Bank Association Colours I went to see delivered in Lords Cricket ground [then in Dorset Square] by Mrs Saml Thornton, wife of the Governor of the Bank, to Lieut. Coll. Whitmore, Commander of the Corps. – The Captains are all Directors of the Bank, the Lieutenants & Ensigns Principal Clerks of the Bank. There were upwards of 400 in the line. The Colours were delivered about ¼ before one oClock after a Sermon read by the Chaplain. – The Corps then performed many evolutions admirably well till past 3 oClock. The Company separated about 4 oClock, after many hundred spectators had been partakers of refreshment prepared in 18 Marquees, beside the Pavilion.
The quartermaster was none other than Soane, and it was through his invitation that Farington that evening went to the Bank itself, where he ‘saw the Bank Directors, and the whole Corps, seated after dinner, drinking patriotic toasts. – The Rotunda contained several tables, a Company with the Officers sat at each table. Other Companys were in the Dividend rooms.’ Clearly the Corps was a mirror image of the day-to-day Bank in its respect for hierarchy, together with a strong streak of paternalism, and just over a week later the diarist gleaned some further information:
Bank Clerk told me today that the Directors provided breakfast for each Company of their Volunteers at Coffee Houses at 8 oClock after they had exercised, – and they went to the Offices at 9. – On the Kings birth day the Directors presented each of them, 500 in number, with 6 guineas each as a compliment to buy suit of cloaths &c.
In practice, until they were disbanded in July 1814, the Bank Volunteers saw little in the way of serious action; but during much of 1803–5 they stood ready to guard the Bank’s gold, should invasion happen and the treasure have to be despatched elsewhere.19
Such was the wartime Bank’s enlarged workload that, unsurprisingly, staff numbers rose sharply, as can be seen in the table.
Clerical
Porters &c.
1793
394
24
1796
430
28
1797
542
28
1805
752
49
1810
829
73
1815
933
77
Who were these increasingly numerous clerks? Anne Murphy, on the basis of a close study of the recruitment process between 1800 and 1815, finds that the great majority had no familial connection with the Bank; that without that connection it remained necessary to be recommended by a director; that the primary motive was a steady job together with job security; that applicants tended to be around twenty years old; that none was Catholic; that social background was often somewhere between higher artisan and general ‘middling’; and that relatively few new recruits arrived at the Bank with particularly well-developed skills in handwriting or accounting or ‘telling’ money – that, in other words, they would largely be expected to learn on the job. As for the wider fraternity they now joined, Murphy offers a striking but convincing assessment of the national contribution made by what she calls ‘the largest concentrated white-collar workforce in the world’:
Much like a civil service, together the Bank’s clerks constituted a body of knowledge and experience that remained constant while directors and governors of the Bank came and went. Each operated in a specialised capacity in offices supervised by senior colleagues, and heavily coordinated with each other, thus making work at the Bank akin to that in a large factory. Individually, the jobs those clerks performed were mundane and repetitive but collectively the feat they achieved, that of managing the national debt and providing banking and discount facilities for London’s business and financial community, was nothing short of extraordinary. They dealt with thousands of transactions every month, managed records relating to a huge balance sheet, made sense of the system of public debt, provided effective and efficient liaison with the Exchequer, managed much of London’s bullion inflows and oversaw the processes for the manufacture and circulation of banknotes. Moreover, this was a labour force that, until the advent of the automated bookkeeping machine and the typewriter, and indeed arguably until the advent of the computer, could not be replaced or even significantly aided by technology. Their work was done by hand in processes that involved the endless recording of details in ledgers and checking and double-checking to ensure the integrity of the records.
