As a Zionist leader, he was presented with the Balfour Declaration, which pledged British support for a Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine.

As a young man, he travelled in Europe, attending the University of Bonn for a year before entering Magdalene College, Cambridge.

As a boy, Rothschild was once dragged off his horse and assaulted by workmen while on a hunting ride near Tring, an experience he attributed to antisemitism.

However, his parents established a zoological museum as a compensation and footed the bill for expeditions all over the world to seek out animals.

He also hired taxidermists, a librarian, and, most importantly, professional scientists to work with him to curate and write up the resulting collections: Ernst Hartert, for birds, from 1892 until his retirement at the age of 70 in 1930 and Karl Jordan for entomology, from 1893 until Rothschild's death in 1937.

In 1932, he was forced to sell the vast majority of his bird collection to the American Museum of Natural History after he had been blackmailed by a former mistress.

[2][3] Walter Rothschild was a Liberal Unionist Party Member of Parliament for Aylesbury from 1899 until he retired from politics at the January 1910 general election.

[12] Despite his health, Rothschild served part-time as an officer in a Territorial Army unit, the Royal Buckinghamshire Yeomanry, where he was a captain from July 1902[15] until he was promoted to major in 1903, before retiring in 1909.

[16] As an active Zionist and a close friend of Chaim Weizmann, he worked to formulate the draft declaration for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

On 2 November 1917, he received a letter from the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, addressed to his London home at 148 Piccadilly.