the world of private banking

LONDON’S FIRSt ‘BIG BANG’? 91
reply from Bates that ‘We consider ourselves a sort of Crédit Mobilier ourselves
alone’. 71 Indeed, although the International was created by seven City merchant
and merchant banking houses as a result of a proposal from Charles Mallet, it never
had a formal connection with the Crédit Mobilier and severed any relationship
with it after the Mexican loan debacle of 1864. The other major London-Paris
institution, General Credit & Finance, nearly miscarried through the difficulties
that arose in the creation of the Société Générale, its putative French partner. 72
Nevertheless, this particular link was thereafter sustained, largely through Edward
Blount, despite the post-1866 transformation of the General Credit into a discount
house and its 1885 merger with Union Discount Corporation.
With the exceptions of the International and, to a much lesser extent, the
General Credit, the finance companies of the mid-1860s were generally not some
form of institutionalization of private English banking, whether City or provincial.
Members of the London Financial’s board provided it with some links to jointstock
banking, both provincial (National Provincial), and London (City Bank) and,
possibly, a more tenuous connection with Overend, Gurney. The General Credit’s
directorate had only one such interlock (Alderman Salomans with the London
& Westminster), and likewise, the English & Foreign Credit with the Alliance
of London & Liverpool. Rather, most were second-rate affairs or even bucket
shops that during the mid-1860s took advantage of the gullible investing public’s
apparently almost insatiable appetite for banking and financial shares, whatever
their provenance. The example is the Crédit Foncier and Mobilier of England, the
mid-1860’s vehicle of Albert Gottheimer/Grant. It first appeared in January 1864
as the Crédit Foncier with a largely Irish directorate, promoted by the Mercantile
Credit Association, whose manager, Henry John Barker, had been associated
with Gottheimer in the Mercantile Discount of 1859–61. Very quickly, the Crédit
Foncier and the Mercantile Credit gave birth to the Crédit Mobilier, a clone of the
Foncier through having the same board and manager, who now styled himself as
Grant. The identical twins had merged by the close of the year and the resulting
institution claimed over the opening months of 1866 to have a relationship with
the Paris Crédit Mobilier which assisted neither. 73
The main activities of the finance companies initially comprised foreign and
domestic company promotion, primarily the former, which was almost an entirely
new field that had been opened up by the 1855/6 liberalization of company law.
Amongst their new creations were financial institutions, home and overseas. 74 Such
71
Guildhall Library, London [henceforth GLL]: papers of A. Gibbs & Sons [henceforth
Gibbs Papers], Ms 111036/3, H.H. Gibbs Private Letter Book, to W. Gibbs, 1 May 1863;
and see Cottrell, Investment Banking, vol. I, pp. 129–58.
72
See Cottrell, Investment Banking, vol. I, pp. 104–7.
73
See Cottrell, Investment Banking, vol. I, pp. 111–12, 118, 120, 127.
74
Apart from those already mentioned in the text, they comprised during the mid-
1860s: Albert Insurance, Anglo-Egyptian Bank (with Agra & Masterman’s), British
Columbia & Vancouver’s Island Investment, International Land Credit, Land Mortgage