That unremitting work (perhaps helped a little more by technology than Murphy allows) may not always have been properly appreciated; but in May 1815, during the last weeks of war, the Committee of Inspection for the Drawing Office &c recommended that ‘the Wages of the Clerks in the post Bill Office be advanced £30 each, in Consideration of the great weight of Business, the risque they run in paying Bills improperly, and receiving no benefit from their Situations, exclusive of their Wages’.20
As during the eighteenth century, the major blemish was – despite a continuing tightening of regulations – the occasional but disturbing case of serious fraud. Robert Aslett had joined the Bank in 1778 and soon become a protégé of Abraham Newland, so much so that when in 1799 he was appointed second cashier it was generally assumed that he would in due course succeed Newland as chief cashier. Indeed, such were Newland’s growing infirmities that Aslett by the early 1800s was virtually managing the business of the Cashier’s Office, causing him to succumb in 1802–3 to the temptation of large-scale embezzlement, principally of Exchequer bills. ‘His looks were pale, sorrowful and emaciated,’ noted a reporter as he appeared at the inevitable Old Bailey; and though he avoided the gibbet, some seventeen years of imprisonment lay ahead, until a pardon from the Bank in 1820 on condition that he left the country. No such escape for Philip Whitehead, a former clerk in the Cashier’s Office who in 1812 was hanged for forgery, having pretended to his victim still to be in the employment of the Bank when in fact he had been effectively dismissed for a combination of extravagant living and Stock Exchange speculation. His sister Sarah reacted badly, over the next quarter of a century going daily to the Bank and asking for her brother, with her invariable black dress earning her the sobriquet ‘the Bank Nun’ from the mainly kindly clerks.
One of those may have been Samuel Harrison, who in 1805 as a would-be entrant in his early twenties had been ‘examined by a Committee, my religion enquired into and whether I was a member of any political club, then had to count £100 silver coin, and cast up columns of figures’. He was no Rousseau, but his autobiographical notes, written in annual diary form probably many years later, have their moments:
1806. The 26th July was my first day at the Bank. I was installed in the Bank Note Office, and had to enter and fill up £1 and £2 notes. 200 were the morning’s work. I had to join the Bank Volunteers.
1809. At the Bank, in consequence of several Elections of Clerks, I had many juniors and got into the Drawing Office. At the close of this year, the writing of the numbers and dates on the Bank Notes was superseded by hand machines which printed them. This work not being to the taste of all, I willingly undertook, and eventually got fixed in the Numbering Office. Leaving daily at three o’clock, we had sometimes to work on Sundays to supply the demand of £1 Notes, so much gold being sent to Spain to supply the English Army there.
1810. I agreed to be one of the Godfathers to my friend Feldwick’s first child, a son and heir. I found a large party assembled. It was here I first met Catherine Harpley with her sisters Bessie and Jane then unmarried. My dear Kate soon struck me as being the wife I wanted; lively and good-tempered, a nice spanking girl … My courtship was conducted according to my nature, in a somewhat cold and sensible manner. Whether this told against me, or the animosity of the family, I was suddenly struck down by a concise and abrupt dismissal.
1811. Several of the Bank Clerks used to dine at the Woolpack in St Mildred’s Court; we paid 1/6 each and had a joint cooked expressly, and once a week we had a pint of wine each and got an extra hour from the office. There were about twelve of us; some were
very amusing, full of jokes and puns. The hilarity was so uproarious the landlord begged us to be more orderly. On the 25th May we had a holiday, and, with a friend each, dined at Blackheath. We had subscribed 6d a week until 15/- each was collected. We called ourselves the Bonny Vivants; I was treasurer and chairman with the privilege of making up deficiencies.
At last, in 1813, he met Kate Harpley again, and this time got the go-ahead from her father. ‘On the appointed day [3 April], without anybody knowing at the office, I quietly slipped out, met the wedding party, was married and then returned to the Bank while the rest amused themselves driving in the Park. Then we met again to dinner at White Conduit House. In the afternoon there was a heavy fall of snow which is considered a good omen.’ So it was, and the following year, ‘at 50 minutes past one in the morning of February 12th’, a daughter was born. ‘The pleasure to the parents of a first child is indescribable, but the necessity arises of more stay-at-home habits, and, very possibly, sleepless nights,’ recalled Harrison wryly enough. ‘The high price of provisions, bread 1/5 the quartern and butter 1/11 a pound, with coals 65/- the ton, and the probable termination of the war with France stopping the overtime at the Bank, made me somewhat modify my pleasure of seeing the beginning of a family of children to support.’21
PART TWO
1815–1914
5
All the Obloquy
The year 1815 marks one of those attractively straightforward lines in the sands of modern British history: not only the end of the war, but the start of almost a century of peace (broadly speaking), of Britain’s rise to becoming the workshop of the world, of London’s increasing dominance as an international financial centre, exporting capital to all quarters of the globe. All that is essentially true; yet for at least three decades, until the 1850s, it felt to contemporaries a far more chequered, fraught and uncertain process. Certainly these were difficult decades for the Bank, finding itself uncomfortably often at the sharp end of sustained and widespread criticism, as what became a distinctively Victorian monetary settlement was slowly and painfully forged.
