Discussion Post: The Red-headed League
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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Red-headed League and the chosen topic is Banking.
A few facts:
💷 The accounts at Parsons Thomson… were kept in a way that was typical of Victorian banks. Enormous leather bound ledgers, several inches thick, were bound in leather and stamped in gold. Their pages were covered in lines of copperplate writing in various hands, some legible, some less so… At any one time the bank would be running several account ledgers, each of which contained details of individuals whose surnames began with the same group of letters in the alphabet.
The accounts themselves were not in alphabetical order in the ledger, but each page was numbered and the names of account holders were indexed in each volume. When an individual's ledger page ran out of space, a note was made in the ledger to direct the reader to the next page of the ledger where the account could be found.
Transactions were not usually entered directly into the ledgers. Usually, a daybook was kept in which the day's transactions were recorded. The banks closed to customers a couple of hours before the staff went home, in order to make time to write up the day's transactions. ...the notes in the daybook were transferred to the individual account pages in the ledgers. This was often done by one clerk reading the day's business aloud, and another clerk or clerks listening and writing up the ledgers accordingly… [Jenny Woolf]
💷 ...there was no proper national cheque clearing system in the 1850s, but Coutts' Bank and a few others operated inter-bank agencies to enable money to be transferred between subscribing banks. In the case of Dodgson [Lewis Carroll], regular sums of money deposited to his Old Bank account via Coutts between 1856 and 1860 were actually being sent from the family home in Yorkshire, as family letters confirm. [Jenny Woolf]
💷 Notes were originally hand-written; although they were partially printed from 1725 onwards, cashiers still had to sign each note and make them payable to someone. Notes were fully printed from 1855… Until 1928 all notes were "White Notes", printed in black and with a blank reverse. During the 20th century White Notes were issued in denominations between £5 and £1000, but in the 18th and 19th centuries there were White Notes for £1 and £2. [Wikipedia]
💷 Hoare’s [the oldest surviving independent bank in the UK]... records… reveal... the relatively cosseted career of the bank clerk within Victorian clerical circles. He generally enjoyed a higher salary, longer holidays and more favourable working conditions than his clerical counterparts. It was therefore a highly sought after position. Only those of impeccable character however, were recruited into its ranks… …a fear of scandal within the banking community generally ensured that the occupants of this post were imbued with the most ardent devotion to Victorian notions of respectability. [Ingrid Jeacle]
💷 The hundreds of clerks in the Bank of England could stay until they dropped dead; there was no compulsory retiring age for them. [Liza Picard]
💷 The Victorian City of London was by far the largest financial centre in the world. It was an immensely complex world of joint-stock banks, smaller private banks, stock brokers and jobbers, insurance brokers and agents, shipbrokers, merchants and dealers in every currency and commodity… Much of the City’s life and work was aligned outwards and overseas, and not inland towards British industry… Victorian industry was financed by regional banks, based in cities outside London. [English Heritage]
💷 ...sterling had vastly greater purchasing power than any other currency, being the only international currency whose value was wholly backed by gold reserves. Hence the innumerable references in Victorian literature to impoverished individuals being forced to live on the Continent to save money. Smart Victorian families also often undertook protracted tours to Italy, the Riviera and Switzerland. [English Heritage]
💷 During the nineteenth century, the Bank of England only gradually built up its institutional control over the London money market. Until the 1840s, it competed with other private banks, both in the capital and in the provinces, and sometimes speculated as irresponsibly as any other investor. But the bank had the only sizable gold reserves and came to monopolize government stock issues and short-term loans. [Dale H. Porter]
💷 The Bank Charter Act 1844… restricted the powers of British banks and gave exclusive note-issuing powers to the central Bank of England… Until the mid-nineteenth century, commercial banks in Britain and Ireland were able to issue their own banknotes, and notes issued by provincial banking companies were commonly in circulation.
Under the Act, no bank other than the Bank of England could issue new banknotes, and issuing banks would have to withdraw their existing notes in the event of their being the subject of a takeover. At the same time, the Bank of England was restricted to issue new banknotes only if they were 100% backed by gold or up to £14 million in government debt. The Act served to restrict the supply of new notes reaching circulation, and gave the Bank of England an effective monopoly on the printing of new notes. [Wikipedia]
💷 “Our research suggests a need to reappraise women’s role as savers. Their presence in the account records is far more extensive than standard banking histories suggest. Married women in particular were active account users and the records show some of them were very concerned with keeping control of their own money and out of reach of their spouses.
