Barclays Bank History Series III

A Genealogical Study of the Families Who Created the Bank

Part Three--Barclays Buy a Brewery

Southwark--All the World's a Stage 

 

Anchor Brewery next to Globe

In the last year of the 16th Century, William Shakespeare opened his new play, Henry V, in a new theater at Southwark at the south bank of the River Thames. Some say the first play performed was Julius Caesar, though others argue the first was Henry V.

 

"Legend has it that the Globe’s motto was totus mundus agit histrionem, paraphrased in As You Like It (first performed in 1599) as 'all the world’s a stage.'" Shakespeare was a genius, unexcelled to this day. The Anchor Brewery started life immediately next door to the Globe Theatre on Bankside in 1616, two years after the rebuilt Globe reopened.

 

The brewery's owner was Edmund Halsey, who entrusted operation of the brewery to Ralph Thrale and his son Henry, who with their heirs controlled the site during most of the following century, long after the theater was abandoned in 1642. 

 

Victor Keegan, author of "Vic Keegan’s Lost London 1666: The world-leading Anchor Brewery," at On London webpage, explains what makes this brewery relevant to our story:

Barclay & Perkins Brewery 1781

The brewery’s expansion continued when purchased by David Barclay (of the Barclay Quaker banking family) who brought in his nephew Robert Barclay from America who, in the 1780s, teamed up with a senior employee, John Perkins, under the trading name Barclay & Perkins. By 1809 they were producing a world-leading 260,000 barrels a year. In 1955, Barclay Perkins merged with a rival London brewer, Courage. Brewing continued there until the early 1970s. The buildings were demolished in 1981.

The back story about the Anchor Brewery will appear in Part Four, and will put into context the people in whose orbit Robert Barclay was living amongst in the 1780s. It gave him a contact both with members of the ancient Welsh nobility and with members of England's literati of that day, such as Dr. Samuel Johnson and his friend James Boswoth. Once David Barclay (1729-1809) put the brewery into the hands of his nephews, Robert Barclay and, Sylvanus Bevan, it continued to grow until it controlled a large percentage of all beer produced in England. Stay tuned for the story of Barclay & Perkins, in Part Four. 

 

David Barclay's Wife--Daughter of Lloyds Bank Founder

Logo for Lloyds Bank

According to a genealogy of the Lloyd's banking family, David Barclay's second wife was Rachel Lloyd, daughter of Sampson and Rachel Champion Lloyd of Birmingham, who were married in 1767 at the Friends Meeting of Birmingham. 

David Barclay

Two years later they moved into a house he purchased in Hertfordshire, north of London, called Youngsbury, which they had upgraded.He spent his time working on the linen export business, mostly in America, by working with his father's old friend William Penn in Philadelphia. 

Once he saw the revolution and war were inevitable, however, he: 

managed the firm's gradual withdrawal from the export trade. The firm ceased trading altogether in 1783, but by then he had taken up a partnership with the bank. 

He inherited a plantation in Jamaica and its slave population, and in line with his Quaker principles he freed the slaves, paid for them to be taught a trade or handicraft skills, and resettled them on his property in Pennsylvania. He was also one of the close family members who put up the capital to enable his nephew Robert Barclay (1751-1830) to buy the Anchor brewery and establish his highly successful business there. In 1768 he became the first member of the family to own a country house (Youngsbury (Herts)), although it was just a small villa in an unfinished landscaped garden when he acquired it, and he enlarged it considerably and improved the setting. 

Barclay plantation in Jamaica

According to another Quaker website, David and his brother John Barclay inherited property in the West Indies from their mother, Priscilla nee Freame, who died in 1769. 

Seven years later, the year he and wife Rachel Lloyd moved to Youngsbury, he became an active partner in the bank which was then renamed Barclay, Bevan and Bening, which then began developing into a network of "country banks" connected with Norwich and with Birmingham, where it would finance the building of bridges, canals and other trading enterprises, in addition to its old standby of textiles.

