4

An Elderly Lady in the City

In 1797 a Scottish MP called Alexander Allardyce penned An Address to the Proprietors of the Bank. Noting that he himself had become a proprietor ‘some years ago’, he related how on doing so he had sought to find out about the management of the institution in which he now had a financial stake. ‘As to the state of affairs of the Bank, it was a perfect mystery, said to be known only to the Court of Directors. Every body said, that the Bank must be possessed of an immense hoard of wealth, which was continually increasing; but, when asked for what this hoard and its accumulations were intended, nobody could tell but the Directors, and they were not accustomed to answer questions of that nature.’ Allardyce willingly conceded – as over the years did most of the Bank’s critics – that ‘the present Directors are men of integrity and honour’, but the sense of exasperation was palpable. In fact, even as Allardyce wrote, the fundamentals were changing. The war with France that began in February 1793 and lasted a generation not only precipitated monetary turmoil, but also placed the Bank and its affairs beneath an unprecedented public gaze.

Turmoil certainly characterised the first few months of the war. ‘An alarming effect upon the public credit was brought by the check given to our trade and manufactures,’ noted the director Samuel Thornton in January 1794 in his private overview of the previous year. ‘But for the successful interference of Parliament, by the issue and loan of a new species of Exchequer bills, the effect would have been fatal to the mercantile part of the community.’ Even so, he added, ‘the number of bankruptcies in the last year exceeds all former example’. Thornton himself had been a member of an eleven-strong ad hoc City committee that in April had urgently pressed on Pitt the large-scale issue of Exchequer bills, which sound but hard-pressed merchants and traders could discount at once at the Bank; before that, amid what was one of the century’s most serious financial and commercial crises (already brewing during the winter of 1792–3), credits from the Bank had helped in March to save some of the City’s key merchants. According to Sir Francis Baring’s retrospective account of the crisis, these credits involved a significant change of policy. ‘In the distress of 1793,’ he explained, ‘they [the Bank] committed a fatal error by deciding that all merchants and traders were entitled to their proportion of accommodation as the Bank was a public body and ought not to discriminate between individuals.’ Put another way, houses now receiving their ‘proportion of accommodation’ included Jewish houses – unwelcome to Baring, but a signal moment in the City’s development as an international financial centre, with war poised to recruit to London from Germany and the Low Countries an array of talented outsiders (many of them Jewish) from Nathan Rothschild downwards.

Yet was the Bank, in purely financial terms, being too liberal in its approach, notwithstanding the severity of the crisis? ‘If not the whole by farr the greater part of the accommodation intended for the merchant Bankers & traders resident within the Kingdom of Great Britain (by the bye a pretty comprehensive description) must as surely come from the Coffers of the B. of E. without the Least necessity for any application for the consent of the directors as if the Court of Directors had with the most unbounded Liberality of sentiment offered to advance the whole money,’ Benjamin Winthrop, a former and future director (‘give me credit for the purity of my motives’), wrote darkly to the Committee of Treasury in early May ahead of the implementation of the Exchequer bills scheme, even as parliamentary critics claimed loudly that the Bank was not doing enough. And Winthrop found instruction if not consolation in history: ‘King Alfred divided his Loaf with the Pilgrim but he did not make an offer of his whole Loaf to the Pilgrim.’ In fact, the scheme worked a treat, as did the introduction of the £5 note (a temporary measure that proved to have staying power), and Winthrop’s fears were unfounded; but the crisis as a whole was yet another reminder of the difficulty of pleasing everyone.¹

The war itself inevitably put fresh strains on the Bank’s already difficult relationship with the relentlessly demanding Pitt. He for his part was ultimately prepared to defend the Bank when necessary – even on one occasion telling the Commons that it was ‘a private trading company’ that would regard any attempt to have a governor and deputy governor cross-examined by the House as ‘highly unjust and violent’ – but generally treated it with a large degree of ruthlessness and at times deviousness. The relationship’s worst year was 1795, as the war’s financial pressures deepened. In January the governor and deputy governor, Godfrey Thornton and Daniel Giles respectively, ‘waited on Mr. P.’ (in the latter’s words) ‘to acquaint him that it was their wish to bring to his consideration that he would so settle his arrangements of Finance for the present year so as not to depend on any further assistance from the Bank beyond the 4 millions already agreed upon & that the advances on the Treasury bills cannot be allowed at any time to exceed the sum of five hundred thousand pounds’; by June the Bank was threatening to withhold all further advances on Treasury bills; in July it warned gravely about its liabilities starting dangerously to exceed its reserves of specie; and in August it refused a request for a further advance on Exchequer paper, with Giles, now governor, reminding Pitt that ‘a provident care for their Establishment must precede all other Objects’. Giles, indeed, seems to have had a gratifyingly combative streak, in October even asking Pitt face to face whether he actually knew how the nation’s reserves of gold stood; to which, according to the Committee of Treasury’s discreetly pencilled minutes, the great man ‘really took shame to himself for having never formed any idea on that subject so as to leave him to judge of it with any accuracy’.

In fact, the Bank’s treasure by this time was rapidly shrinking, not least in the context of the French government’s determined attempt to restore its own gold standard after the collapse of the assignat. What to do? Winthrop, a director again, had his say in a characteristic letter to Giles at the start of December. Arguing that ‘the unexampled Efflux of Specie & Bullion from the Bank in the course of the last Six Months’ was likely to continue or even intensify, and declaring that the Bank’s own ‘Safety’ was ‘a Consideration in my Mind far superior & paramount to all others’, he urgently called for the Bank ‘to endeavour to contract our Advances to Government at this time’. In the middle of a patriotic war, that was always going to be easier said than done; but four weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, the Bank did seek to retrench, with the directors resolving ‘to adopt some Measures that will be effectual to enable the Court at all times to restrain the Amount of the Discounts within such Limits as they shall from Time to Time prescribe’, in practice through a system of weekly limits.² The directors had a far from easy line to tread: tightening commercial credit might easily trigger alarm and in turn another financial crisis; yet doing nothing to check the flight of gold was hardly an attractive alternative.

