the world of private banking

CHAPTER 15
Hereditary Calling, Inherited Refinement:
the Private Bankers of the City of London,
1914–86
David Kynaston
‘My own feeling is that the private firms are on their trial’, Gaspard Farrer of
Barings wrote shortly before the end of the First World War to a like-minded Dutch
merchant banker. ‘If they have not gone back during the war’, he added, ‘they
have at least not made the progress of the Joint Stock Banks.’ If the challenge for
the City’s merchant banks was to return to the pre-1914 glory days – a nostalgic
ambition that was the primary motive for their enthusiastic endorsement soon
afterwards of Britain’s misguided return to the gold standard – a couple of striking
quotations, one retrospective and the other contemporary, would suggest that it
was a challenge that proved too much for them. In his novel The Conscience of
the Rich, that perceptive chronicler of the corridors of power, C.P. Snow, gives
a portrait of a rich Jewish family which had made its fortune as bankers in the
nineteenth century before retiring from the fray as early as 1896. ‘Everything’s
on too big a scale for a private firm’, Leonard March laments in the 1920s. ‘Look
at the Rothschilds. They used to be the most influential family in Europe. And
they’ve kept on going after we finished, they’ve not done badly, and what are
they now? Just merchant bankers in a fairly lucrative way of business.’ The other
assessment, in a typically memorable passage, was made by Keynes in 1934:
The capitalist has lost the source of his inner strength – his self-assurance,
his self-confidence, his untameable will, his belief in his own beauty and
unquestionable value to society. He is a forlorn object, heaven knows.... Lord
Revelstoke the First, Lord Rothschild the First, Lord Goschen the First, Sir
Lothian Bell, Sir Ernest Cassel, the private bankers, the ship-owning families,
the merchant princes.... Where are they now? There are no such objects on the
earth. Their office-boys (on salaries) rule in their mausoleums.
P. Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power: Barings, 1762–1929 (London, 1988), p. 339.
C.P. Snow, The Conscience of the Rich (New York, 1958), p. 90.
K. Martin, Editor: a Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931–1945 (London, 1968),
p. 98.