“Our picture of married women in the 19th century as only having ‘pin money’ to manage, and of working class money management just being a case of coins put in jars on the mantelpiece, needs to be challenged and this data helps us do so.” [Dr Linda Perriton, talking about her research with Professor Josephine Maltby] The researchers looked at a sample of 19th century savings bank account records from East London, Bury, South Shields and Newcastle.
💷 As the British banking system developed in the Victorian era, one of its major challenges was substantial and endemic fraud among senior managers and directors, closely linked with serious mismanagement… [Geoffrey Williams]
💷 In the first 20 years of the Victorian era, 1837 to 1857, there were more than a half-dozen large-scale bank failures due to fraud in England, as well as a number of others in Ireland and Scotland, not to mention fraud-induced failures of smaller banks. [Geoffrey Williams]
💷 In 1866, for example, the bill broker and discount banker Overend, Gurney & Co collapsed with debts of £11m, a breathtaking sum at the time. The company's directors were promptly tried for fraud, but not before they had triggered a financial crisis that saw some 200 other companies, including many smaller banks, go out of business. [Jon Henley]
💷 In the last 25 years of her reign things were very different. Only two major financial institutions frauds can be seen: the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878, and the collapse of the Liberator Building Society and Balfour companies in 1892… fraud and mismanagement in the financial sector had significantly diminished as a problem. [Geoffrey Williams]
💷 One of the most important changes of the last part of the Victorian era is the development of a professional banking and accounting culture. [Geoffrey Williams]
💷 In the United Kingdom and Ireland a bank holiday is a public holiday, when banks and many other businesses are closed for the day… In 1871, Sir John Lubbock introduced the Bank Holidays Act, it introduced the concept of holidays with pay and designated four holidays in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and five in Scotland. These were Easter Monday, the first Monday in August, the 26th December, and Whit Monday (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) and New Year's Day, Good Friday, the first Monday in May, the first Monday in August, and Christmas Day (Scotland). In England, Wales and Ireland, Good Friday and Christmas Day were considered traditional days of rest (as were Sundays) and therefore it was felt unnecessary to include them in the Act. The move was such a popular one and there were even suggestions that August Bank Holiday should be called St Lubbock's day! [Learn English Online]
💷 In "The Adventure of the Priory School" we learn where Holmes did his banking… "I fancy that I see your Grace's cheque book upon the table. If should be glad if you would make me out a cheque for six thousand pounds. It would be as well perhaps for you to cross it. The Capital and Counties Bank, Oxford Street, are my agents."
Was there such a bank as the Oxford Street branch of the Capital and Counties Bank? Not only was there such a bank, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself banked there. It was located at 125 Oxford Street at the junction with Wardour Street… [British Banking History Society]
💷 The Capital & Counties Bank is also mentioned in TWIS and BRUC. The Hampshire & North Wilts Banking Company... was formed in 1877. It was a result of a merger between two already well-established joint-stock banks, the Hampshire Banking Company and the North Wilts Banking Company. The new bank was renamed Capital & Counties in 1878, the directors having decided that they wanted a less provincial title.
The Bank continued to expand through a series of takeovers and branch openings; at the start of the 1890s it had emerged as one of the few banks to have a truly nationwide network. By 1918 it had 473 branches. [Lloyds Banking Group]
💷 ...in "Thor Bridge"... Watson says, "Somewhere in the vaults of the bank Cox and Company at Charing Cross, there is a travel worn and battered tin dispatch-box with my name, John H Watson MD, Late Indian Army, painted on the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine"... Cox and Company was the pay agent for the British Army in India… [British Banking History Society] ...by the end of the 19th century most regiments used Cox & Co as their agents. [Wikipedia]
💷 ...not all the banks mentioned in the stories are real. For example… the "City and Suburban Bank" mentioned in "The Red-Headed League" [is] fictitious. [British Banking History Society]
Some useful resources:
Victorian Bank Accounts as Material for Research By Jenny Woolf, on The Victorian Web.
The Hunting of the (Victorian) Bank Account — The Example of Carroll By Jenny Woolf, on The Victorian Web.
Bank of England note issues On Wikipedia.
Money in Victorian England That is, the physical coins and notes. On Welcome to 1876 Victorian England.
Bank of England On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
List of Banks Routledge's Popular Guide to London, [c.1873]. On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
The Bank Clerk in Victorian Society: The Case of Hoare and Company This paper considers the role of the bank clerk in the Victorian era and provides insights into clerical life in a London bank during the period. By Ingrid Jeacle.
