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Amschel Mayor James Rothschild

Amschel Mayor James Rothschild

Male 1955 - 1996  (41 years)    Has 24 ancestors and 3 descendants in this family tree.

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  • Name Amschel Mayor James Rothschild 
    Birth 18 Apr 1955 
    Gender Male 
    Death 8 Jul 1996 
    Siblings 3 Siblings 
    Person ID I303316  Geneagraphie
    Last Modified 17 Mar 2002 

    Father Col. Baron Victor Rothschild,   b. 31 Oct 1910   d. Mar 1990, London, Middlesex, England Find all individuals with events at this location (Age 79 years) 
    Mother Teresa Georgina Mayor,   b. 10 Dec 1915   d. 1996 (Age 80 years) 
    Marriage 14 Aug 1946 
    Family ID F121731  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

    Family Living 
    Children 
     1. Living
     2. Living
     3. Living
    Family ID F121706  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
    Last Modified 19 Sep 2006 

  • Notes 
    • He became a country gentleman of near-ducal level: oversaw the family estate that spread across Suffolk hills; manufactured a select brand of apple juice; made his mark as cricketeer on many an exclusive lawn; silvered the shelves of his den with trophies from auto races; dipped on occasion into London's chic recesses, like the Club Zanzibar.

      In 1987 his father, Lord Victor, asked him to enter the Family bank after all. Amschel was thirty-two. He went through a brief breaking-in period as silver trader and as assistant to New Court's head, Sir Evelyn. Then, in 1990, Evelyn put him in charge of Rothschild Assets Management. It was a rather spectacular and ultimately disastrous advancement.
      But no one knew that yet, though many in the City were aware of the challenges built into Amschel's job. Rothschild Assets Management---R.A.M. for short---constituted one of eight such funds-handling companies operating under the Rothschild umbrella on various continents. There was not one world-beater among them. In fact, the London one had to make do with portfolios totaling under twenty billion, whereas the leader in the field, Boston Fidelities, husbanded four hundred. Amschel planned to improve this un-Rothschild picture by combining the eight far-flung enterprises into a single engine of ubiquitous reach and global heft.
      Even for a seasoned Rothschild of toughest vintage this would have been a thorny task. It involved long-distance strategizing, the creation of a Dutch Holding Company, the harnessing of the cousin branch in Paris with all its remote ramifications, the exploration and verification of offshore balance sheets, the integrating of sundry transoceanic executive teams, the assessing and sometimes the venturing of antipodal boardroom gambits. Amschel poured dogged work and unstinting expense into his initiative. In 1995 it still did not pay off. R.A.M. reported a loss of nine million dollars.
      A deficit of a different sort was suffered by Amschel's private sphere: No more rustic ease around the ample hearth in Suffolk. Now Amschel's schedule had to obey imperatives harsher than those of the cricket league or the breeding of exquisite apples. Chronic travel ate into what was once a close-knit family life. There was always that limousine lying in wait to dash him to the airport. Amschel still tried to be a good father, but often he had to be good in absentia. And, of course, he turned, increasingly, into an absentee husband. After fifteen years of marriage, rumors floated through London of
      Amschel's rows with Anita. Friends worried over the emptiness in his eyes.
      Yet toward the end of spring 1996 it appeared that Amschel's labors would find reward. By May the ink on R.A.M. ledgers turned from red to black. And in midsummer some long-missed paterfamilias joy beckoned: Amschel and his son James were to play a big cricket match on the weekend of July thirteenth. On the Monday preceding, on July eighth, Amschel chaired a long, toilsome meeting on R.A.M. matters in the Paris family bank on avenue Matignon. Its agenda, while not sunny, was not particularly grim.
      When the conference ended at five P.M., none of the participants shaking hands with Amschel suspected that anything might be very much amiss. Neither did a chambermaid at the Hotel Bristol around the corner, where Amschel lodged at $900 a night under bronze chandeliers. At 7:30 P.M. she knocked at the door of Room 402 to turn down Amschel's bed. Nobody answered. She entered with her passkey and found Amschel dead.
      There was no note. No clear explanation of the suicide was ever provided. But it is fair to reason that Amschel had died of an evil all too common and too up-to-date: stress. The stress of stretching a local London-based assets-managing company into a network spanning the planet is a gold-framed mirror that reflects the pressures afflicting many of us today on a humbler scale. From the five brothers fanning out across Europe in their coaches, to Amschel vibrating in the Concorde between London and New York, the Rothschilds have been among the principal dynamos powering the modern stress cycle. They are archdemons of our Zeitgeist. That is half the reason they are legend. The other half lies in their ability to transcend the very Zeitgeist they've been spreading. They have managed to temper universal ambition with a very specific tradition. In the teeth of their own planetary thrust they insist on family-textured closeness. Sometimes, as in Amschel's case, they fail. Yet this recent failure focused them, even more recently, on their customary remedy.

      Three months after Amschel's death, the other major event in the Rothschilds' 1990's story came to pass. Sir Evelyn, as head of N. M. Rothschild, London, made an announcement: his French cousin David, already his deputy chairman, would be director of a committee coordinating Rothschild investment banking around the world. This, reported The New York Times, meant "that the French and English branches had become partners again in a way not seen since the Rothschilds first invented international banking." It was a global move by tribal means---a classic reprise of the Rothschilds myth first set in motion by old Meyer and his five boys on Jew Street.
    • (Medical):hanged himself from the towel rail in the bathroom



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