the world of private banking

CHAPTER 4
London’s First ‘Big Bang’? Institutional
Change in the City, 1855–83
Philip L. Cottrell
There is a peculiar fascination to some people in making money on the Stock
Exchange. I know hundreds who would rather make £50 on the Stock Exchange
than £250 by the exercise of their profession; here is a nameless fascination, and
in the year 1871 the favourite form of making money on the Stock Exchange was
by applying for shares, selling them at whatever premium they were at, and that
money was considered made, and was considered – I say considered – honourably
made. I reveal no secrets because I am incapable, but you would be amazed to see
as applicants the names, the excellent names of most honourable men, and women
too, for the ladies were not backward in the year 1871, her grace did not object
to write to ask me whether she could have 50 shares in this or that company, my
lady dropped me a polite line, sometimes with a card for a conversazione, to ask
if she could get 20 shares in such and such a company. Public writers – clergymen
– I hope the bar will forgive me for saying so – barristers also were not deficient
in applications to me, and not merely to me but to any body connected with
public companies, for allotments when shares were at a premium.
A. Grant, Twycross v. Grant and Others: Speech of Albert Grant
(London, 1876), p. 126.
With its contemporary ring, applying the description ‘Big Bang’ to mid-nineteenth
century organizational changes in the English financial sector, above all to the
London markets, might rightly be queried. Furthermore, the depiction itself might
be ambiguous. ‘Bangers’ for many past generations of English schoolboys meant
the almost lethal, small fireworks, such as ‘Imps’, available for Guy Fawkes
Night celebrations. Their detonations could be ear-splitting while consuming
precious pocket money in a matter of seconds, with nothing to show afterwards.
Some particular London institutions, 25 years after ‘Big Bang’, might draw up
somewhat comparable balance sheets for their participations in that financial
explosion. Since the phrase was coined during the early 1980s, others could argue
that the analogy was being drawn with developments in the science of cosmology
– a theory about the origins of the universe. ‘Big Bang’ has been put forward as
the seminal explosion that initiated the expanding universe, yet it has also been
hypothesized that expansion will ultimately be exhausted, causing inward collapse.
Putting aside the danger of mixing metaphors, possibly more appropriate is not a
‘Bang’ but a ‘Bonfire’ which consumed restrictive practices in the 1980s. This