The year 1796 proved a predictably stressful one, with an internal drain on gold replacing the external drain and taking the Bank’s treasure, which had stood at some £7 million back in 1794, down to below £2 million by the autumn. For the City as a whole, though, the greater preoccupation – and bone of contention – was the Bank’s new discount-restriction policy. In February a group of Bank proprietors lodged a complaint, only to be informed haughtily by the Committee of Treasury that it was ‘quite unusual in the Bank to give particular reasons for any measures which they, after mature deliberation, may think fit to adopt’; and when in April a City committee (that included the versatile financier Walter Boyd, close to Pitt and no friend of the Bank) sought to establish a board of twenty-five members that would be authorised by Parliament and issue promissory notes, ‘for the express purpose of furnishing to trade a temporary assistance which the Bank of England do not find it convenient, or perhaps do not think themselves sufficiently authorised, under their present powers, to give’, the Bank made a dead set against it and successfully persuaded Pitt to offer it no encouragement. Not that the Pitt/Bank relationship was suddenly harmonious. Take the memorial that the directors presented to him in late July after they had agreed, with intense reluctance, to his latest pressing request for a substantial advance:

They beg leave to declare, that nothing could induce them, under the present circumstances, to comply with the demand now made upon them, but the dread that their refusal might be productive of a greater evil, and nothing but the extreme pressure and exigencies of the case can in any shape justify them for acceding to this measure, and they apprehend, that in so doing, they render themselves totally incapable of granting any further assistance to Government during the remainder of this year, and unable even to make the usual advances on the land and mort for the ensuing year …

‘Money is extremely scarce in the City,’ noted next week the diarist Joseph Farington (not a City man, but with his ears close to the ground), adding, ‘Bank Directors much out of humour with Pitt’. By autumn the prevailing City mood was one of anxiety and grumbling. ‘The apprehension of an invasion of this country seems to have taken possession of men’s minds so strongly that even in every company it becomes a subject of conversation,’ reported The Times in September, an apprehension naturally contributing much to the hoarding of gold, as guineas were withdrawn rapidly from the country banks as well as from the Bank itself. As for grumbling, supplementing anxiety, Farington received an instructive visit at the start of October from a Mr Berwick, woollen draper as well as Cornhill banker:

There are great difficulties in the City from a want of money, – He blames in some degree some of the Directors of the Bank, who are supposed to be unfriendly to government, and who may have an interest in promoting occasional difficulties. – He also said that the Capital of the Bank is not proportioned to the business done, which is a cause of hesitation in discounting there from an apprehension that if the times become precarious from the alarms of invasion &c. a run might be made which the Bank could not answer, not having specie equal to its discounts or in such proportion as to secure its safety in such an emergency.

Despite the success of Pitt’s so-called Loyalty Loan in December – the Bank showing the way by contributing £1 million, plus £½ million from individual directors – neither government nor people, City nor Bank, entered 1797 in optimistic mood.³

‘I have found my health decline through anxiety and application,’ reflected Samuel Thornton in January, writing his customary retrospective of the previous year. ‘The duties I have to fulfil at the Bank, and the office of deputy governor upon which I am entering [he was due to take up the position in the spring], call indeed for all my attention.’ So they already did, and so they increasingly would. The early weeks of 1797 were essentially more of the same – rumours of imminent invasion, flight of gold, money tight – before a dramatic endgame began during the last full week of February. A series of country banks stopped payment; specie drained from the Bank at the rate of some £100,000 a day; a substantial enemy fleet was sighted off Beachy Head, a sighting that did its damage before proving false; the price of Consols tumbled; and a handful of the Bank’s main men – usually including governor Daniel Giles, deputy governor Thomas Raikes, veteran director Samuel Bosanquet and Thornton himself – were in seemingly ceaseless conclave with Pitt, giving him regular updates about the loss of gold, as the treasure threatened to dip below £1 million. Thus on Tuesday the 21st the Bank’s deputation, having explained ‘exactly to him how the Cash [specie] is circumstanced’, urged ‘that he may, if possible and proper, strike out some means of alleviating the public alarms, and stopping this apparent disposition in people’s minds for having a large deposit of Cash in their houses’; three days later, the Bank’s representatives waited on Pitt not only to impart the latest alarming bullion figures (£130,000 withdrawn that Friday), but ‘to ask him how far he thought the Bank might venture to go on paying Cash, and when he would think it necessary to interfere before our Cash was so reduced as might be detrimental to the immediate service of the State’. The ball, in other words, was firmly placed in Pitt’s court – and next morning, Saturday the 25th, as news reached London that French troops had landed at Fishguard, he resolved to take decisive action, probably to the relief of the Bank.⁴

Events over the rest of the weekend moved with notably clockwork precision. Pitt later on Saturday despatched a message to King George III at Windsor, urgently asking him to return to London the next morning; noon on Sunday saw a meeting of the Privy Council, attended also by Giles and his three colleagues, at which the decision was reached to suspend cash payments; and at the Bank on Sunday evening, eleven directors (including the lord mayor, Brook Watson) assembled to wait for the formal communication from the Privy Council. This duly arrived at half-past seven, containing an Order in Council stating that it was the ‘unanimous Opinion’ of that body that it was ‘indispensably necessary for the Publick Service, that the Directors of the Bank of England, should forbear issuing any Cash in Payment until the Sense of Parliament can be taken on that Subject, and the proper Measures adopted thereupon, for maintaining the Means of Circulation, and supporting the Publick and Commercial Credit of the Kingdom at this important Conjuncture’. Whereupon, after Abraham Newland had been called in and ‘directed to pay Obedience’ to the new dispensation, the lord mayor was ‘desired to send round to all the Bankers in the City this Evening a Copy of the Injunction of the Privy Council’. Overnight, printed circulars were prepared for posting at the doors of the Bank – containing not only the text of the Order in Council, but a resolute and reassuring message from the Bank itself in consequence of that Order:

The Governor, Deputy Governor, and Directors of the BANK of ENGLAND, think it their Duty to inform the Proprietors of BANK STOCK, as well as the PUBLICK at large, that the general Concerns of the BANK are in the most affluent and prosperous Situation, and such as to preclude every Doubt as to the Security of its Notes.

The directors mean to continue their usual Discounts for the Accommodation of the Commercial Interest, paying the Amount in Bank Notes, and the Dividend Warrants will be paid in the same Manner.

A new, paper-money era was beginning, though amid huge uncertainty and with no one knowing – or even able plausibly to guess – for how long.

