Jacob Rothschild, the banker and philanthropist who left the family bank to build his own financial empire in the City of London, has died. He was 87.
His family confirmed his death in a statement to the Press Association. No cause was given.
“Our father Jacob was a towering presence in many peoples’ lives - a superbly accomplished financier, a champion of the arts and culture, a devoted public servant,” the family said in the statement, noting several of his philanthropic endeavors.
A seventh-generation heir of the famed banking dynasty, Rothschild left N.M. Rothschild & Sons Ltd. in 1980 to focus on Rothschild Investment Trust after resigning from the family firm over a dispute about its direction. The offshoot business — now known as RIT Capital Partners Plc — is today one of the UK’s largest investment trusts with £3.5 billion ($4.4 billion) in net assets at the end of November.
Along with RIT, he co-founded the asset manager St. James’s Place Plc and formed part of a trio that joined forces three decades ago in a $21 billion aborted hostile takeover bid for British American Tobacco Plc, which if successful would have been one of the biggest takeovers of all time.
Jacob “returned the British branch of the Rothschild family to the ascendance,” said David Hawkins, founder of Cliveden Advisory, a London-based strategic consulting business for wealthy individuals and their investment firms. He had “acute business acumen.”
Jacob Rothschild was also one of the UK’s leading philanthropists. He chaired the boards of the National Gallery and the National Heritage Lottery Fund.
A noted art collector, he restored Spencer House in London and masterminded the five-year restoration of Waddesdon Manor, the 19th century country house in Buckinghamshire built by one of his many wealthy ancestors, from 1990 to 1995.
Rothschild also followed other members of the far-flung family in having charitable interests in Israel. He was chairman of Yad Hanadiv, the family foundation, which gave the Knesset and the Supreme Court buildings to the nation.
He was awarded the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II in 2002. The order is given for service in the field of the arts, learning, literature and science, and are limited in number to 24 in the United Kingdom. Rothschild was among the rare people to have been painted by both Lucian Freud and David Hockney.
“He made the very most of the privilege he was born into, contributing hugely to the cultural and commercial life of Britain,” Former UK chancellor George Osborne said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “His contributions to the Waddesdon gallery make it one the jewels of the British Museum. Smart, curious, full of new projects and with a dry humour - he will be missed.”
Eton College
Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild was born in April, 1936, educated at Eton College and the University of Oxford. In 1961, he married the late Serena Mary Dunn, a granddaughter of the Canadian financier Sir James Dunn. She was a British thoroughbred racehorse owner and managed Waddesdon Stud at the manor of the same name that has become one of the National Trust’s most visited properties.
Jacob Rothschild was a descendant of the renowned family of financiers founded in the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt by Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a rare-coin dealer born in 1744 who advised German aristocrats on their finances. Mayer Amschel sent his sons to major European cities to do business with cash-strapped governments.
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Nathan Mayer Rothschild was the first to venture abroad when he arrived on English shores at the end of the 18th century. Nathan founded his namesake bank in 1810 and gained prominence for financing Britain’s military operations in the Napoleonic Wars.
“They spent, I think, the first part of the 19th century making lots of money,” Jacob said of his ancestors in a 2021 Bloomberg Television interview. “They spent a lot of the second half of the 19th century spending it.”
Jacob became a partner in N.M. Rothschild & Sons four years after joining the family bank in 1959 and ran its corporate-finance department. About two decades later, he faced opposition in his efforts to expand the bank’s services from his father Victor and his cousin Evelyn, who took over from Victor as chairman in 1976.
Jacob and Evelyn had a highly publicized split in 1980 over the former’s push to merge with S.G. Warburg & Co., in the hopes of expanding internationally and competing with Wall Street firms. When Evelyn refused, Jacob quit and founded his offshoot investment vehicle, RIT.
The Succession
Since debuting on the London Stock Exchange in 1988 in the wake of the deregulation of the city’s financial markets, RIT has grown more than 1,300%. Rothschild stepped down as RIT’s chairman in 2019, though his daughter, Hannah, 61, remained on the board of directors of the investment firm, where she oversees a stake of at least 10% now worth more than £250 million.
Other companies he co-founded include Global Asset Management and St James’s Place, which was established in 1991 under the name of the J. Rothschild Assurance Group. Other posts included serving as deputy chairman for BSkyB for five years to 2008, the same year he stepped down from Blackstone’s board.
Jacob’s 52-year-old son, Nathaniel, chairman and the major shareholder of UK manufacturer Volex Plc, succeeds him as the 5th Baron Rothschild. The younger banking scion previously served as a RIT director before his elder sister, Hannah, took on a similar role in 2013.
In addition to serving on RIT’s board of directors, Hannah is the only one of Jacob’s offspring to help run his private investment firm, Five Arrows Limited. Hannah, a former chair of the UK’s National Gallery, also helps to oversee her family’s charitable entities along with her other siblings Emily, 56, and Beth, who’s 60 this month.
In recent years, there have been signs of closer ties between Jacob’s family and the rest of the dynasty. Hannah lent financial backing to the move last year to take private Rothschild & Co, the bank that grew out of a merger between the Paris and UK banks. Evelyn, with whom Jacob had had differences, had played a big role in the coming together of the lenders. Evelyn died in 2022.
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