Tring Park was once home to a menagerie of exotic animals, including giant tortoises.
Lord Lionel Walter, Baron Rothschild, was born into a prominent banking family, but he had little interest in finance.
Instead he pursued his childhood passion for collecting natural history specimens. Discover the story of how the Natural History Museum at Tring came to be.
Born in 1868, Walter Rothschild became interested in nature when he was very young. His family had moved from London to Tring Park in Hertfordshire, where he started collecting insects.
When he was seven he told his parents that he was going to “make a museum”, and by the time he was 10 he had enough specimens to start one – in his parents’ garden shed.
Alfred Minall, a joiner and journeyman on the Rothschild estate, acted as caretaker and taxidermist for Walter’s early collections and became his museum’s first curator.
But Walter’s appetite for collecting both local and exotic species rapidly outgrew the modest construction.
Although his family disapproved of his interest in natural science, his father – the first Lord Rothschild – built him a museum on the edge of Tring Park as a twenty-first birthday present.
Three years later, in 1892, Walter’s Zoological Museum – now the Natural History Museum at Tring – opened to the public.
People outside Walter’s museum on the occasion of the International Zoological Congress, 1899.
Although Walter served in the military, worked in the family banking business and was involved in politics, his first passion was always his museum.
He employed around 400 collectors during his lifetime and accumulated specimens from more than 48 different countries, many of which were new to Western science.
Collectors sent him animal specimens from around the world. Walter mainly stayed in Tring and focused on carefully studying the creatures he received and describing new species.
Ernst Hartert, a German ornithologist, was employed as a curator at Walter’s museum.
Bird expert Ernst Hartert was appointed Curator of Ornithology from 1892 to 1930 and served as the museum’s first director during that time. He travelled in India, Africa and South America and played an important role in making the Museum at Tring a centre for scientific exchange.
Entomologist Karl Jordan was employed as Walter’s curator of insects.
Insect expert Karl Jordan was Curator of Walter’s entomology collections from 1893 and the museum’s director from 1930 to 1938. He described more than 3,000 new species, many from specimens sent to Tring by Walters’ network of collectors, plus a further 800 in collaboration with Walter and Charles Rothschild.
Sailor Henry Palmer collected bird specimens from the Sandwich Islands and documented commercial egg-harvesting operations.
In 1890, sailor Henry Palmer was sent by Walter to collect bird specimens from the Sandwich Islands in the North Pacific Ocean, which are now part of Hawaii. He also documented the commercial egg-harvesting operations. Palmer’s specimens were key to Walter’s work on species that are now extinct or highly endangered.
As well as the thousands of specimens Walter put on display, the collection he amassed included over a million more used for research behind the scenes, notably 300,000 birds and over a million butterflies and moths.
In spite of his family’s great wealth, the eccentric baron was sometimes short of money. In fact, he sold most of his beetles to raise funds for his museum.
In the 1930s, a personal crisis forced Walter to sell almost his entire bird collection to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
The bird skin collection of Walter Rothschild leaving Tring, bound for the American Museum of Natural History.
But his museum wasn’t to blame for all his financial troubles. In 1931, Walter was confronted with a demand to pay for a debt “not incurred on account of the museum”. Only after Walter’s death was it revealed he’d been blackmailed for nearly 40 years by a peeress – who had once been his mistress – and her husband.
When Walter died in 1937, aged 69, he left his remaining research collections, the public museum, its contents and the surrounding land to the Natural History Museum in London.
His collection is the biggest private natural history collection ever assembled by one person. It’s also the largest bequest of specimens ever received by the Natural History Museum.
Walter’s butterfly collections were later moved to London and Tring became home to the bird research collections. Today, staff working at Tring look after more than a million bird specimens, nests and eggs. Researchers from around the world travel to Tring to use this important collection.
As a collector, Walter was drawn to both the unusual and the exotic.
A menagerie of exotic animals, Tring Park became home to emus and kangaroos. Walter also owned zebras that were trained to pull a carriage, which he was even invited to drive to the grounds of Buckingham Palace.
Walter’s zebra- and disguised horse-drawn carriage photographed outside the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington.
This bowler hat containing a wasp nest was found in an outhouse on the Rothschild estate in Tring.
A common wasp, Vespula vulgaris, nest in a bowler hat.
Walter sent explorer Charles Harris to the Galápagos Islands, off Ecuador, to collect giant tortoises. Throughout his lifetime Walter kept a total of 144 live giant tortoises from Galapágos and the Aldabra atoll, which is in the Indian Ocean.
Walter’s aim was in part to protect them from potential extinction in their native habitat. He even leased the island of Aldabra for 10 years, to stop declining giant tortoise numbers by protecting them from hunting.
Transporting a giant tortoise in 1897.
Walter was fascinated by the cassowary – a large, flightless bird found in Australia and New Guinea.
He kept 64 live cassowaries in nearby Tring Park, had portraits done of each, then had each animal prepared as taxidermy when they died.
Walter wrote a detailed study, known as a monograph, based on observation of live cassowary specimens. Although he thought the birds’ individual variation – especially their coloured wattles – indicated many species, there are actually only three species now recognised by science.
These portraits are just a sample of those prepared at Walter’s request by English artist Frederick William Frohawk (1861-1946).
Watercolours of cassowaries by Frederick William Frohawk, prepared for publication in Walter’s Monograph on the Genus Casuarius.
Two of the most bizarre specimens on display in the Natural History Museum at Tring are the dressed fleas. They come from Mexico, where they were made as souvenirs for tourists.
An interest in fleas ran in Walter’s family. His brother Charles and niece Miriam both studied them. Miriam was the first person to work out how fleas jump.
Dressed fleas from the collections of the Natural History Museum at Tring.
Most of the 4,900 specimens on display in the Natural History Museum at Tring have been there since it opened to the public 125 years ago. In fact, some are still exactly where Walter put them many years ago.
Discover the world-class collection of animals and birds at the Natural History Museum at Tring, Hertfordshire.
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