The lord mayor on the Sunday evening was also requested to ask the City’s bankers to meet at the Mansion House at 11 o’clock on Monday morning. There, they carried a resolution, almost at once bearing about a thousand signatures, that had deliberately strong echoes of 1745 in its statement that, in order to ‘prevent embarrassments to Publick Credit’ and ‘to support it with the utmost Exertions at the present important Conjuncture’, the signatories ‘do most readily hereby declare, that we will not refuse to receive Bank Notes in Payment of any Sum of Money to be paid to us, and we will use our utmost Endeavours to make all our Payments in the same Manner’. Other similar meetings and declarations, almost all intensely patriotic in tone, rapidly followed in many cities and towns; and the contemporary evidence strongly suggests a broad acceptance in these weeks of Bank of England notes even if they were no longer backed by gold, with the notes themselves soon including £1 and £2 denominations. One inevitable consequence was at the supply end. ‘Before the present urgency there were 5 printing presses used in printing Bank notes,’ whereas ‘now there are 16 presses employed night & day, and 14 more are to be added,’ recorded Farington as early as 16 March. Legislation, meanwhile, gave full sanction to the new situation, with the Restriction Bill of 9 March (becoming law on 3 May) indemnifying the Bank against the direct consequences of suspension of cash payments. Predictably, if perhaps illogically, many now hoarded what gold they had left; and less than three weeks after suspension, Samuel Thornton confessed to his brother-in-law, Lord Balgonie, that ‘I wish I could comply with your request & send you a bag of gold, but no such thing is to be obtained …’⁵

The Bank was also busy in these weeks supplying witnesses to the ‘secret’ parliamentary committees investigating the events leading up to suspension. ‘When did you first perceive a diminution of the usual quantity of Bank Notes in circulation?’ the Commons Committee asked its first witness, Thomas Raikes, on 4 March, less than a week after the event. ‘I cannot recollect,’ replied the deputy governor, and his next few answers were not all that much more helpful:

Did that diminution take place, to any considerable degree, before the Bank began to lessen their Discounts? – I fancy not.

Did the diminution of the Discounts and of the Bank Notes in circulation, correspond with each other? – Yes; except so far as it might be affected by the emission of Bank Notes for the payment of dividends.

Did the diminution of Discounts, by the Bank, produce any difference with respect to discounts by private Bankers, and other persons usually discounting bills? – I presume it did.

What difference did it produce? – It is not within my cognizance, further than that the less accommodation the Bank give to the Public, the less Bank Notes will be in the hands of the Bankers.

The next witness was Pitt himself. ‘I certainly thought, from all that passed, that they felt the necessity of the measure on public grounds,’ he responded when asked about the attitude of the Bank directors to suspension. ‘But,’ he carefully added, ‘I certainly do not mean to represent them as recommending or advising the measure.’ The governor, Daniel Giles, was also asked: ‘According to the best judgement you could form at that time, founded upon all the circumstances affecting the interest of the Bank, did you think such a measure necessary? – I thought it was prudential.’ Other witnesses included Walter Boyd, who launched a full-scale attack on the Bank’s December 1795 change of discount policy (‘has diminished the powers of commercial houses, and diminished the value of public securities’), while from Threadneedle Street, after Raikes on being recalled had insisted that it was ‘the alarm of invasion’ that above all had caused ‘the present drain’, the remaining three witnesses were Benjamin Winthrop, Godfrey Thornton and Samuel Bosanquet. Winthrop put it on record that ‘I was always fearful that such very large advances to Government might at some time or other operate very prejudicially to the Bank, and therefore on many occasions, as an individual Director, I have been against such advances’; Thornton feebly replied, ‘The causes are unknown to me,’ when asked to explain the unusual demand for specie; and Bosanquet cogently outlined the big picture as seen from the Bank’s Court Room:

Is it not always in the power of the Directors of the Bank to restrict the amount of their Advances to Government, and to enforce the reduction of those Advances? – Undoubtedly it is; but not without taking measures which may be very detrimental in their consequences. I do not recollect a single Advance of any importance, which has been consented to for the use of Government, for a considerable time past, but where the consequences of refusing it did not appear to the Directors to be liable to the fatal consequence of bringing on a public alarm, by injuring the national credit.

‘And this,’ explained Bosanquet, ‘they judged likely to be of more fatal consequence than any inconvenience which could arise to the Bank from making the Advance.’⁶

The Commons naturally also debated the turn of events, specifically the Bank Restriction Bill. The most resonant contribution (retrospectively anyway) came on 24 March, from the Whig politician and Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, always happy to portray Pitt’s Tory government in an unfavourable light:

He made a fanciful allusion to the Bank, as an elderly lady in the City, of great credit and long standing, who had lately made a faux pas which was not altogether inexcusable. She had he said unfortunately fallen into bad company, and contracted too great an intimacy and connexion at the St James’s end of the town. The young gentleman, however, who had employed all his arts of soft persuasion to seduce this old lady, had so far shown his designs, that by timely breaking off the connexion, there might be hopes for the old gentlewoman once more regaining her credit and injured reputation.

The Bank’s main spokesman in the Commons was Samuel Thornton, who three days later ignored Sheridan’s jest but insisted that ‘no minister, nor any authority on earth, ever had or ever should control the conduct of the directors of the Bank in giving accommodation to individual merchants by way of discount’, adding that ‘the directors were the best judges to what extent their issue of paper should be made, which must be regulated by prudence …’ His words cut no ice with Sir William Pulteney, MP for Shrewsbury and reputedly the wealthiest man in Britain. In a fierce speech on 7 April he advocated ‘putting an end to the monopoly of the Bank of England’; argued that ‘its antiquity alone has had a great effect, and the imposing mystery which has hitherto been observed in the conduct of its affairs, has created an awe and veneration, which the human mind must, for a time, have some difficulty to overcome’; and went on:

But the late events, have, in a great measure, dispelled this charm: the Bank of England has been obliged to disclose the state of its affairs, the veil is drawn up, and we see nothing of that fancied magnificence which, till now, made a wonderful impression. It can never again, I believe, assume the same place in the imagination of the public.

The debate ended that day with a short pained speech from Thornton, explicitly repudiating Pulteney. ‘The restriction did not arise from the operations of the Bank itself, but from other causes, which he was not at liberty to describe,’ he stated; while ‘as to the compact which was said to subsist between government and the Bank, during the years in which he had been connected with the Bank, he knew of no partiality whatever …’⁷

The suspension of payments in gold was undeniably a huge national event, and the great political cartoonist James Gillray was quickly on the case. On 9 March a cartoon entitled ‘MIDAS, Transmuting all into GOLD PAPER’ went on sale at Mrs Hannah Humphrey’s print shop in St James’s, above which Gillray occupied a room. As arresting as anything that he drew, it showed Pitt vomiting banknotes and shitting money into the Bank of England. A fortnight later, Sheridan in the Commons indulged in his bit of fancy; and on 22 May, in the immediate context of Pitt under criticism for seeking to secure yet another substantial loan from the Bank, there appeared Gillray’s celebrated cartoon, ‘POLITICAL RAVISHMENT, or The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in danger!’ It depicted the freckly beanpole Pitt seeking to ravish a gaunt old lady dressed in banknotes and sitting on a locked box containing the Bank’s treasure; while, as he did his worst, she was crying, ‘Murder! murder! Rape! murder! – Oh you Villain! what have I kept my Honor untainted so long, to have it broke up, by you at last? – Oh Murder! Rape! Ravishment! Ruin! Ruin! Ruin!!!’⁸ A nickname, by Gillray out of Sheridan, was thus born, lasting at least two centuries and in the process giving to the Bank an affectionate familiarity that no public relations campaign could have hoped to achieve.

