It said in the paper the other day that, between them, 27-year-old David de Rothschild and his older brother Anthony will one day inherit something like £300 million. So I’m only partly listening to David’s plans to travel, with three others, over the Arctic Ocean ice pack from Russia to Canada, via the North Pole.Most of the time I spend thinking about why David chose to obscure half his handsome face with an apologetic beard and wondering what it’s like to be so devastatingly rich in the 21st century.
Doesn’t David’s career path so far — manufacturer of custom-made T-shirts; backer of lingerie company; holder of a diploma in naturopathy; author of, as yet unpublished, children’s books; writer of, as yet unsold, screenplay — sum up the classic rich boy’s dilemma?
Namely, how do you live up to what your father (and grandfathers) did before you?
Of course, David is entitled to be offended by these questions but he takes them in his stride, wincing only slightly when the lingerie venture is brought up: “How did you know? Oh God, I’m so embarrassed about that, did you have to dig it up?” He admits that he lacked a sense of purpose in his early twenties, but he’s since grown up. Definitely, absolutely, for good.
Sometime, perhaps a year ago, “things just clicked”.
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David has always loved the outdoors and like Zac Goldsmith, that other high-society heir, is a passionate environmentalist. This year, under David’s influence, his father Sir Evelyn, the former chairman of NM Rothschild, sent out wristbands instead of Christmas cards imploring friends to protect the environment.
By his mid-twenties David was competing successfully in triathlons but longed to do something more substantial. Last year he successfully crossed Antarctica on skis.
“We were the fastest team to ski to the South Pole, in 37 days,” he says but then adds self-deprecatingly: “Take that with a massive pinch of salt as we left from a totally different place than usual . . .”
Because David is leaving on Thursday, our meeting takes place in the 12-year-old Mercedes estate (his PR’s car; David normally cycles around London) that is taking him to his first TV interview. He really is very tall and looks cramped sitting there in the front seat and it occurs to me that he must feel equally hemmed in sitting behind a desk.
“Banking isn’t something I’d close the door on,” he’s already told me on the phone but that beard, the shoulder-length hair and the colourful beanie that he’s wearing despite the fact that it isn’t cold seem to undermine this claim.
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Perhaps in another context the grey-blue eyes he’s inherited from his father could look shrewd and calculating, but today they are friendly and open. Merrily he chats away about his forthcoming challenge, unflustered by the looming TV interview: “Why? Should I be nervous?” He’s not obsessed by the environment, he says, but will have a go if his brother forgets to turn the lights off, gets annoyed about E-numbers in food and worries about why it doesn’t rain as it used to in London. Every so often he’ll check himself mid-effusive eco-lecture with a cheerful: “Sorry, I’m ranting.”
“To be honest I went to Antarctica probably for selfish reasons because it was about me and exploring my boundaries. But it was a catalyst for me . . . when you’re out there you end up finding out that it’s a selfish pursuit whether you sail around the world solo or climb a mountain; you leave other people behind. I started to realise that actually it could be about a lot more. I thought to myself: it’s got to be more than this, more than pure self-promotion. I started asking myself: ‘What can you use it for?’” Mulling over this question during the long, cold days in the South Pole, David came up with his next big thing: “Adventure Ecology”. Over the next five years he intends to mount expeditions to the most ecologically fragile places on earth to generate interest in their plight. In the weeks building up to this first such expedition, he has been doing the rounds of schools, encouraging children to track the team’s progress via its website.
In common with many more fully fledged explorers, David had an unhappy time at school: “I was much more interested in what was outside the window than what was inside. It was a nightmare. I don’t think they captured my imagination correctly.”
So he’s an explorer now? “I’m not an explorer; hate the word, it sounds awful. I’d like to think — this sounds really cheesy — but I’d like to think that I am probably exploring the boundaries of education and the way it’s delivered.
“Exploring in its true sense is about doing a route that no-one’s done, give me a break, the North Pole’s been done a long time ago. First and foremost I’d say I’m an adventurer . . . for lack of a better word.”