Against a larger background of severe economic depression and high unemployment, allied to pent-up resentment about the Bank’s undeniably handsome profits during the war, criticism was under way within months of Waterloo. ‘That an account should be laid before a General Court,’ demanded a proprietor in December 1815, ‘of the amount of the surplus profits of this Company’, a demand ‘warmly’ supported by David Ricardo; but on the governor, William Mellish, brusquely informing the Bank’s stockholders that ‘the Company had all along placed great confidence in their Directors, and that if any reason were harboured for wishing to withdraw it, he begged that their accusation might be spoken out’, the motion was lost on a show of hands ‘by about two to one’. The verdict of the political economist James Mill, writing next day to Ricardo, was plain enough: ‘I should treat all the excess above the due remuneration for their public services, as money got upon false pretences, which the law treats as swindling.’ Ricardo himself entirely agreed – ‘I think the Bank an unnecessary establishment getting rich by those profits which fairly belong to the public,’ he had written not long before to another eminent economist, Thomas Malthus – but probably no one was hotter on the subject than the Whig MP and businessman Pascoe Grenfell. The deposits of public money at the Bank were, he told the Commons in February 1816 in the course of proposing a select committee to look into its arrangements with government, ‘wholly unproductive to the public, but productive of profit and advantage to the Bank’, quite apart of course, he added, from the excessive cost of the Bank’s management of the public debt, as well as the ‘immense increase in Bank profits’ as a result of the paper-money era. ‘I am not,’ he insisted, ‘advising the establishment of a second great national bank’; but he had no hesitation in contrasting on the one hand a country during the last twenty years ‘groaning under the weight and burthen of taxation – vexed, harassed, and tormented, by a swarm of petty, paltry, teazing taxes’, with on the other hand the fact that ‘we should be squandering upon this wealthy, this opulent company, so large, so vast, so extravagant a remuneration’ – a contrast, he went on, that ‘excites in us feelings of disgust and indignation’. From the government benches, Lord Castlereagh (mindful no doubt that the post-war abolition of income tax would make ministers particularly dependent on loans from the Bank) argued that ‘any unnecessary inquiry’ into the Bank’s affairs would be ‘to its prejudice, and, so far, to the prejudice of the country, by affecting the public credit’; while, directly on the Bank’s behalf, Alexander Baring declared that his ‘main objection to the motion arose from the exaggeration with which it was prefaced, and the sort of spirit with which it was proposed’, sentiments echoed by William Manning (a recent governor, and father of the cardinal), who ‘stated that, including all the responsibility and expenses, the Bank only charged the public, for the expense of managing the funds, eightpence in the £100’. Grenfell’s motion was duly defeated, 81–44; and a year later, when he tried again, the result was similar, 90–40, notwithstanding his well-researched claim that ‘the profits of the Bank within the last twenty years, in addition to the usual dividend of seven per cent, amounted to the sum of 27 millions’ – albeit he ‘did not mean to impute any censure to the Bank that made these gains’, but rather he ‘found fault only with the government that tolerated them’.1
All this was hardly, from the Bank’s point of view, brilliant mood music for determining the big one: whether to resume cash payments, and if so, when.