David Barclay's youngest sister, Lucy, born in Cheapside in 1737, returned to the Barclays' roots in Scotland by marrying her cousin Robert, born in Scotland in 1732, described by one Blogger as follows:

Robert Barclay (1732) was MP for Kincardineshire from 1788 until his death in 1797, being re-elected in 1790 and 1796 and was a friend of William Pitt the Younger (1759 – 1806), the United Kingdom’s youngest-ever prime minister.  Robert was also involved in local affairs in Kincardineshire as a Commissioner of Supply and as a member of the Board of Agriculture.  He was married twice, firstly to his cousin, Lucy Barclay, the daughter of David Barclay of Cheapside ... in 1756.  He was a great grandson and she was a granddaughter of Robert Barclay (1648), the Apologist.  Lucy died in childbirth the following year, though her daughter, also Lucy, survived. 

Eugenics of Francis Galton

Lucy junior married Samuel John Galton (1753).  One of their sons, Samuel Tertius Galton (1783) married Francis Ann Violetta Darwin, the cousin of Charles Darwin of “Origin of Species” fame.  In turn, one of their children was Francis Galton (1822) an outstanding 19th century polymath, responsible for major contributions in many fields of study, such as the identification of individuals by their fingerprints and the inheritance of human genius.

The second Lucy's marriage thus returned this branch of the family back to England, into the domain of the Lloyd family and the Quaker Meeting at Birmingham. The Galtons were of a scientific bent, involved in the anti-slavery movement, but also made their fortune manufacturing guns. In addition, Sir Francis Galton developed the concept of eugenics which would be used to justify autocratic actions even to the present day.

Though Barclay's banking partners had previously been Quakers, after a generation or two they had become separated from the sect because of marrying outside their faith, and they failed to retain the doctrine of anti-slavery that the Barclays continued to practice.  As a member of the Meeting for Sufferings Committee on the Slave Trade which met from 1783 to 1792, David Barclay no doubt objected when his non-Quaker banking partners--less concerned about owning slaves than he was--nevertheless financed plantation mortgages in the West Indies Trade. As a result:

The brothers [David and John] were mortgagees of an estate called Vaucluse and the enslaved people attached to it on Barbados c. 1780. Sometime around 1785 John and David Barclay took possession in lieu of debts of a 2000 acre cattle pen named Unity Valley in St Ann, Jamaica. 

His book, An Account of the Emancipation of the Slaves of Unity Valley Pen, in Jamaica, published in Dorking in 1825, can be read online. Other research shows that John died in 1787, after the end of the revolutionary war, and "David Barclay took full possession of the estate and determined to emancipate the remaining 32 enslaved people still on Unity Valley. In 1795 he dispatched his agent William Holden to Jamaica with instructions to enact the manumission and then remove all freed persons to Philadelphia, where they would be delivered into the care of the Society for Improving the Condition of Free Blacks, run by Quaker acquaintances."

We saw in Part Two how the Freames had lost a big investment in the South Sea Corporation, so perhaps David Barclay felt justified in rejecting their manner of conducting business. His marriage to his second wife brought him in contact with a Quaker banking family headed by Sampson Lloyd of Birmingham, who provided credit to small manufacturers in the West Midlands. Rachel Lloyd Barclay's younger brother, Charles Lloyd of Bingley House, born in 1748, had received his banking training at the Barclays' counting house in London, but later went to work for the family bank, Hanbury, Taylor, Lloyd, and Bowman--only a couple of doors away from his brother-in-law at 54 Lombard. [Source: Samuel Lloyd, The Lloyds of Birmingham (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1908), p. 32].

 

Other Barclay Relatives

 

The next generation of Barclays came to fruition in 1781 when the David Barclay mentioned above bought the Southwark brewery and put his nephew Robert in place there. The previous year Robert and Rachel Gurney Barclay, became the parents of a son to whom they gave an unusual name--Charles--one of a very few of that name in the Barclay family, and they began a new life in Clapham, not far from Southwark. Eventually, the brewery enabled them to move up to a mansion at Bury Hill, 75 miles west of Clapham.

Bury Hill in Dorking

 

Before she married Robert Barclay, Rachel Gurney had spent an idyllic childhood at her family's rented mansion in Norfolk called Earlham, where five generations of Gurneys lived as happy Quakers while their respective Gurney fathers worked at their profitable woolen and worsted mills in Norwich, located within the orange highlighted territory called East Anglia, show to the right. 