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An adventurer, then? “I think in the last year I’ve got on track. All these things have come together and just clicked. Over the next five years I’ll be doing a series of high-profile expeditions starting with the North Pole and moving to other parts of the world. I think that I’ve made my bed now. I’ve crossed Antarctica, I’ve crossed Greenland. I don’t have another job, so this is what I’ve dedicated my life to.”
As well as the money, the young adventurer has inherited good looks and manners from his parents: he is the only person who has so far sent me a thankyou note for an interview before it was published. In 2002, the society magazine Tatler jointly ranked him and his brother as the second most eligible men in Britain. The description read: “Dave is as hunky as ever and looks better than anyone in a white suit.” ()
But he subsequently moved to Australia and fell out of the Little Black Book. Does he miss those society days? “I’ve lived in the country most of my life and the whole partying thing was never factored into my lifestyle. Often it’s other people’s projections, to be honest with you. We live in a society obsessed by lists.”
Later he tells me: “I’m just a country boy.”
This Thursday the four-person team (David, Martin Hartley, Paul Landry and Sarah McNair Landry), accompanied by 16 dogs, will travel to Cape Arctichesky in Russia and spend 12 weeks traversing the Arctic ocean through to Ellesmere Island in Canada. Although the route will be gruelling it will not be a first. Instead of setting records the team hopes to send out a stark environmental message: “The North Pole I believe is showing some of the greatest effects of climate change and in the next three to five years, or sooner that, this route from Russia through to the North Pole to Canada will not be possible because of climate change and the melting ice.
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“A week ago it was minus 5C (23F) in Siberia in the middle of January: something’s wrong and somebody’s got to start asking some questions.”
The intention is laudable but the real question is whether he will he be taken seriously. Can he make the perceptual leap from Tatler pin-up to hero of the National Geographic? And this is where David de Rothschild really came into his own. Faced with such a question, other rich boys might have balked or sulked or refused to carry on the conversation. Instead David paused, drew breath and said (and I print in full): “In life you can either hide behind your name or you stand out in front of it and I’m not ashamed of my name in any shape or form. And like everyone else I start in one place and finish in one place, it’s what you do in between that creates us as people.
“I could just climb the route for myself or I could climb the route and try to do something for other people, hopefully. I think ultimately I don’t need other people to know my name. I need people to understand the issues, and if the issue gets across because I’m put in the spotlight for being a playboy then I’m happy. Sure, I take a hit but people can make up their own minds.
“And if people go to the piece in the newspaper and I manage to get some space in a newspaper because somebody said I was a playboy well, then, you know what? I stand in front of my name because at least it drove someone to do something positive.
“Whatever I do there are always going to be people who say ‘well, he’s David de Rothschild’. Well so I am. Hello. I am David de Rothschild and I am very fortunate, but at the same time I can either sit back and do nothing or I can do something that hopefully has a positive impact on society and that is what I am trying to do.”
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The candid thoughtfulness of that response made me hope that David de Rothschild cracks it. I hope David de Rothschild holds on to that beanie cap and beard and makes a name for himself.
The Adventure Ecology’s Arctic expedition’s progress can be followed on: www.adventureecology.com
Arctic on the rocks?
According to the most up-to-date scientific projections, there could be no sea ice at all covering the surface of the Arctic Ocean by as soon as the summer of 2060. A journey by foot would, theoretically, become impossible long before that.
The area of ice cover has declined every year for the past four years — and last year’s measurement of 2 million square miles was the lowest since satellite analysis began in 1978.
The University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) has determined that the current rate of decline in sea ice cover is 8 per cent per decade, and has suggested that levels last year were less than at the last low period, the 1930s and 1940s. Were that rate of decline to continue, there would be no ice within 60 years.
Announcing its most recent findings, however, Dr Mark Serreze, of the NSIDC, emphasised that: “There’s always going to be some uncertainty because the climate system does have a lot of natural variability, especially in the Arctic.”
Current analysis of the sea ice levels cannot be definitive because scientists are able to record only how much of the Arctic’s surface is covered by ice. They are, as yet, unable to record its volume. It can only be estimated by submarine soundings of its thickness.
The £90 million European satellite Cryosat, which should have been able to provide this information, was grounded at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, in Russia, in October after a flight-control system failure just before launch.