The best most people can hope for on their 21st birthday is a good party and a few presents. But not Lionel Walter Rothschild; he was given a museum.
It was a gift from his father, and coming from a family of merchant bankers, Rothschild Junior had the financial clout to amass a huge collection of natural history specimens, which were opened to the public as the Zoological Museum in Tring, Hertfordshire, in 1892.
Today, the museum still has many of its original Victorian features, and like places such as the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, it is still dominated by the influence of its founder, who arranged many of the displays.
So it is perhaps ironic that the Natural History Museum, which was given the entire museum and its collection by the Rothschild family in 1938, has just announced that the Walter Rothschild name has been dropped and it will now be known as the Natural History Museum at Tring.
Museum director Teresa Wild says that while the new name should help to attract a larger and more diverse audience, the link with Rothschild will still be vitally important.
'Before, we had not done enough to celebrate Lord Rothschild, so there are now plans to do more,' she says. 'There will be a temporary exhibition on him that will open in July and will be used as the basis for a permanent gallery about him.'
There is certainly plenty of material for an exhibition on Rothschild, who was an eccentric figure. He kept animals in the grounds around the museum and in Tring Park, and his unusual pets included a wolf, dingo, kangaroos, kiwis and giant tortoises.
He had a particular passion for cassowaries - large, flightless birds from New Guinea and Australia - and kept 65 of them. Rothschild also liked zebras, and once drove a team of them into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace.
With about 120,000 visitors a year, the museum is by no means a small operation, although it might attract more people through the direct association with the Natural History Museum brand. There are two main parts - the public galleries and the enormous bird collection - as well as the Rothschild library.
One gallery is used for temporary exhibitions, while five others house an amazing array of natural history specimens in their original Victorian display cases. Many are examples of 19th-century taxidermy that some other museums have lost or put into storage.
The displays have been upgraded over the years, but the poses of many of the specimens have been kept, even though they don't all fit in with what we now know about animal behaviour.
A traditional approach has also been retained for much of the labelling, making it seem slightly dry to modern tastes, and some of the interpretation might struggle to inspire the families who form 90 per cent of visitors. But there are gallery trails for children that brighten up the experience and there are plans to expand these.
Also, a new museum guide will be published in the summer. The new guide and the trails might provide the chance to tell some of the fascinating stories that the staff at Tring know about the objects, such as the tales of the dressed fleas from Mexico, the mandrill that met president Roosevelt and the background to the largest object on display - a southern elephant seal.
But the public galleries, with their huge glass cases packed with weird and wonderful creatures, do enough on their own to inspire wonder for many visitors. When I was there, a woman came in with two children, stopped and said, 'Oh, my gosh - wow.'
The staff who care for the objects in the bird collection also have amazing stories to tell. This is the Natural History Museum's collection rather than Rothschild's, and moved to a purpose-built, four-storey building at Tring in the early 1970s. It includes about 700,000 bird skins, representing 95 per cent of known species, as well as eggs, specimens preserved in spirit, skeletons and nests.
The museum offers very limited tours of the bird collections to specialist groups, while researchers are the only others who have access to this world-renowned facility.
This means the public do not get the chance to gawp at a bird collected by Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands that has a label in his own handwriting, or to hear about how Marmite is used by conservators to encourage beetles to strip bird skeletons.
The museum might not be set up for constant behind-the-scenes tours, but it would be good if some of the stories found there could be made available to the public.
One change that could give more people the chance to visit is something that is out of the museum's hands - better public transport. With Tring station four miles away and no prospect of zebra-drawn carriages to bring people to the museum, car-users, local schools and Tring residents will remain the core audience.
It was a gift from his father, and coming from a family of merchant bankers, Rothschild Junior had the financial clout to amass a huge collection of natural history specimens, which were opened to the public as the Zoological Museum in Tring, Hertfordshire, in 1892.
Today, the museum still has many of its original Victorian features, and like places such as the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, it is still dominated by the influence of its founder, who arranged many of the displays.
So it is perhaps ironic that the Natural History Museum, which was given the entire museum and its collection by the Rothschild family in 1938, has just announced that the Walter Rothschild name has been dropped and it will now be known as the Natural History Museum at Tring.
Museum director Teresa Wild says that while the new name should help to attract a larger and more diverse audience, the link with Rothschild will still be vitally important.
'Before, we had not done enough to celebrate Lord Rothschild, so there are now plans to do more,' she says. 'There will be a temporary exhibition on him that will open in July and will be used as the basis for a permanent gallery about him.'
There is certainly plenty of material for an exhibition on Rothschild, who was an eccentric figure. He kept animals in the grounds around the museum and in Tring Park, and his unusual pets included a wolf, dingo, kangaroos, kiwis and giant tortoises.
He had a particular passion for cassowaries - large, flightless birds from New Guinea and Australia - and kept 65 of them. Rothschild also liked zebras, and once drove a team of them into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace.
With about 120,000 visitors a year, the museum is by no means a small operation, although it might attract more people through the direct association with the Natural History Museum brand. There are two main parts - the public galleries and the enormous bird collection - as well as the Rothschild library.
One gallery is used for temporary exhibitions, while five others house an amazing array of natural history specimens in their original Victorian display cases. Many are examples of 19th-century taxidermy that some other museums have lost or put into storage.
The displays have been upgraded over the years, but the poses of many of the specimens have been kept, even though they don't all fit in with what we now know about animal behaviour.
A traditional approach has also been retained for much of the labelling, making it seem slightly dry to modern tastes, and some of the interpretation might struggle to inspire the families who form 90 per cent of visitors. But there are gallery trails for children that brighten up the experience and there are plans to expand these.
Also, a new museum guide will be published in the summer. The new guide and the trails might provide the chance to tell some of the fascinating stories that the staff at Tring know about the objects, such as the tales of the dressed fleas from Mexico, the mandrill that met president Roosevelt and the background to the largest object on display - a southern elephant seal.
But the public galleries, with their huge glass cases packed with weird and wonderful creatures, do enough on their own to inspire wonder for many visitors. When I was there, a woman came in with two children, stopped and said, 'Oh, my gosh - wow.'
The staff who care for the objects in the bird collection also have amazing stories to tell. This is the Natural History Museum's collection rather than Rothschild's, and moved to a purpose-built, four-storey building at Tring in the early 1970s. It includes about 700,000 bird skins, representing 95 per cent of known species, as well as eggs, specimens preserved in spirit, skeletons and nests.
The museum offers very limited tours of the bird collections to specialist groups, while researchers are the only others who have access to this world-renowned facility.
This means the public do not get the chance to gawp at a bird collected by Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands that has a label in his own handwriting, or to hear about how Marmite is used by conservators to encourage beetles to strip bird skeletons.
The museum might not be set up for constant behind-the-scenes tours, but it would be good if some of the stories found there could be made available to the public.
One change that could give more people the chance to visit is something that is out of the museum's hands - better public transport. With Tring station four miles away and no prospect of zebra-drawn carriages to bring people to the museum, car-users, local schools and Tring residents will remain the core audience.