The Victorian middle classes By Liza Picard, on the British Library website. Brief mention of banking and bank clerks.
Victorians: Commerce On the English Heritage website.
The Bank of England and the London Money Market in the Nineteenth Century By Dale H. Porter, Professor of History and Humanities, Western Michigan University, on The Victorian Web.
Bank Charter Act 1844 On Wikipedia.
York academics provide new insights into savings behaviour in 19th century England On the University of York website.
Fraud in the Development of Victorian British Banking In PDF form. By Geoffrey Williams, Assistant Professor, Transylvania University.
Bank Holiday On Wikipedia.
Bank Holidays Act 1871 On Wikipedia.
Bank Holidays On Learn English Online.
The man who gave us all our Bank Holidays? Why, it was a banker! On This is Money.
Cheques and Sherlock Holmes On the British Banking History Society website. Article, and link to images of relevant cheques.
Capital & Counties Bank (1877-1918) On the Lloyds Banking Group website.
Cox’s & King’s, Army Agents (1758-1923) On the Lloyds Banking Group website. (Cox’s & King’s is a later name for Cox & Co. This bank is of course mentioned in THOR as the bank where Watson keeps his papers.)
Cox & Kings On Wikipedia.
Cox & Co. Cheque Image of (unused) Cox & Co. cheque for sale, dating from 1897. On Coincraft.
Were Victorian bankers really ‘good?’ By Iain Sharpe. An Opinion Article on History & Policy.
Banking in the United Kingdom: 19th century On Wikipedia.
Show us the money By Jon Henley, on the Guardian website. Looks at bank crises over the centuries - a paragraph on the Victorian era.
Austin Bidwell: The Victorian fraudster who shook the Bank of England with the most daring forgery the world had known By Nicholas Booth, on the Independent website.
How did the banking system evolve after 1800? By Richard Brown, on the Looking at History blog.
Panic of 1825 On Wikipedia. The Panic of 1825 was a stock market crash that started in the Bank of England…
The Financial Fiction Genre From Chaucer to the Victorian and Edwardian Eras By Roy Davies. On the Exeter University website.
Mr. Stryver at Tellson's Bank by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne). Illustration to Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. (August 1859). On The Victorian Web.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
A few facts:
💷 The accounts at Parsons Thomson… were kept in a way that was typical of Victorian banks. Enormous leather bound ledgers, several inches thick, were bound in leather and stamped in gold. Their pages were covered in lines of copperplate writing in various hands, some legible, some less so… At any one time the bank would be running several account ledgers, each of which contained details of individuals whose surnames began with the same group of letters in the alphabet.
The accounts themselves were not in alphabetical order in the ledger, but each page was numbered and the names of account holders were indexed in each volume. When an individual's ledger page ran out of space, a note was made in the ledger to direct the reader to the next page of the ledger where the account could be found.
Transactions were not usually entered directly into the ledgers. Usually, a daybook was kept in which the day's transactions were recorded. The banks closed to customers a couple of hours before the staff went home, in order to make time to write up the day's transactions. ...the notes in the daybook were transferred to the individual account pages in the ledgers. This was often done by one clerk reading the day's business aloud, and another clerk or clerks listening and writing up the ledgers accordingly… [Jenny Woolf]
💷 ...there was no proper national cheque clearing system in the 1850s, but Coutts' Bank and a few others operated inter-bank agencies to enable money to be transferred between subscribing banks. In the case of Dodgson [Lewis Carroll], regular sums of money deposited to his Old Bank account via Coutts between 1856 and 1860 were actually being sent from the family home in Yorkshire, as family letters confirm. [Jenny Woolf]
💷 Notes were originally hand-written; although they were partially printed from 1725 onwards, cashiers still had to sign each note and make them payable to someone. Notes were fully printed from 1855… Until 1928 all notes were "White Notes", printed in black and with a blank reverse. During the 20th century White Notes were issued in denominations between £5 and £1000, but in the 18th and 19th centuries there were White Notes for £1 and £2. [Wikipedia]
💷 Hoare’s [the oldest surviving independent bank in the UK]... records… reveal... the relatively cosseted career of the bank clerk within Victorian clerical circles. He generally enjoyed a higher salary, longer holidays and more favourable working conditions than his clerical counterparts. It was therefore a highly sought after position. Only those of impeccable character however, were recruited into its ranks… …a fear of scandal within the banking community generally ensured that the occupants of this post were imbued with the most ardent devotion to Victorian notions of respectability. [Ingrid Jeacle]
💷 The hundreds of clerks in the Bank of England could stay until they dropped dead; there was no compulsory retiring age for them. [Liza Picard]
