It cannot be said that bankers generally attach much importance to the protection of nature, but Charles Rothschild was different.
He was born in 1877 into one of the world’s largest banking families and grew up working in the family business, but his real passion was nature. Charles spent his spare time categorizing fleas, dragonflies and rare plants, and met his wife, the Hungarian Baroness Rózsika Edle von Wertheimstein, on a butterfly collecting expedition in the Carpathian mountains.
Rothschild, one of the pioneers of modern nature conservation, realized that protecting the natural environment was a better strategy than trying to preserve individual species. More than a century ago, he saw the impact of human activities on our natural habitats and felt compelled to create a list of 284 areas in Britain that were “worthy of conservation”.
Rothschild founded the Society for the Support of Nature Reserves (SPNR); this association later became The Wildlife Trusts and today looks after more than 2,300 nature reserves in the UK (more than there are McDonald’s).
Craig Bennett, chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts, tells me: “60 per cent of the UK population lives within three miles of a Wildlife Trust reserve… the concept of nature reserves is now well established, but the idea was groundbreaking in his life. [Rothschild’s] day.”
Focus on Fens
It all began in the Fens in the east of England, in the low-lying and fertile lands between Lincoln in the north, Cambridge in the south and Peterborough in the west, where the rich soil is peaty and almost black. Walking through Woodwalton Fen and Holme Fen National Nature Reserves (NNRs) is the closest you can get to seeing the natural landscape Rothschild saw more than a century ago, but surprisingly less than one percent of the undrained, uncultivated marshes have survived. today – and this was only saved when Rothschild stepped in to buy the land in 1911.
On a cold autumn evening, a hundred years after Rothschild’s death in 1923, Woodwalton Fen felt a comforting dampness, the sky darkening overhead. Grand Fen monitoring and research officer Henry Stanier walked with me, identifying bird sounds and talking a little about the long history of the area.
“The wild swamp has almost completely disappeared. “Local people hunted wildfowl and mined peat, using ‘bog boats’, the flat-bottomed boats you see in Cambridge, to navigate the marshes and man-made ditches,” he said.
Henry showed me around Rothschild’s stilt bungalow, the banker’s marsh retreat, and shared the Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust’s vision that this marsh area forms part of a huge new wetland landscape called the Great Marsh.
The 50-year project to link parts of Woodwalton Fen and Holme Fen will create a habitat mosaic, a “living landscape”, and create a wetland corridor over nearby farmland and trial wet farming (paludiculture). From the north-east end of Woodwalton Fen you can see the stubble in the fields after harvest, but there are already axes policing the wet ditches and merlins darting across the open land. Beyond the farm I could see the thick woodland of Holme Fen, the largest birch forest in lowland England, managed by Natural England.
Britain’s first nature reserve
Rothschild initially considered gifting the marshland he purchased in 1911 to the National Trust, but declined. Undaunted, he founded the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves (SPNR), which purchased Woodwalton Fen in 1919, creating the country’s first nature reserve. But it wasn’t just the Fens that Rothschild fought to protect, he also wanted to extend protection to natural habitats across the country.
in the book Wildlife is Safe – One Hundred Years of Nature Conservation“His idea was to use the Society to persuade others that ‘it is desirable to preserve permanent areas suitable for nature reserves,’ writes Tim Sands. The plan was to ‘conduct a nationwide survey of such sites with the help of local communities and individuals’.
SPNR visited some sites and sent surveys to others; Once completed, the surveys were filed separately in Rothschild’s separate blue bank envelopes. Eventually Rothschild took his list of 284 sites and presented them to the government. Today, some of these areas have been lost to time or devastated by development, but many more are now owned and managed by various organizations such as The Wildlife Trusts, the National Trust, the RSPB and organizations such as Natural England or Scottish Natural Heritage. or local groups.
Success stories include Blean Woods in Kent, one of the largest areas of ancient woodlands in England; Britain’s largest dune system, Braunton Burrows in Devon, is now part of a Unesco Biosphere Reserve; All of Scotland’s islands, including Foula, St Kilda and Ailsa Craig, are protected for birdlife; and remote places in Wales, such as Mount Holyhead on Anglesey, with its rare plants.
Despite the black-and-white photographs of a stern-looking man in a Victorian morning suit, it is thought-provoking to realize that Charles Rothschild was relatively young when he set out to save Britain’s natural habitats. In 1912, he was 35 years old when he held the first meeting at the National History Museum to discuss the idea of establishing a society. However, despite possessing seemingly boundless energy, Rothschild was described by his daughter as a “lonely and isolated figure” and died by suicide in 1923 after contracting encephalitis.
His foresight in recognizing that rare habitats needed to be protected by law led to the creation of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949, which ultimately led to many of Britain’s most important areas for wildlife and recreation being saved from destruction.
For more information on Rothschild’s List and the Great Fen Habitat, see wildlifesafety.org. Rachel Mills remained near Houghton, south of the Fens. Eagle Mill (doubles from £105).