 

Her mother was Elizabeth Kett, whose ancestors had been somewhat notorious in Wymondham, Norfolk a century or two earlier because of the protest they led. Robert Kett had a rebellion named for him, and both he and his brother William Kett were hanged in Wymond-ham in Norfolk in 1549--the same village where Elizabeth Kett, the youngest daughter of Richard Kett of Norwich, grew up many years later.  

 

Kett Ancestor

Robert Kett was an upper middle-class tanner who got caught up in a protest begun by poor villagers in Edwardian days. Sympathizing with his neighbors, who were distraught because common areas they had used for centuries had suddenly been enclosed by fences--Kett saw the enclosure orders were made to benefit wealthy landowners engaged in the woolen trade and were issued by Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, the uncle of 11-year-old King Edward VI (heir of Henry VIII). 

 

Both Robert and his brother were hanged from local public buildings in a most distasteful manner.  There was a lesson in that, I suppose, for that day. Many generations later, in 1736, Elizabeth Kett married John Gurney of Earlham, a scion of the "principal Quaker family of Norwich." 

 

Norfolk, heart of textile trade

Their son, John Gurney II, later became master of Earlham Hall, where he raised his children, including daughter, Anna Maria Kett, who married her cousin Charles Barclay in 1804.

 

Charles' first cousin Agatha (daughter of David Barclay--1729-1809) had already united the Barclays and Gurneys. Agatha's marriage to Rachel Gurney's older brother, Richard Gurney, was one of numerous weddings between the two Norfolk Quaker families--Gurneys and Ketts--over the centuries, according to The Ketts of Norfolk, a yeoman family, 1836-1914, by Louisa Marion Kett and George Kett (1921).  

 

Barclays, Tritton & Bevan

Barclays, Tritton, and Bevan in 1803

 

At about the same time as his marriage, Charles' name began to appear in newspapers showing his name as a director of one company or another, notable for the fact that the companies whose boards he sat on had  securities being underwritten by Barclays, Tritton and Bevan at 54 Lombard Street. As one example, we show a clip to the right of one such company formed in June 1803, called the Croydon, Merstham and Godstone Railway, which, despite the name, appears to have been only a track bed which charged a toll for those wishing to transport products by horse-pulled wagons over it. 

 

The financing was handled by George Tritton of Wandsworth (1761-1831), one-time High Sheriff of Surrey, assisted by Robert and Charles Barclay, and their banking partners. [Source: Hampshire Telegraph and Naval Chronicle, (Portsmouth, Hampshire, England,13 June 1803), Page 2].

 

George Tritton, like Robert Barclay, at that time, was a brewer and wanted the "railway" built to distribute beer from Wandsworth to Croydon, about 9 miles south of his home at Clapham. This distribution line probably helped the Trittons get a better price for their Ram Brewery, along with its 80 pubs, when they sold in 1831. Ram Brewery produced a different type of beer from that the Anchor Brewery (Barclay & Perkins) made in Southwark.

 

For a decade or two the common interest in brewing beer and being Quakers would unite the Barclay, Bevan and Tritton families as they also became banking partners. 

 

 Charles, on the Barclay side of the brewery, entered the business at a young age, according to Charles Wright Barclay, A history of the Barclay family, with full pedigree from 1066 to 1933 (London, The St. Catherine Press, 1924-34). Soon after 1812, his father, Robert, retired, throwing the main responsibility for management of Barclay & Perkins on Charles' shoulders--or more likely on those of John Perkins.  

Charles found time to "take up political work." He was elected to the traditional seat the Thrales had held in 1815, as the Member of Parliament for Southwark in the Conservative Party. He supported Sir Robert Peel, but was not re-elected in 1818, remaining out of Parliament for some years. 

He and Anna Maria had a country house in Suffolk (Henstead), where the family spent summers until 1823, when they moved to London--43 Grosvenor Place--directly across the street from Buckingham Palace. From there he stood again for Paliament and returned to the House of Commons as  the Member for Dundalk, Ireland, "having purchased the seat, as was the custom before the Reform Bill." [C.W. Barclay, above]

 

They also rented Betchworth Castle, near Dorking, but only until 1830 when he inherited the estates at Bury Hill left by his father Robert. It was just in the nick of time perhaps, as Bletchworth Castle now stands in ruins. That village gets its claim to fame in modern days from the fact that its church appeared in many scenes from the 1994 romantic comedy, "Four Weddings and a Funeral, " with Hugh Grant. 