On and off, but mainly on, Britain would continue to be at war with France for the next eighteen years, until Wellington’s hard-fought victory at Waterloo. Jane Austen’s near-silence on the subject may have suggested otherwise, but across Britain these were frequently tumultuous, even fearful years, wonderfully caught in Jenny Uglow’s panoramic survey In These Times (2014). At the Bank, shortly before Christmas 1803 and following the appointment the previous month of a select committee, the Court of Directors was assured that ‘a Plan has been concocted, whereby, they [the Committee] have reason to hope, not only the many valuable Articles, which are allways in the Custody of the Bank, but also such of the original Books and Papers, as appear most necessary to be preserved, may be secured from danger, during the confusion which is to be apprehended from an Invasion’. Personal vicissitudes were many, even for those accustomed to the dignity of the Court Room. ‘With a fortune diminished by two-thirds of its amount,’ mused Samuel Thornton at the start of 1812 in the context of having been compelled to sell his Albury Park estate in Surrey, ‘I hope still to live with contentment, and though not in splendour, yet in comfort.’ More generally, the Bank played a key role in the often underestimated (then and later) British war machine – a role acknowledged in 1800 by the almost entirely uncontentious twenty-one-year renewal of its Charter, taking it from 1812 to 1833 at the acceptable price of an interest-free £3 million loan to government for six years.⁹

What, then, specifically was the Bank’s contribution to the war effort? Arguably it had six main aspects: first, amid the pound sterling’s continuing inconvertibility, the issuing of paper money on a large scale, with the £1 and £2 denominations putting banknotes into the hands of the general populace for the first time; second, managing the hugely enlarged national debt, up from £245 million at the start of the war to £834 million by the end; third, managing much of the government’s day-to-day money, an increasingly complex task; fourth, the time-honoured function of providing, relatively uncomplainingly, temporary advances to government, running for much of the duration at a reasonably manageable six to seven millions a year; fifth, managing the government loan process, vital to the financing of the war and usually involving competitive tenders from contractors, with the Treasury in practice heavily reliant on the disinterested guidance of the governor and deputy governor of the day; and sixth, stimulating commercial credit (largely through its discounting activities), not least so that, in a deeply uncertain trading world, merchants could guard against future shortages by stockpiling goods in their warehouses.

It was this sixth aspect that was by far the most controversial, especially after the commercial boom of 1808–10 got out of hand, with predictable results. Had the Bank, asked its critics, abused the freedom of non-convertibility? A trio of modern verdicts are helpful. Ian Duffy, the economic historian who has made the closest study of the Bank’s discounting policy during what came to be known as the restriction period (that is, the suspension of cash payments), accepts that the Bank’s refusal to reduce advances in early 1810 was mistaken; but at the same time he argues that this refusal was a tacit and honourable acknowledgement that its December 1795 policy of rigid rationing had been an error, leading to severe commercial and financial difficulties, even perhaps to suspension itself. More generally, Elisa Newby has valuably emphasised how these eighteen years were inevitably taxing times, as ‘the war, high government expenditure, trade blockades and bad harvests made the formulation of monetary policy a difficult task’. Yet despite all this, she observes, the Bank’s notes were accepted as payment throughout, while the fact that interest rates (for both long- and short-term borrowing) remained below 6 per cent graphically indicated the monetary policy’s market credibility. A final word goes to a politician as well as historian, Kwasi Kwarteng: ‘Despite the steep increase in [government] borrowing, the fact that the paper pound essentially held its value [depreciating only 30 per cent between 1797 and 1815] was an extraordinary piece of financial management on the part of any central bank. The Bank of England had organised government borrowing, but it had not put money into circulation. In modern parlance, the Bank maintained a tight control of the money supply, in stark contrast to the French and American revolutionary regimes.’¹⁰

An important and time-consuming by-product of the paper-money era – especially with so many people unaccustomed to banknotes now having them in their pockets – was large-scale forgery and the related crime of ‘uttering’ (deliberately possessing and circulating) counterfeit notes. ‘If some steps are not taken to counteract this alarming increase in the circulation of forged paper,’ a Plymouth correspondent warned the Bank only four years after suspension, ‘we are apprehensive that it may prevent the negotiating of your notes altogether.’ Or as a partner from the Bank’s solicitors, the firm that soon became known as Freshfields, put it in 1809: ‘The fabrication and circulation of forged bank notes has lately become so systematic a matter of business that the security of the circulating medium of the country is seriously menaced and unless prompt and active measures are taken to detect and punish the offenders, the most serious consequences may be the result.’ The Bank’s reaction to the problem was vigorous, undertaking in most years between 1800 and 1815 at least thirty prosecutions for forgery, having not stinted in its system of financial rewards in order to get to that point. A significant proportion of prosecutions ended in the death penalty, though legislation in 1801 permitted those pleading guilty to uttering the lesser sentence of fourteen years of transportation.

Inevitably, letters from convicted prisoners, appealing for mercy and/or charity (usually pecuniary), poured in. How did the Bank, whose Committee for Law Suits met regularly from 1802, respond? ‘Deliberate and rational’ is Deirdre Palk’s verdict, based on her pioneering analysis of this often wretched correspondence and what ensued. ‘To those, male or female, who were condemned to die, it would make only the cold response that it was not its business to interfere. Nor would it support others petitioning the Home Secretary or monarch. Having gone through the expensive and difficult process of prosecuting capitally those it believed to be a serious threat to the nation’s, and its own, security, it stood back, justified in its actions. On the other hand, the Bank showed tolerance towards those who were going to be removed from the country.’ In particular, she notes, ‘the Bank was willing to respond with generosity to women convicts while they remained in prison and when they went on board the transport ships’; while in general ‘it responded favourably to requests from women, and unfavourably to requests from men’. Financial relief was above all what most women asked for – and, according to Palk, ‘this was what they got in abundance’, often in the form of weekly payments, usually after the Bank had sent investigators to Newgate to check the genuineness of the request. ‘The reasons given were distress, hunger, little children to support, lack of clothing, no husband or friends to give support, no one to visit them. Men were not so likely to be in this condition, or so the Gentlemen of the Bank believed.’¹¹