💷 The Victorian City of London was by far the largest financial centre in the world. It was an immensely complex world of joint-stock banks, smaller private banks, stock brokers and jobbers, insurance brokers and agents, shipbrokers, merchants and dealers in every currency and commodity… Much of the City’s life and work was aligned outwards and overseas, and not inland towards British industry… Victorian industry was financed by regional banks, based in cities outside London. [English Heritage]
💷 ...sterling had vastly greater purchasing power than any other currency, being the only international currency whose value was wholly backed by gold reserves. Hence the innumerable references in Victorian literature to impoverished individuals being forced to live on the Continent to save money. Smart Victorian families also often undertook protracted tours to Italy, the Riviera and Switzerland. [English Heritage]
💷 During the nineteenth century, the Bank of England only gradually built up its institutional control over the London money market. Until the 1840s, it competed with other private banks, both in the capital and in the provinces, and sometimes speculated as irresponsibly as any other investor. But the bank had the only sizable gold reserves and came to monopolize government stock issues and short-term loans. [Dale H. Porter]
💷 The Bank Charter Act 1844… restricted the powers of British banks and gave exclusive note-issuing powers to the central Bank of England… Until the mid-nineteenth century, commercial banks in Britain and Ireland were able to issue their own banknotes, and notes issued by provincial banking companies were commonly in circulation.
Under the Act, no bank other than the Bank of England could issue new banknotes, and issuing banks would have to withdraw their existing notes in the event of their being the subject of a takeover. At the same time, the Bank of England was restricted to issue new banknotes only if they were 100% backed by gold or up to £14 million in government debt. The Act served to restrict the supply of new notes reaching circulation, and gave the Bank of England an effective monopoly on the printing of new notes. [Wikipedia]
💷 “Our research suggests a need to reappraise women’s role as savers. Their presence in the account records is far more extensive than standard banking histories suggest. Married women in particular were active account users and the records show some of them were very concerned with keeping control of their own money and out of reach of their spouses.
“Our picture of married women in the 19th century as only having ‘pin money’ to manage, and of working class money management just being a case of coins put in jars on the mantelpiece, needs to be challenged and this data helps us do so.” [Dr Linda Perriton, talking about her research with Professor Josephine Maltby] The researchers looked at a sample of 19th century savings bank account records from East London, Bury, South Shields and Newcastle.
💷 As the British banking system developed in the Victorian era, one of its major challenges was substantial and endemic fraud among senior managers and directors, closely linked with serious mismanagement… [Geoffrey Williams]
💷 In the first 20 years of the Victorian era, 1837 to 1857, there were more than a half-dozen large-scale bank failures due to fraud in England, as well as a number of others in Ireland and Scotland, not to mention fraud-induced failures of smaller banks. [Geoffrey Williams]
💷 In 1866, for example, the bill broker and discount banker Overend, Gurney & Co collapsed with debts of £11m, a breathtaking sum at the time. The company's directors were promptly tried for fraud, but not before they had triggered a financial crisis that saw some 200 other companies, including many smaller banks, go out of business. [Jon Henley]
💷 In the last 25 years of her reign things were very different. Only two major financial institutions frauds can be seen: the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878, and the collapse of the Liberator Building Society and Balfour companies in 1892… fraud and mismanagement in the financial sector had significantly diminished as a problem. [Geoffrey Williams]
💷 One of the most important changes of the last part of the Victorian era is the development of a professional banking and accounting culture. [Geoffrey Williams]
💷 In the United Kingdom and Ireland a bank holiday is a public holiday, when banks and many other businesses are closed for the day… In 1871, Sir John Lubbock introduced the Bank Holidays Act, it introduced the concept of holidays with pay and designated four holidays in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and five in Scotland. These were Easter Monday, the first Monday in August, the 26th December, and Whit Monday (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) and New Year's Day, Good Friday, the first Monday in May, the first Monday in August, and Christmas Day (Scotland). In England, Wales and Ireland, Good Friday and Christmas Day were considered traditional days of rest (as were Sundays) and therefore it was felt unnecessary to include them in the Act. The move was such a popular one and there were even suggestions that August Bank Holiday should be called St Lubbock's day! [Learn English Online]
💷 In "The Adventure of the Priory School" we learn where Holmes did his banking… "I fancy that I see your Grace's cheque book upon the table. If should be glad if you would make me out a cheque for six thousand pounds. It would be as well perhaps for you to cross it. The Capital and Counties Bank, Oxford Street, are my agents."
