steepholm

My mother's been recalling her time working for Eddie Rothschild in the late 1940s. He employed her to ghost-write his memoir, Window on the World, and so for two years she went to work every morning at the family bank in St Swithin's Lane. A few of her reminiscences...

Work at Rothschild's began at 10am, with the staff going to the basement and toasting bread on forks at the coal hearths there.

She often worked in the Gold Fixing Room, where each morning a group of four or five top-hatted men would arrive in order to determine the worldwide price of gold. While they were doing this, she had to vacate the room. Why this was (and is) done at Rothschild's, she doesn't know.

At lunchtime, all the women were seated at one table, the men at another, and they were attended by a butler called Henry. In those rationed days they were grateful for the plentiful meals, made up of food grown on the lavish Rothschild estates. For all that, the meat was sometimes off.

The three partners (Eddie, his uncle Anthony, and a Mr Coleville) worked in the Partners' Room, the only one that was bigger than the Gold Fixing Room. The top half of the door was made of plain glass, and people who wished to talk to them would wait outside, until summoned by a nod. On tne mantelpiece of the Partners' Room were a few coins of loose change that had been left there by Disraeli at the time of the building of the Suez canal - largely on Rothschild money.

Though she didn't mention it tonight, I also remember my mother confessing that she once drank her fingerbowl when attending a posh Rothschild meal, a humiliation to be equalled only when, as a small child, I was offered a napkin at a dinner party and declined, explaining that "My knees are quite warm enough, thank you." That's her story, anyway.

Years later, when she was living in Romsey, Eddie Rothschild invited her to his home in Exbury, just the other side of the Forest; but she didn't go. I suppose the moment had passed.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lamentables

How fascinating all your family history is! All the history I'm aware of from my own family has been small, domestic stuff (not to say domestic is uninteresting).

My grandparents were all old when I was born and died when I was young, and I've little sense of my parents talking of their past. Their was a brief window between my realising that my father had interesting stories to tell and him becoming incapable of telling them - I missed that opportunity.

steepholm

I feel I let a lot of things slip through my fingers with my father, in similar circumstances, and I'm determined not to make the same mistake again. I have a similar experience re. grandparents: all mine were dead by the time I was 8.

Now I feel like I've been caught out in a less-than-convincing excuse :)

I am resigned to being isolated from my family history. My mother is both alive and able to tell stories but, to be blunt, she lies and manipulates so that her stories are not to be trusted and I don't want to hear them.