Britannia, the statue at the Bank of England’s gate
~ Sunday, November 12, 2023 Blog Post ~
There are plenty of money-related inscriptions and artworks found in important finance buildings worldwide. I want to include a discussion about Britannia here in my blog.
Britannia is a statue that stands at the gate of the Bank of England. Visitors will see her pouring coins from a cornucopia with one hand, while the other is holding a spear and shield.
Britannia eaned the Bank of England its nickname, “the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.” This artwork is mentioned in several publications, including:
2. “Virtuous Bankers’ Review: Accounting for a Nation,” by Adam Rowe, The Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2023
The Britannia statue is by British architect and sculptor Sir Robert Taylor. Sometime in the 1700s, he was appointed the Bank of England’s Surveyor and Architect. Sir Robert also designed the British central bank’s main buildings, including the Court Room and Rotunda.
References:
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/archive/publications/britannia-and-the-bank.pdf
https://www.jamb.co.uk/blog/a-highly-important-18th-century-chimneypiece-by-sir-robert-taylor/
‘Virtuous Bankers’ Review: Accounting for a Nation (From The Wall Street Journal)
By Adam Rowe, July 7, 2023
A tour inside the 18th-century Bank of England, where an army of clerks stoked the boilers of Britain’s economic engine room.
During the 18th century, the British Empire rose to global dominance by developing a new model of organized government, one that proved especially effective at converting the wealth of a free society into the power of a fiscal-military state. At the heart of this system was the Bank of England, “the grand Palladium of Public Credit,” as the Bank’s inspectors described it in 1784.
Most historians have considered the bank from the outside, as it were, describing its role in Britain’s imperial and financial system. In “Virtuous Bankers: A Day in the Life of the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England,” Anne Murphy brings readers inside the crowded corridors of the bank itself, focusing on the mundane routines that allowed it to carry out its herculean responsibilities.
The “heroes” of Ms. Murphy’s narrative are the 300 clerks who performed the essential daily work of the bank, issuing notes, discounting bills of exchange, balancing accounts. This small army of white-collar professionals, whose tedious mental labors corresponded to the repetitive physical tasks of industrial workers, didn’t officially run the bank, but they did make it run.
Second in importance to the clerks was the bank itself as a physical place, both its architectural features and its presence within the city of London. The Bank of England’s headquarters moved to its current location on Threadneedle Street in 1734, its dimensions gradually expanding with its balance sheet. Starting in the 1750s, renovations and additions, including a vast rotunda that housed the secondary market in government securities, made the bank one of London’s great architectural sites. Situated in the middle of London’s business district, the building “made a statement about its central place in the country’s economy,” Ms. Murphy writes. The Palladian facade signaled permanence, prestige and virtue. At the gate stood Robert Taylor’s statue of Britannia herself, pouring coins from a cornucopia with one hand while holding a shield and spear with the other.
Those toiling within the bank’s back offices, however, found their surroundings much less impressive. Most work spaces were lit by tallow candles, and they were heated by coal, which created thick black smoke and little warmth. Solid human waste had to be removed physically from the cesspits beneath the bank’s privies, creating a stench. In general, the office climate would have been more familiar to a Roman bureaucrat in antiquity than to anyone at a major financial institution today. And yet the galloping pace of technological progress did not begin to affect banking methods until recently.
Before electronic payments became the norm in the late 20th century, the work of banking was the work of creating, exchanging, storing and organizing immense volumes of paper. Markets were established in a defined space, where buyers and sellers came together. And countless bank messengers, carrying securities and bills of exchange, were “a common sight,” Ms. Murphy writes, their activities “part of the rhythms of financial life.”
Incompetence and fraud at any level threatened the integrity of the entire system. Perhaps the central challenge that the Bank of England faced in this era — highlighted by dramatic and recurring lapses — was maintaining the honesty and discipline of its clerks as the scale of its business expanded. By meeting this challenge, the bank transitioned from an institution organized around bonds of loyalty and obligation to a modern professional bureaucracy, in which fidelity was secured by regular salaries, job security and rationalized systems of accountability.
Ms. Murphy, a history professor at the University of Portsmouth, relies primarily on the records left by the Committee of Inspection between 1783 and 1784. As the name implies, the committee, composed of three of the bank’s directors, was tasked with scrutinizing nearly every aspect of the bank’s business. But she appears to have read as well every source shedding light on her subject. Her account of security reforms proposed by the committee, for example, relies on court records to describe the frauds to which they were responding.
This is more than enough to commend “Virtuous Bankers” as an important work of scholarship for serious students of the Bank of England. More casual readers, though, may find their admiration for the author’s diligence tempered by despair of their ability to match it. The daily routine of 18th-century bank clerks, it is fair to say, is less intrinsically fascinating than the exploits of Napoleon or Horatio Nelson. We learn that clerks suffered cramps from sitting hunched over ledgers; that they sometimes had to forgo their 90-minute lunch break and eat at their desks; that senior officials spent their afternoons “at leisure” while junior clerks worked grinding hours for less pay. Readers wearied by a long day at the office, and their spouse’s nightly account of the same, will not find escape in these pages.
But Ms. Murphy also presents the bank’s intricate daily routines as a key to the success of the British Empire. During the long 18th century, from the bank’s establishment in 1694 to the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the government’s debt swelled from a little more than a million pounds, lent by a handful of elites, to nearly a billion lent by 250,000 creditors from every stratum of the British public. Historians cite constitutional reforms to explain the government’s increased borrowing capacity. As Parliament restrained the spending caprices of the monarchy, the story goes, and the courts began defending property rights, the government’s financial promises came to seem credible.
But, as Ms. Murphy points out, the public’s willingness to lend preceded the government’s apparent readiness to repay. The bank itself, she argues, served as “a visible symbol of credible commitment through its building and the openly displayed actions of its clerks as they maintained the record of ownership of the national debt.”
Though the bank became a model for modern central banks, it grew into this role as a private corporation, owned by its shareholders and controlled by the directors the shareholders elected. It managed the state’s debts in exchange for lucrative fees. To the bank’s critics, the arrangement stank of corruption. But it also proved an incentive to meet the needs of the government and the exacting demands of the market, since the bank’s survival depended on its delivering “the efficiency that state machinery can seldom achieve.” At a time when the government’s financial credibility remained doubtful, the bank served as an “intermediary between the state and the public creditors,” Ms. Murphy writes. The partnership was an “extraordinary patchwork” of virtue and avarice, ingenuity and incompetence, but it worked.
The U.S. won its independence in 1783, the same year that the bank’s Committee of Inspection began its efforts. The most divisive question the new republic soon confronted was whether to re-create the Bank of England in America. To the founding generation, the bank represented both corruption and power. We have been recoiling from its example ever since — and following it.
Mr. Rowe is a historian in Dallas.
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