Was there such a bank as the Oxford Street branch of the Capital and Counties Bank? Not only was there such a bank, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself banked there. It was located at 125 Oxford Street at the junction with Wardour Street… [British Banking History Society]
💷 The Capital & Counties Bank is also mentioned in TWIS and BRUC. The Hampshire & North Wilts Banking Company... was formed in 1877. It was a result of a merger between two already well-established joint-stock banks, the Hampshire Banking Company and the North Wilts Banking Company. The new bank was renamed Capital & Counties in 1878, the directors having decided that they wanted a less provincial title.
The Bank continued to expand through a series of takeovers and branch openings; at the start of the 1890s it had emerged as one of the few banks to have a truly nationwide network. By 1918 it had 473 branches. [Lloyds Banking Group]
💷 ...in "Thor Bridge"... Watson says, "Somewhere in the vaults of the bank Cox and Company at Charing Cross, there is a travel worn and battered tin dispatch-box with my name, John H Watson MD, Late Indian Army, painted on the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine"... Cox and Company was the pay agent for the British Army in India… [British Banking History Society] ...by the end of the 19th century most regiments used Cox & Co as their agents. [Wikipedia]
💷 ...not all the banks mentioned in the stories are real. For example… the "City and Suburban Bank" mentioned in "The Red-Headed League" [is] fictitious. [British Banking History Society]
Some useful resources:
Victorian Bank Accounts as Material for Research By Jenny Woolf, on The Victorian Web.
The Hunting of the (Victorian) Bank Account — The Example of Carroll By Jenny Woolf, on The Victorian Web.
Bank of England note issues On Wikipedia.
Money in Victorian England That is, the physical coins and notes. On Welcome to 1876 Victorian England.
Bank of England On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
List of Banks Routledge's Popular Guide to London, [c.1873]. On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
The Bank Clerk in Victorian Society: The Case of Hoare and Company This paper considers the role of the bank clerk in the Victorian era and provides insights into clerical life in a London bank during the period. By Ingrid Jeacle.
The Victorian middle classes By Liza Picard, on the British Library website. Brief mention of banking and bank clerks.
Victorians: Commerce On the English Heritage website.
The Bank of England and the London Money Market in the Nineteenth Century By Dale H. Porter, Professor of History and Humanities, Western Michigan University, on The Victorian Web.
Bank Charter Act 1844 On Wikipedia.
York academics provide new insights into savings behaviour in 19th century England On the University of York website.
Fraud in the Development of Victorian British Banking In PDF form. By Geoffrey Williams, Assistant Professor, Transylvania University.
Bank Holiday On Wikipedia.
Bank Holidays Act 1871 On Wikipedia.
Bank Holidays On Learn English Online.
The man who gave us all our Bank Holidays? Why, it was a banker! On This is Money.
Cheques and Sherlock Holmes On the British Banking History Society website. Article, and link to images of relevant cheques.
Capital & Counties Bank (1877-1918) On the Lloyds Banking Group website.
Cox’s & King’s, Army Agents (1758-1923) On the Lloyds Banking Group website. (Cox’s & King’s is a later name for Cox & Co. This bank is of course mentioned in THOR as the bank where Watson keeps his papers.)
Cox & Kings On Wikipedia.
Cox & Co. Cheque Image of (unused) Cox & Co. cheque for sale, dating from 1897. On Coincraft.
Were Victorian bankers really ‘good?’ By Iain Sharpe. An Opinion Article on History & Policy.
Banking in the United Kingdom: 19th century On Wikipedia.
Show us the money By Jon Henley, on the Guardian website. Looks at bank crises over the centuries - a paragraph on the Victorian era.
Austin Bidwell: The Victorian fraudster who shook the Bank of England with the most daring forgery the world had known By Nicholas Booth, on the Independent website.
How did the banking system evolve after 1800? By Richard Brown, on the Looking at History blog.
Panic of 1825 On Wikipedia. The Panic of 1825 was a stock market crash that started in the Bank of England…
The Financial Fiction Genre From Chaucer to the Victorian and Edwardian Eras By Roy Davies. On the Exeter University website.
Mr. Stryver at Tellson's Bank by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne). Illustration to Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. (August 1859). On The Victorian Web.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
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