ‘Why do you laugh?’”
James and Dorothy also being childless, the property was handed
over to the National Trust, who have adopted many of Alice’s principles in their conservancy practice, while generations of Rothschilds continue to endow, renovate and ensure the longterm sustainability of the estate.
Her cousin Constance, Lady Battersea, noted in an affectionate obituary that she would be sorely missed by locals: “Her death will be deeply and sincerely regretted…especially by the inhabitants of Waddesdon, by the many there whom she assisted in trouble… by the working men for whose benefit she provided a club-room and useful library, and last but not least by the many families for whom she built sanitary and attractive cottages.”
These cottages make a visit to the Manor so enjoyable — the beautifully-kept village at the foot of the estate, the drop-dead-gorgeous big house with its wealth of curlicues and cone-headed turrets, the fabulous china, textiles and armoury within, and for the next two weeks at least, acres of daffodils carpeting the rolling hills of the extensive grounds.
And now the woman who was responsible for the glory of the grounds in particular and working the land is finally getting her due. Pippa Shirley, director of collections and gardens at Waddesdon, says: “She was an extraordinary woman who stands out in an age dominated by men. Her spirit lives on in a place which may have been created by her brother but which she made very much her own.”
Poor Alice what a pity we cannot cut her head off and give her a new one feels her ugliness and shrinks from the world
Whenever she said something amusing and one laughed, she would round on one and ask ‘Why do you laugh?’
Alice’s Wonderlands runs until October 30 waddesdon.org.uk