The paper-money era, and the attendant rise of counterfeiting, also meant that the focus was on the banknotes themselves. ‘Until means are discovered of rendering the Forgery of Bank Notes utterly impracticable,’ observed a landscape engraver, John Landseer, in 1797, ‘it should seem to be a duty the Bank Directors owe to the Public and to themselves to render it as difficult as possible.’ Perhaps the Bank should have taken responsibility for coming up with its own solution, but instead it asked the public at large to put forward proposals for a so-called ‘inimitable’ note – a course of action that led to some 400 suggestions reaching the Bank during the whole restriction period. Sadly, the quest proved unavailing, with a future governor recalling in the 1830s that ‘the multiplicity of proposed schemes, the absurdity of many and the inefficiency of others had tended to embarrass and protract the subject rather than add any useful information’; even among those proposals that had some initial plausibility, there proved to be no ‘inimitable’ note that the Bank’s engraver was not capable of copying. As for the Bank’s existing notes – or ‘Newlands’ as they were often called, in reference to the chief cashier, whose name appeared as the payee on all notes until his retirement in 1807 – some new security measures were undoubtedly adopted during these years, in addition to the traditional use of white watermarked paper, but there was some truth in the claim of a miniature painter called J. T. Barber Beaumont. Of ‘inferior workmanship to common engraved shop-bills’ was his unfavourable judgement, soon after the end of the war, on the Bank’s notes; and furthermore, he added, they could be forged ‘by any one who can use a camel’s hair pencil’.¹²

Famously, the paper-money era engendered more than its fair share of debate among economists and bankers. The first phase occurred in the early 1800s, against the background of a sharp rise in the cost of food and an unfavourable turn in the foreign exchanges. A Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt, on the Influence of the Stoppage of Issues in Specie at the Bank of England was the title of Walter Boyd’s combative pamphlet, published in early 1801. Boyd argued that ‘there is the highest probability that the increase of Bank Notes is the principal cause of the great rise in the price of commodities and every species of exchangeable value’; declared that ‘the real resources of the country are now, and always have been, too solid and extensive to require the aid of forced paper-money, that dangerous quack-medicine’; professed himself ‘intimately convinced’ that ‘the resumption of payments in specie at the Bank’ would be ‘perfectly consistent’ with ‘the truest interest’ of ‘the Bank itself’; and depicted the Bank’s directors as facing since 1797 an ‘almost irresistible temptation’, given that the ‘impression upon their minds, that every fresh addition to their circulating paper was a new service rendered’, chimed so naturally with ‘the still more powerful and certain conviction that it was, at the same time, an addition to the sources of profit to the Bank’.

Later that year came a direct refutation from Sir Francis Baring, who back in 1797, not long after suspension, had publicly identified the Bank as the lender of last resort – while 1802 saw a heavyweight contribution from Henry Thornton. He was an MP, an economist, a City banker and a younger brother of Samuel (who himself the previous year had optimistically noted that ‘my own strength and vigour will be recruited as soon as my responsible situation of Governor to the Bank shall be ended’). An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain had at its heart a paradox. On the one hand, it stoutly defended the Bank, not only highlighting its independence of government but finding ‘an additional ground of confidence’ in it, namely:

that the numerous proprietors who chuse the directors, and have the power of controlling them (a power of which they have prudently forborne to make any frequent use), are men whose general stake in the country far exceeds that particular one which they have in the stock of the company. They are men, therefore, who feel themselves to be most deeply interested not merely in the increase of the dividends or in the maintenance of the credit of the Bank of England, but in the support of commercial as well as public credit in general. There is, indeed, both among them and among the whole commercial world, who make so large a portion of this country, a remarkable determination to sustain credit, and especially the credit of the bank …

On the other hand, the remorseless logic of Thornton’s treatise tended towards what soon became known as the ‘bullionist’ position, at whose heart lay the belief – for some an almost messianic belief – that it was the quantity of money that determined prices. ‘His loyalty to the Bank of England led him to accept too readily the view that the premium on gold was due to a decline in trade due to bad harvests,’ reflected the economist J. Keith Horsefield many years later. ‘Nor did he recognise that his explanation of the necessity to suspend cash payments – a panic demand for gold at home superimposed upon an unfavourable balance of trade – was in itself inadequate to justify the continuance of the suspension. His theoretical demonstration was perfectly clear, and only his reliance on the practical good sense of the Bank can have prevented his applying it to the facts.’¹³

The debate then died down for some six or seven years, while the Bank continued to apply its practical good sense. The reason for the debate’s return was mainly economic (in particular another unfavourable turn on the exchanges, throwing fresh doubt on the strength of the currency in a paper-money regime), but it also owed something to the remarkable stockjobber-turned-economist David Ricardo. ‘All the evils in our currency’, he stated in a pungent piece in the Morning Chronicle in August 1809, were ‘owing to the over-issues of the Bank, to the dangerous power with which it was entrusted [since 1797] of diminishing at its will, the value of every moneyed man’s property, and by enhancing the price of provisions, and every necessary of life, injuring the public annuitant, and all those persons whose incomes were fixed, and who were consequently not enabled to shift any part of the burden from their own shoulders’. Ricardo undoubtedly came to hold a dim view of the Bank, delighting in nicknaming it dismissively ‘the company of merchants’ – which was true enough, though underestimating the very real concern about conflicts of interest if that institution elected out-and-out bankers to its Court of Directors. In any case, not long afterwards, the Commons agreed to appoint what became known as the Bullion Committee, with the three active members comprising its chairman Francis Horner, the rising Tory politician William Huskisson and the widely esteemed Henry Thornton.¹⁴

Taking evidence between February and May 1810, the Committee had several sessions with the governor, John Whitmore, and deputy governor, John Pearse. In all likelihood neither enjoyed the experience, but they held firm to their position that (in the governor’s words) ‘the Bank never force a note into circulation, and there will not remain a note in circulation more than the immediate wants of the public require’. And they explained that when it came to making a discounting decision, the three key considerations were ‘the amount already given to the individual’, ‘the solidity of the paper’ and ‘the appearance of its being issued for commercial purposes’. Indeed, insisted Whitmore, ‘the Bank does not comply with the whole demand upon them for discounts, and they are never induced, by a view to their own profit, to push their issues beyond what they deem consistent with the public interest’. More than once the two men found themselves having to stall – ‘I desire time to consider that question … I would wish for time to consider that question … I cannot say, for want of advices …’ – while Whitmore was adamant that ‘I decline answering questions as to opinion.’ Perhaps inevitably, that included anything relating to the possible future of cash payments, with both men playing the deadest of bats. Following the proceedings especially closely was Ricardo, and on Whitmore being asked a hypothetical question and replying that ‘never having weighed the subject with any reference to the price of Bullion, I am not prepared with an opinion how a merchant would act in such a case’, he privately noted, ‘Is not this a confession that he has not considered a most important question in political economy, particularly necessary to be well understood by a Bank director?’

