the world of private banking

96
THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
architectural competition. What is considered to be the finest surviving midcentury
bank building was designed by Somers Clarke I in a Venetian Gothic style
at 7 Lothbury for General Credit, built during 1866 as the finance company was
being transformed into a corporate discount house. These commissioned designs
were matched by other, speculative office developments. Surviving examples of
the latter can be found, for instance, at 19–21 Billiter Street, 103 Cannon Street,
59–61 Mark Lane (City of London Real Property Company), 65 Cornhill and 25
Throgmorton Street. 84
VIII
The excesses of the City’s mid-nineteenth century ‘Big Bang’ were tellingly
lampooned, and no better than by R.M.L. Meason, who, in the guise of ‘City
Man’, wrote in his 1866 Profits of Panics of the affairs of the Arungabad Bank,
the Bamford & Newington Extension Railway, finance companies and the Bank
of Patagonia. This was his second warning as, over 1865, he had compiled a set
of comparably barbed, well-based sketches for Charles Dickens’s All The Year
Round, subsequently put together as Bubbles of Finance.
Meason was part of the long tradition of English financial satire from which
readers winced rather than learnt. The ashes of the mid-century ‘Big Bang’ were
more formally but briefly raked over after the 1866 crisis by a parliamentary
inquiry not into banking (such as those that had immediately followed the 1847
and 1857 crises and had involved Commons and Lords committees) but limited
liability. 85 The collapse of company promotions but especially of foreign lending
during the mid-1870s led to a much lengthier investigation, involving separate
parliamentary committees that probed company law, 86 foreign sovereign lending 87
and the Stock Exchange (of which Sir Nathaniel Rothschild was a member). 88
Past misdemeanours were aired as committee members reviewed two decades
of experience but the results of their probing led to no consequent, positive
legislation. Despite Lowe recanting on the axiom by which he had initiated the
repeal of Peel’s 1844 regulatory banking legislation – ‘Free Trade in Capital’
– the only warning to depositors and investors continued to be caveat emptor! It
was to have little effect.
84
S. Bradley and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London I: The City of
London (London, 1997), pp. 110–11, 112, 113; and plates 99, 103. For the General Credit/
Discount building, see also Sir John N. Summerson, The Architecture of Victorian London
(Charlottesville VA, 1976).
85
B.P.P., 1867, X.
86
B.P.P., 1877, VIII.
87
B.P.P., 1875, XX.
88
Exceptionally, a Royal Commission – B.P.P., 1878, XIX.