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.
Read more about this topic: James Goldsmith
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, family and/or background:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“We have had many harbingers and forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no example. I mean we have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels’ food; who, trusting to his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was done by his own hands.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)