The most powerful criticism of the Bank came from Sir Francis Baring, no longer able – following the recent tide of speculation amid an apparent loosening of monetary policy – to support suspension and the wide discretionary powers that that had given to the Bank:

There are many instances of clerks not worth £100 establishing themselves as merchants, and receiving (since the restriction) an accommodation from the Bank, by discounting what is called good bills to the amount (probably) of five or £10,000; such a demand I am inclined to consider as created by the Bank, and not arising out of a regular course of trade, such as would exist if the restriction was removed. This circumstance is important, if my opinion, that the circulation of the country cannot be perfectly safe until the restriction is removed, is well founded.

‘I think the Bank would not be disposed to extend their issues beyond three-fourths part of its present amount,’ Baring added, ‘if the restriction was removed.’ To these and similar charges, Jeremiah Harman, a director since 1794, was unwilling to concede an inch:

Do you not apprehend that there is a disposition in persons keeping accounts at the Bank, to apply for a larger extent of discount than it is on the whole expedient for the Bank to grant? – Very many do, and we treat them accordingly.

Do you not think that the sum total applied for, even though the accommodation afforded should be on the security of good bills to safe persons, might be such as to produce some excess in the quantity of the Bank issues if fully complied with? – I think if we discount only for solid persons, and such paper as is for real bona fide transactions, we cannot materially err.

The final Bank witness was John Humble, principal clerk of the Bullion Office (which according to him ‘used formerly to be called the Warehouse’). ‘Can you state to the Committee,’ he was asked, ‘the quantity, or nearly the quantity, of gold bullion imported, that has been deposited in your office in the course of the last year?’ ‘I have no conception of it,’ he replied. ‘Could you not state from your books the amount of sales of gold of all sorts for the last year?’ To this he was more helpful: ‘Probably we might.’

Horner, Huskisson and Thornton (by now an explicit bullionist) produced their report in June. The key recommendation was that cash payments should be resumed in 1812; and their treatment of the Bank was firm but measured, noting at the outset that suspension in 1797 had been ‘not a measure fought for by the Bank, but imposed upon it by the Legislature for what were held to be urgent reasons of State policy and public expediency’. The fundamental argument was straightforward:

It was a necessary consequence of the suspension of cash payments, to exempt the Bank from that drain of Gold, which, in former times, was sure to result from an unfavourable Exchange and a high price of Bullion. And the Directors, released from all fears of such a drain, and no longer feeling any inconvenience from such a state of things, have not been prompted to restore the Exchanges and the price of Gold to their proper level by a reduction of their advances and issues.

Unfortunately, suggested the report, the Bank had been too stuck in its ways, failing to alter its policy, based on familiar ‘sound and well adjusted principles’, in the light of the unfamiliar post-1797 situation. The three wise men helpfully summarised that policy:

The Bank Directors, as well as some of the merchants who have been examined, shewed a great anxiety to state to Your Committee a doctrine, of the truth of which they professed themselves to be most thoroughly convinced, that there can be no possible excess in the issue of Bank of England paper, so long as the advances in which it is issued are made upon the principles which at present guide the conduct of the Directors, that is, so long as the discount of mercantile Bills are confined to paper of undoubted solidity, arising out of real commercial transactions, and payable at short and fixed periods.

Furthermore, the report went on:

It was natural for the Bank Directors to believe, that nothing but benefit could accrue to the public at large, while they saw the growth of Bank profits go hand in hand with the accommodations granted to the Merchants. It was hardly to be expected of the directors of the Bank, that they should be fully aware of the consequences that might result from their pursuing, after the suspension of cash payments, the same system which they have found a safe one before. To watch the operation of so new a law, and to provide against the injury which might result from it to the public interests, was the province, not so much of the Bank as of the Legislature.

Ultimately, the discretionary trust, established as a result of suspension, was one ‘which it is unreasonable to expect that the Directors of the Bank of England should ever be able to discharge’, given that ‘the most detailed knowledge of the actual trade of the Country, combined with the profound science in all the principles of Money and circulation, would not enable any man or set of men to adjust, and keep always adjusted, the right proportion of circulating medium in a country to the wants of trade’. The magisterial summing-up came later in the paragraph:

The Directors of the Bank of England, in the judgement of Your Committee, have exercised the new and extraordinary discretion reposed in them since 1797, with an integrity and a regard to the public interest, according to their conceptions of it, and indeed a degree of forbearance in turning it less to the profit of the Bank than it would easily have admitted of, that meant the continuance of that confidence which the public has so long and so justly felt in the integrity with which its affairs are directed, as well as in the unshaken stability and ample funds of that great establishment. That their recent policy involves great practical errors, which it is of the utmost public importance to correct, Your Committee are fully convinced; but those errors are less to be imputed to the Bank Directors, than to be stated as the effect of a new system, of which, however it originated, or was rendered necessary as a temporary expedient, it might have been well if Parliament had sooner taken into view all the consequences.

The Bank may still have been in some sense a private body (to the extent, indeed, that the Bullion Committee meekly gave way over the Bank’s insistence that it need not be required to reveal the total of its private discounts); but inasmuch as it was to be regarded as a public institution – increasing by the year – the whole question of discretion was shaping up as the battleground of the future.¹⁵

More immediately, the question was whether Parliament would side with the economists or with the practical men. ‘A strong political contention has arisen about our paper currency,’ observed Samuel Thornton at the start of 1811, adding that ‘parties are very nearly balanced’. Finally, in May, a four-day debate in the Commons decided the matter. From the Bank, Alexander Baring (a director since 1805) asserted that ‘the mass of the evil was to be found in the national debt, and not in the circulating medium’, while Samuel Thornton ‘disclaimed the idea that the Bank issued paper to an unlimited amount’, pointed out that ‘the discounting of bills was not the only means of issuing their paper, much being issued on government securities’, and ‘expressed his conviction that there would be no limit to the distress and embarrassment that must follow the restoration of cash payments, under circumstances like the present’; from the bullionists, William Wilberforce expressed disappointment with the evidence of the Bank directors (‘their eyes were not opened to the magnitude of the duties they were called on to discharge’); and from the politicians, the decisive contribution was that of Spencer Perceval, like Pitt both prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer, according to whom the adoption of the Bullion Report ‘would be tantamount to a declaration that they would no longer continue those foreign exertions which they had hitherto considered indispensable to the security of the country’. In other words, there was a war still on, its outcome remained deeply uncertain, and the unavoidable fact was that resuming cash payments – however theoretically desirable – would seriously jeopardise getting hold of specie in order to pay armies and fleets, to subsidise allies and to pay for food imports in the context of Napoleon’s Continental Blockade. Indeed, if Horner’s resolution in May 1811 to end the Bank restriction ‘two years from the present time’ had been passed, that would have taken effect in 1813, just when (observes Clapham) ‘Napoleon was beating Russians and Prussians at Lützen and Bautzen’. But Horner’s resolution was rejected, the Commons instead resolved that cash payments should be resumed six months after the end of the war, and for the time being the Bank was allowed to continue doing its best or worst. Ricardo meanwhile could only fume. ‘I trust the day is not far distant,’ he had written in the Morning Chronicle following the publication of the Bullion Committee’s report, ‘when we shall look back with astonishment at the delusion to which we have so long been subject, in allowing a company of merchants, notoriously ignorant of the most obvious principles of political oeconomy, to regulate at their will, the value of the property of a great portion of the community.’¹⁶

