Early Life and Family Background
Born in Paris, Goldsmith was the son of luxury hotel tycoon and former Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Major Frank Goldsmith and his French wife Marcelle Moullier, and younger brother of environmental campaigner Edward Goldsmith. His father was Jewish and his mother Catholic; both Goldsmith and his brother were baptized in Catholicism: that was considered afterwards as a formality.
Goldsmith first attended Millfield and then later Eton, but dropped out in 1949 aged 16, after he had bet 10 pounds on a three-horse accumulator at Lewes, winning 8,000 pounds. With his winnings he decided that he should leave Eton immediately; in a speech at his boarding house he declared that, "a man of my means should not remain a schoolboy." Later Goldsmith joined the army.
Goldsmith's father Frank changed the family name from the German Goldschmidt to the English Goldsmith. The Goldschmidts, neighbors and rivals to the Rothschild family, were a wealthy, Frankfurt-based, Jewish family, who had been influential figures in international merchant banking since the 16th century. James' great-grandfather was Benedict Hayum Salomon Goldschmidt, banker and consul to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. James' grandfather Adolphe Benedict Goldschmidt (1838–1918), a multi-millionaire, came to London in 1895.
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