‘Much difficulty occurs about our currency,’ noted Samuel Thornton at the start of 1816, adding that it was ‘the general wish that the Bank should resume its cash payments as soon as possible’. May that year saw a full-scale Commons debate and vote, and again it was Baring and Manning to the fore. The former, calling himself ‘as great an enemy as any man to the restriction act in itself’, wanted the House to ‘intrust the whole to the discretion of the Bank, and depend upon its zeal, and its desire of answering the expectations of the country, so conformable with its own interests’, at the same time asserting that ‘two years were necessary to enable the Bank to supply specie in sufficient quantity for the circulation of the country’; while the latter took a similar line, emphasising that the watchword had to be ‘caution’. The Commons duly voted to extend restriction until July 1818, but not before a fierce attack from the Whig MP George Tierney:
However demure the Bank directors might look, and whatever professions they might make, they seemed resolved to act in opposition to those looks and professions; they had still upon their countenances all the beautiful simplicity and innocence they had worn for the last nineteen years – always pretending to be ready to pay in gold, yet, when the time came, always finding some reason to keep their money in their own hands. He entertained great personal respect for the directors individually; but, speaking of them collectively, he could not help saying that they seemed very desirous of retaining in their hands the annual gain of £800,000.
Still, two years was perhaps not so long in the overall scheme of things, and William Huskisson in February 1817 told the Commons that he ‘rejoiced to see the period approaching in which cash payments would be resumed’.
It was not to be. By that autumn the exchanges had turned decisively against England and gold began inexorably to drain away, with indeed increasing rapidity from early 1818, fuelled also by successive bad harvests necessitating substantial imports of wheat; and in May 1818 the Tory government pushed through a further one-year postponement of resumption. As usual the Bank came in for criticism, prompting Thornton to protest in the Commons that circumstances had been beyond its control. ‘The resumption of cash payments would,’ he explained in his customary hurt tones about the entirely honourable motives of his colleagues and himself, ‘make them comparatively independent men – for they would then be no longer subject to those questions which were daily pressed upon them, and those asperities that
were hourly used towards them.’ Huskisson meanwhile kept his eye firmly on his long-term goal, befitting his increasing reputation as the intellectual driving-force behind Lord Liverpool’s ministry and in effect speaking for a rising generation of commercially minded middle-class economic liberals. For him, and those who thought like him, one of the decisive advantages of returning to the gold standard was that it would be so properly regulated from the outset that there could be no possibility of mismanagement – let alone greed – on the part of Thornton et al. ‘The Bank,’ he assured Liverpool in July 1818 in visionary manner, ‘would be the great Steam Engine of the State to keep the Channel of the Circulation always pressing full, and the power of converting its Notes at any time into Gold Bullion at 78s per ounce the Regulator and Index of the Engine, by which the extent of its operations and the sufficiency of the supply would be determined & ascertained.’2
If that was essentially a utilitarian perspective, there was also emerging strongly by this time a powerful radical-cum-humanitarian critique of the Bank, fuelled in significant part by the continuing vain search for an ‘inimitable’ banknote and the sharp rise in Bank prosecutions for forgery (up from 63 in 1815 to 260 by 1818), together with subsequent hangings (some two dozen in 1818). It proved a fruitful artistic subject. A peep into the old rag shop in Threadneedle Street was the title of an anonymous print published in September 1818, showing the unfortunate, meanly dressed possessor of a forged note pleading on his knees for mercy, while the Bank’s prosperous directors sit in judgement at a nearby table. ‘Take him out, Thomas!!! he has a d––––d hanging look,’ orders one director to a minion; ‘Away with the Vagabond! do you think we sit here for nothing?’ says another; a third merely slumbers; and a fourth deigns to inspect the note, before declaring, ‘Upon my soul I have my doubts … We had better declare it bad.’ Soon afterwards, in January 1819, the great George Cruikshank (later Dickens’s illustrator) produced his uncompromising ‘Bank Restriction Note’, adorned with skulls, convict ships and gibbets, as well as Britannia gobbling up a naked infant. So too with radical journalists, above all the brilliant, tireless and shamelessly exaggerating William Cobbett. ‘This villainous Bank has slaughtered more people than would people a State,’ he exploded in the Political Register a few months after Cruikshank’s gruesome parody.
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