Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

The Honourable Dr Miriam Rothschild

Oration given on 15 April 1999

Chancellor:  The Senate of the University has resolved that the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred on the Honourable Dr Miriam Rothschild.

Miriam Rothschild has long been known as the ‘Flea Lady’ for her distinction in entomology – the scientific study of insects.  She ought to be so labelled for her energetic hopping about between subjects and problems in an intellectual life of some seventy-five years.  She has never specialised, but then was never guided into it as a respectable later twentieth century scientist would have been.  She is, as she would readily agree, a figure from an earlier age: the distinguished independent scientist, like several other Rothschilds, notably her father Charles.

Her parents thought school would constrict her so she didn’t attend one.  She read widely until seventeen, when she decided to take some university classes but without pursuing any one degree.  Instead she chose two – English Literature and Zoology.  But she couldn’t fit in the lectures and practicals.  She has recalled: “You always wanted to hear somebody talk on Ruskin when it was time to dissect a sea urchin….”.  So her only university degrees are honorary ones: from three countries.

Her original choice of scientific field was marine biology, notably snails and their parasites.  The Second World War came and she worked on a government project to produce food for chickens from seaweed.  This work was obviously seen as the ideal preparation for her next assignment: to the Government’s most secret code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, trying to break the Germans’ Enigma machine cypher by intensive mathematical and logical analysis.  Remarkably, she was one of several marine biologists recruited, alongside the maths and philosophy academics and indeed claims that the biologists more than held their own.  The Anglo-Polish success in breaking heir master code without the Germans or Japanese fully realising the fact, considerably shortened the War.  Her final war work was concerned with promoting beef production.  She established by many hundreds of dissections that wood pigeons could carry bovine tuberculosis and threaten the cattle.

In 1952 she published her classic study of parasites, Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos, alongside launching into the magnum opus of her life’s work.  This is a full catalogue of the world’s most comprehensive inventory of several million fleas, which had been collected by her father, Charles Rothschild, and which is now in the Natural history Museum.  This work was to take at least twenty years, and occupy six volumes.

She combined some of these years with raising six children: she spent the days mostly with the children and the nights with the fleas and her microscope, for she has always been burdened (or is it blessed?) with insomnia.  As to her preference, she has said that she much prefers children to fleas, even though her research recorded that they are so good at jumping up and down that some may do it 30,000 times without a pause for breath – (the fleas, that is).

Work on yet more fleas followed, this time Australian ones living on rabbits.  She discovered how they synchronise their own fertility with the rabbits’, so their own young can drop directly onto the new-born baby rabbits and so carry on into the next generations.  For a parasite to so adapt its own hormones and ovaries as to depend on its hosts for its own reproduction is remarkable indeed.

Butterflies are her first love: she has studied them, as her more recent book, Butterfly Cooing like a Dove, shows to great effect.  But she also loves to just watch them – and dragonflies too.  She has created the National Dragonfly Museum on her estate near Oundle in Northants.  For this she needs flowers and they are another great passion.  She has planted rare wildflowers on her estate and sells their seed to encourage others to grow more.  She has described this work on television.  “I woke up suddenly one morning and looked at the fields.  Not a flower in sight.  Modern agriculture had bulldozed, weed-killed and drained all the flowers out of the fields that I’d known as a child.  We were living on a snooker table.  So we let the grass grow and sowed flower seeds taken from disused local fields: 96 species grew up, some of them self-sown and quite rare, including orchids.  Anyone with non-acid soil can do it.”

She also loves trees and has often (and wrongly) been quoted as saying “Everyone with a garden, however small, should have at least a few acres of woodland” .  If it really was her uncle who said this, it doesn’t matter: she should have because it fits with her strategic approach on her own estate.  No fewer than 150 acres have been devoted to her wildflowers.

She abhors the speedy destruction of the world’s natural habitat and supports international efforts to save threatened species of animals and plants from extinction.  Together with Sir David Attenborough and Dr David Bellamy, she is vice-president of Fauna and Flora International, which pursues this cause.  Her current concerns also include the study of bio-chemistry of human memory and (entirely in contrast) the moral issue of cruelty to the animals we rear and kill – whether in laboratories, factory farms or slaughterhouses.

She has always been professionally active in addition to having published more than 350 scientific papers.  Her memberships of learned bodies include the Royal Zoological Society, the Royal Entomological Society and the Marine Biological Association.  She has served as a trustee of the Natural History Museum.  She has received several international science awards from, for example, the International Society of Chemical Ecology and the Czech Science Academy.  In 1985 she gave the Romanes Lecture at Oxford University (called Animals and Man) while also being elected that year a fellow of the Royal Society.  And this is a scientist who says of herself: “I am an amateur – I have no degrees”.

University exist to gather, analyse, explain and conserve knowledge of all that is in and beyond our world.  They must organise this task into academic disciplines, with their professions and departments, to promote both research and teaching, while maintaining standards by constant comparison.  An independent shooting star, like Miriam Rothschild – unconnected with universities but fully engaged with the scientific professions – is a modern rarity.  It is very welcome and refreshing exception to all of us who remain lashed to the oars of the academic galleys.  Her ninetieth birthday has passed.  She may well be one of the last of her kind of scientist – (as she says) “amateur : with no degrees”.  We try to honour this remarkable British scholar with our honorary degree but it is really she who honours us by accepting it.  It is a sad, but understandable disappointment to us all that she cannot share in our ceremony today.

Chancellor, I present to you (in absentia) Miriam Louisa Rothschild.