Fortunately the great economist was not privy to the Bank’s records in October 1811, revealing difficulty in maintaining a quorum at the Court and seven directors (including Alexander Baring, Stephen Thornton and a future governor, Cornelius Buller) being rather acerbically asked ‘when their attendance could be depended upon’. Even so, the government’s reliance upon the Bank during these last few years of the war was as heavy as ever, as again and again it sent supplicant letters begging the purchase of surplus Exchequer bills. Perceval’s successor as chancellor was Nicholas Vansittart – known as ‘Van’ and somewhat unfairly the laughing-stock of the advanced school of financiers under Huskisson, who called him ‘old Mouldy’. A request from Van on 16 May 1815, just weeks before Waterloo and asking the governor and deputy governor to enable the purchase of £2 million of Exchequer bills, had all the well-worn phrases: ‘Lord Liverpool [prime minister] and I had hoped … I am, however, sorry to find myself under the necessity of requesting … I feel it my Duty earnestly to recommend this Application to the favourable consideration of your Court.’ As usual, the application was successful; and Clapham’s evocative phrases about the Bank’s ‘reluctant yet stubborn’ support of the chancellor of the day, backing him ‘faithfully, if sometimes with groans’, almost certainly capture the relationship exactly.¹⁷

The war was far from being John Soane’s restriction period, as his physical transformation of the Bank continued apace. Two crucial decisions were taken and implemented in the mid-1790s: to acquire land to the north, pushing up to the edge of Lothbury; and to turn the whole of the Bank into a continuous walled island site, exuding security, solidity and permanence – invaluable qualities at a time of considerable radical agitation. Thereafter, it was full steam ahead. In 1797 he began the Residence Court, home to key officials and their families; in 1798–9, having quite recently rebuilt the 4 Per Cent Office, he built the Consols Transfer Office, along rather more orthodox classical lines than the Bank Stock Office; and over the next few years there followed the New Library, the New Accountant’s and Cashier’s Offices, and the Lothbury Court, with the last showing Soane at his most simultaneously picturesque and monumental, albeit largely concealed from the visitor’s gaze. Soane’s classical masterpiece, though, was Tivoli Corner. This was built on the north-west corner between 1805 and 1807, was wholly in public view and possessed a uniqueness authoritatively described by Daniel Abramson:

A marvel of geometry mediating a difficult site, its pyramidal elevation and complexly alternating projections and recessions reached back through two centuries of European Baroque architecture. A century of the classical British picturesque, beginning with Vanbrugh, also climaxed with the Tivoli Corner’s ebullient skyline and richly shadowed layers of space. The Tivoli order’s full-bodied Roman Corinthian richness – here with complete garland and bucrania frieze – juxtaposed against the angular plainness of the Grecian inflected attic seemed to propose a modern classical amalgam.

Soane also took the opportunity during the 1800s to expand and remodel the suite of directors’ parlours, including the addition of the Governor’s Court, and to construct the 130-foot Long Passage, linking the Bank’s public spaces near the southern front to its more private areas to the north. Altogether, it was a prodigious achievement by one man; and it was neither idle boasting nor special pleading when Soane affirmed in 1803 that ‘the business of the Bank is my first consideration’.

For their part, the directors deserve credit for the backing they gave him, especially given that – initially at least – Soane’s approach was far from universally applauded. In May 1796, at a meeting of the Architects’ Club with Soane absent, satirical verses were read aloud (subsequently printed, eventually leading to a libel case) that, among other charges, accused Soane of having vandalised Taylor’s Rotunda; while later in 1796 three dining acquaintances of the diarist Joseph Farington castigated his work at the Bank as ‘affected and contemptible’. Undoubtedly some directors harboured reservations, on the grounds partly of expense (sometimes running at upwards of £40,000 a year) and partly of taste, with the Committee for Building perhaps somewhat nervously in 1797 conveying its wish to Soane for ‘some ornament but not too much’. Two things helped Soane. The first was his increasingly close links over the years with many of the individual directors, who employed him as their personal architect; the other was a growing general sense of the sheer scale and impressiveness of what he was doing. A culminating moment came in June 1814, when Tsar Alexander I took time during his visit to London to inspect the Bank, with the architect by his side, at the end of which the Tsar, reported the press, ‘complimented Soane in a very particular manner on the grandeur of the work and shook him most cordially by the hand’. Few contemporaries denied the grandeur; as Leigh’s New Picture of London put it four years later, ‘this immense pile of building is more extensive in its range of offices, and more eminent for its architectural ornament, and interior arrangement, than any single public office in the metropolis’.¹⁸

Soane was probably unstoppable, war or no war, but without the conflict there certainly would not have been a Bank Volunteer Corps. It was formed in 1798, was given the responsibility of defending the Bank as a reinforcement of the Picquet, and had its moment in the sun on the first Monday of September 1799, as recorded by Farington:

Bank Association Colours I went to see delivered in Lords Cricket ground [then in Dorset Square] by Mrs Saml Thornton, wife of the Governor of the Bank, to Lieut. Coll. Whitmore, Commander of the Corps. – The Captains are all Directors of the Bank, the Lieutenants & Ensigns Principal Clerks of the Bank. There were upwards of 400 in the line. The Colours were delivered about ¼ before one oClock after a Sermon read by the Chaplain. – The Corps then performed many evolutions admirably well till past 3 oClock. The Company separated about 4 oClock, after many hundred spectators had been partakers of refreshment prepared in 18 Marquees, beside the Pavilion.

The quartermaster was none other than Soane, and it was through his invitation that Farington that evening went to the Bank itself, where he ‘saw the Bank Directors, and the whole Corps, seated after dinner, drinking patriotic toasts. – The Rotunda contained several tables, a Company with the Officers sat at each table. Other Companys were in the Dividend rooms.’ Clearly the Corps was a mirror image of the day-to-day Bank in its respect for hierarchy, together with a strong streak of paternalism, and just over a week later the diarist gleaned some further information:

Bank Clerk told me today that the Directors provided breakfast for each Company of their Volunteers at Coffee Houses at 8 oClock after they had exercised, – and they went to the Offices at 9. – On the Kings birth day the Directors presented each of them, 500 in number, with 6 guineas each as a compliment to buy suit of cloaths &c.

