the world of private banking

HEREDItARy CALLING, INHERItED REFINEmENt 267
Earlier, from the inter-war years, there had been one particularly interesting
merchant-banker outsider who had made it to the very top. ‘He is absolutely
straight, very level headed, not a talker, but goes and does things and does them
well’, Farrer informed an American banker shortly before Edward Peacock, the
son of a Canadian schoolmaster, joined Barings in 1924. ‘He has of course had a
different upbringing from any of us here’, Farrer conceded to another correspondent
about the new recruit, ‘but the set of his mind and all his ways are on the same
lines as ours.’ 13 Peacock quickly established himself as the power behind the
throne, and after Revelstoke’s death in 1929 he was acknowledged as the bank’s
leader, especially in the areas of international and corporate finance. Cecil Baring
may have privately called him ‘The Paycock’, but neither he nor the other active
members of the family imagined that they could do without him. 14
Peacock was also at the centre of a fascinating moment in merchant banking
history – a moment that makes one realize the importance of nuance, prejudice and
cultural assumptions, and equally the limitations of a baldly sociological, headcounting,
what one might call Who’s Who approach. It came in the autumn of
1942, some eight months after the death of Lionel de Rothschild left Rothschilds
(already badly hit by the Credit Anstalt smash of 1931) in a parlous financial
position – almost certainly, from the evidence of Norman’s diary, dependent on
the Bank of England in order to stay afloat. Schroders was also in a poor state then,
and on 8 September that bank’s Albert Pam called on Norman in order to float an
idea. ‘Why shd not Schroders, Rs & Barings amalgamate?’ recorded Norman’s
diary in typically clipped fashion. ‘Or why shd not Barings take over the other
2?’ Two days later, Norman put the idea to Peacock: ‘?BB & Co + JHS & Co
+ NMR & S:; he will consider’. Peacock duly returned three weeks later with
Barings’ answer: ‘BB & Co not willing, after consideration, to join with JHS &
Co, whose methods are impossible and unpopularity great – nor with NMR & S
who are entirely a Jewish family concern’. 15 Some twenty years after Barings,
Rothschilds and Schroders had become the City’s so-called ‘Trinity’, doing a
series of important issues together on a consortium basis, this was a strikingly
personal basis on which to reach a not unmomentous decision. At the very least it
serves, to reiterate, as a warning against simplistic readings of the City elite.
The episode in 1942 is one of many not mentioned, let alone illuminated,
in A Gilt-edged Life, the charming, recently published memoirs of Edmund de
Rothschild, a benevolent man with few enemies. His father Lionel liked to call
himself ‘a banker by hobby, a gardener by profession’, and young Edmund after
his birth in 1916 was brought up in country-houses in Hampshire. Fishing and
13
Barings Archives, Dep 33.21, 23 May 1922, Dep.33.22, 9 Nov. 1923.
14
J. Orbell, Baring Brothers & Co., Limited: a History to 1939 (privately published by
Baring Brothers, 1985), pp. 82–3; D. Pollen, I Remember, I Remember (privately published,
1983), p. 229.
15
Bank of England Archives, ADM 20/31, 15 Apr. 1942, 8 Sept. 1942, 10 Sept. 1942,
2 Oct. 1942.