 

Charles succeeded Robert Barclay Allardice as head of the family of Barclay of Urie and Mathers (also related to Lucy Barclay Galton) in 1854--receiving the "Arms as borne by Colonel David anno 1666." He and Anna Maria Kett Barclay had four sons and three daughters. These children's marriages clearly indicate the family's close relationships with other notable Quaker bankers:

• Daughter Caroline Barclay (1814-78) was married in 1837 at Dorking to John Gurney Hoare (1810-75) of Hampstead--the eldest son of Samuel and Louisa Gurney Hoare. Their son, Samuel Barclay Hoare born in 1841 would become Sir Samuel Hoare, P.C., C.M.G., C.S.I., eventually Secretary of State for India.
• Rachel Juliana Barclay (1816-86) became the second wife of  her brother-in-law, Joseph Hoare, giving birth to John Gurney Hoare in 1847, a few years after their marriage.  

Inbreeding common for royals

The Hoare brothers--John Gurney and Joseph--were not the first Hoare men intermarried with famous Quaker banking families. Marriages between Gurney women and Hoare men, for example, had been going on for generations by then. Their mother and grandmother had been Gurneys, and their Barclay wives shared a grandmother who had also been a Gurney. Marriages between first cousins, although frowned upon by Quaker doctrine, was often easily ignored. 

 

John Gurney and Caroline Barclay Hoare's marriage did result in at least two powerful male descendants: 

1. Samuel John Gurney Hoare, named First Baronet on 7 August 1899, and 
2. His son of the same name, created Viscount Templewood at  Whitehall, July 14, 1944. Both titles, however, became extinct when Viscount Templewood, allegedly a homosexual, though he married Maud Lygon. He died in 1959.

Charles Barclay's eldest son, Arthur Kett Barclay, named for his maternal grandfather, was schooled at Harrow for several years and in 1824 went to work in the brewery in Dorking and became a partner in it in 1828, shortly before romance entered the tale:

 

Prestigious public school

Robert met Rachel Hanbury and fell deeply in love with her. Their mutual attachment was declared and there was no obstacle to their union except Robert’s youth, and his father decreed that he must see a little more of the world before thinking of marriage, so sent the brothers abroad.

They visited Norway, Sweden, Finland, St. Petersburg, and then, “placing their carriage on a sledge, set out for Moscow,” eventually returning home by Smolensk, Warsaw, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Brussels, Lille and Calais. Arthur’s journal records that during the latter part of the journey they travelled day and night “in order to try to keep pace with Robert’s anxious wish to return, and on the 25th day of January, 1830, we drove up to the door at Betchworth in the same little carriage which we had taken from England, wrapped in the furs and Russian dresses which had enabled us to bear the cold of one of the most severe winters known for years.”

Shortly after their return, Robert was admitted into partnership with his uncle David Barclay (of Eastwick, Bury Hill) and Robert Foster Reynolds, constituting the house of business of Barclay Brothers, Merchants. His wedding took place in the following February. [Source: Charles Wright Barclay, op cit.]

Master of Brewers Co.

Arthur Kett Barclay had received the title of Ury and Mather when Charles Barclay died in 1855, two weeks after suffering a serious riding accident, when “in consequence of meeting the hounds, he lost command of his horse, and fell to the ground, sustaining so much injury as to result in his death.”  After Arthur's death in 1869, his son Robert succeeded to the Scottish titles.

Arthur's youngest brother, Thomas George Barclay, lived in Dorking and became Master of the Brewers Company in 1863. During his career he was elected as a director of the Imperial Insurance Company, located at 16 Pall Mall and Old Broad Street, along with other members of the family we will meet in a subsequent segment--Robert Cooper Lee Bevan, Augustus Henry Bosanquet, and James Gordon Mudoch, among others. David Bevan's daughter, Louisa Priscilla Bevan, married Bosanquet in 1825. He died in 1894, leaving no children.