In practice, until they were disbanded in July 1814, the Bank Volunteers saw little in the way of serious action; but during much of 1803–5 they stood ready to guard the Bank’s gold, should invasion happen and the treasure have to be despatched elsewhere.¹⁹

Such was the wartime Bank’s enlarged workload that, unsurprisingly, staff numbers rose sharply, as can be seen in the table.

Who were these increasingly numerous clerks? Anne Murphy, on the basis of a close study of the recruitment process between 1800 and 1815, finds that the great majority had no familial connection with the Bank; that without that connection it remained necessary to be recommended by a director; that the primary motive was a steady job together with job security; that applicants tended to be around twenty years old; that none was Catholic; that social background was often somewhere between higher artisan and general ‘middling’; and that relatively few new recruits arrived at the Bank with particularly well-developed skills in handwriting or accounting or ‘telling’ money – that, in other words, they would largely be expected to learn on the job. As for the wider fraternity they now joined, Murphy offers a striking but convincing assessment of the national contribution made by what she calls ‘the largest concentrated white-collar workforce in the world’:

Much like a civil service, together the Bank’s clerks constituted a body of knowledge and experience that remained constant while directors and governors of the Bank came and went. Each operated in a specialised capacity in offices supervised by senior colleagues, and heavily coordinated with each other, thus making work at the Bank akin to that in a large factory. Individually, the jobs those clerks performed were mundane and repetitive but collectively the feat they achieved, that of managing the national debt and providing banking and discount facilities for London’s business and financial community, was nothing short of extraordinary. They dealt with thousands of transactions every month, managed records relating to a huge balance sheet, made sense of the system of public debt, provided effective and efficient liaison with the Exchequer, managed much of London’s bullion inflows and oversaw the processes for the manufacture and circulation of banknotes. Moreover, this was a labour force that, until the advent of the automated bookkeeping machine and the typewriter, and indeed arguably until the advent of the computer, could not be replaced or even significantly aided by technology. Their work was done by hand in processes that involved the endless recording of details in ledgers and checking and double-checking to ensure the integrity of the records.

That unremitting work (perhaps helped a little more by technology than Murphy allows) may not always have been properly appreciated; but in May 1815, during the last weeks of war, the Committee of Inspection for the Drawing Office &c recommended that ‘the Wages of the Clerks in the post Bill Office be advanced £30 each, in Consideration of the great weight of Business, the risque they run in paying Bills improperly, and receiving no benefit from their Situations, exclusive of their Wages’.²⁰

As during the eighteenth century, the major blemish was – despite a continuing tightening of regulations – the occasional but disturbing case of serious fraud. Robert Aslett had joined the Bank in 1778 and soon become a protégé of Abraham Newland, so much so that when in 1799 he was appointed second cashier it was generally assumed that he would in due course succeed Newland as chief cashier. Indeed, such were Newland’s growing infirmities that Aslett by the early 1800s was virtually managing the business of the Cashier’s Office, causing him to succumb in 1802–3 to the temptation of large-scale embezzlement, principally of Exchequer bills. ‘His looks were pale, sorrowful and emaciated,’ noted a reporter as he appeared at the inevitable Old Bailey; and though he avoided the gibbet, some seventeen years of imprisonment lay ahead, until a pardon from the Bank in 1820 on condition that he left the country. No such escape for Philip Whitehead, a former clerk in the Cashier’s Office who in 1812 was hanged for forgery, having pretended to his victim still to be in the employment of the Bank when in fact he had been effectively dismissed for a combination of extravagant living and Stock Exchange speculation. His sister Sarah reacted badly, over the next quarter of a century going daily to the Bank and asking for her brother, with her invariable black dress earning her the sobriquet ‘the Bank Nun’ from the mainly kindly clerks.

One of those may have been Samuel Harrison, who in 1805 as a would-be entrant in his early twenties had been ‘examined by a Committee, my religion enquired into and whether I was a member of any political club, then had to count £100 silver coin, and cast up columns of figures’. He was no Rousseau, but his autobiographical notes, written in annual diary form probably many years later, have their moments:

1806. The 26th July was my first day at the Bank. I was installed in the Bank Note Office, and had to enter and fill up £1 and £2 notes. 200 were the morning’s work. I had to join the Bank Volunteers.

1809. At the Bank, in consequence of several Elections of Clerks, I had many juniors and got into the Drawing Office. At the close of this year, the writing of the numbers and dates on the Bank Notes was superseded by hand machines which printed them. This work not being to the taste of all, I willingly undertook, and eventually got fixed in the Numbering Office. Leaving daily at three o’clock, we had sometimes to work on Sundays to supply the demand of £1 Notes, so much gold being sent to Spain to supply the English Army there.

1810. I agreed to be one of the Godfathers to my friend Feldwick’s first child, a son and heir. I found a large party assembled. It was here I first met Catherine Harpley with her sisters Bessie and Jane then unmarried. My dear Kate soon struck me as being the wife I wanted; lively and good-tempered, a nice spanking girl … My courtship was conducted according to my nature, in a somewhat cold and sensible manner. Whether this told against me, or the animosity of the family, I was suddenly struck down by a concise and abrupt dismissal.

1811. Several of the Bank Clerks used to dine at the Woolpack in St Mildred’s Court; we paid 1/6 each and had a joint cooked expressly, and once a week we had a pint of wine each and got an extra hour from the office. There were about twelve of us; some were very amusing, full of jokes and puns. The hilarity was so uproarious the landlord begged us to be more orderly. On the 25th May we had a holiday, and, with a friend each, dined at Blackheath. We had subscribed 6d a week until 15/- each was collected. We called ourselves the Bonny Vivants; I was treasurer and chairman with the privilege of making up deficiencies.

At last, in 1813, he met Kate Harpley again, and this time got the go-ahead from her father. ‘On the appointed day [3 April], without anybody knowing at the office, I quietly slipped out, met the wedding party, was married and then returned to the Bank while the rest amused themselves driving in the Park. Then we met again to dinner at White Conduit House. In the afternoon there was a heavy fall of snow which is considered a good omen.’ So it was, and the following year, ‘at 50 minutes past one in the morning of February 12th’, a daughter was born. ‘The pleasure to the parents of a first child is indescribable, but the necessity arises of more stay-at-home habits, and, very possibly, sleepless nights,’ recalled Harrison wryly enough. ‘The high price of provisions, bread 1/5 the quartern and butter 1/11 a pound, with coals 65/- the ton, and the probable termination of the war with France stopping the overtime at the Bank, made me somewhat modify my pleasure of seeing the beginning of a family of children to support.’²¹