From finding and refining to marking and trading gold bars, the Rothschild family gained first-hand experience of gold's full lifecycle.
Above: Workers at the Royal Mint Refinery, preparing newly minted bars for transportation, 1933
Melanie, what are some of the defining features of the Rothschilds’ knowledge on gold?
Ledgers from the Bullion Department of N M Rothschild & Sons, part of a series beginning in the earliest years of the business.
To know your subject well you should study it from all angles. That is exactly what the Rothschild family did with gold. From finding and refining to marking and trading gold bars, the Rothschild family gained first-hand experience of gold's full lifecycle. This need to specialise is in keeping with the expertise the family built up over many years in the long-term preservation of wealth - a view which was reflected in the comments attributed to Nathan Rothschild at a social gathering in 1834:
If I were to listen to all the projects proposed to me, I should ruin myself very soon. "Stick to one business, young man,” said he to Edward; “stick to your brewery, and you may be the great brewer of London. Be a brewer, and a banker, and a merchant, and a manufacturer, and you will soon be in the Gazette.
For the Rothschild family, specialism is a part of our DNA. When managing gold this has meant searching for the right people with the relevant expertise. An example of this is the recruitment of ex-iron ore workers from Normandy, France to run the Royal Mint Refinery in London. This is one of many pan-European stories where the sharing of expertise and resources made the Rothschild business and its offering to clients stronger.
Finally Melanie, what to your mind best illustrates the value placed on Rothschild's expertise in gold?
It is common to hear of gold bars which sell for a premium given their Rothschild hallmark – for example the Edinburgh Bar. This premium can be as high as 20% vs. the bar's market value and is a sign of trust in the quality and purity of the gold which the Rothschild hallmark conveys. This symbol of quality is not just confined to gold – the independence and integrity of the Rothschild name as a lender to sovereign states during the nineteenth century helped create a commercial benchmark for reasonable contractual terms. If a country was uncomfortable with these terms, it was considered a poor reflection on that nation's financial dependency.
These examples illustrate the trust which investors have placed over centuries in Rothschild as a mark of quality. I would conclude by reminding our readers that gold is one of the least reactive chemical elements found in nature and its relative scarcity, durability and authenticity sit closely to the values of the family.
The stamp used to imprint Rothschild & Co identification marks onto products (primarily gold bars) of the Royal Mint Refinery’