THE ISSUES C. Hoare & Co.


C. Hoare & Co. is the oldest family-owned bank in the world. On the eve of its 350th anniversary, its partners tell Spear’s how surviving plagues, wars, market crashes – and a generation of profligate ‘rotters’ – has shaped their plans for the next few hundred years...


W


hen the goldsmith Richard Hoare set up shop on Cheapside in the City of London in 1672, Charles II


was on the throne. The Dutch were in their pomp; Europe was dominated by the Habsburgs; and the Ottoman Empire, then stretching from Iraq to the Balkans, was locked in mortal combat with the Doge in Venice in a struggle to control the eastern Mediterranean.


Some 350 years on, the business that young


Mr Hoare established, which soon evolved from a goldsmith’s into what we would recognise as a bank, is still going strong. It may even be in better health than ever. It is not the oldest bank in the world. Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in Italy was founded in 1472. Berenberg Bank was founded in 1590 by Hanseatic cloth merchants. And the Sveriges Riksbank, or Swiss central bank, began life in 1668. Yet since Berenberg is no longer solely in family ownership, C. Hoare & Co. has the distinction of being the oldest family-owned bank in the world. Richard Hoare was born in 1648 – the year before Charles I was executed on the scaffold at Whitehall. He apprenticed to a goldsmith in 1665 – the year the great plague wiped out one in eight Londoners. He rose to become a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in 1672, which accorded him the right to practise as a goldsmith himself. In those days goldsmiths acted as bankers, initially because they had the means of securing high-value items, but also because they were already well established as lenders to those in need of cash.


By the time the Bank of England came into being in 1694, Hoare’s career was well under way. Within a few years he had been knighted by Queen Anne, become Lord Mayor of London and been elected an MP for the City. When he died at the age of 70 in 1719, the bank bearing his name had amassed an elite, mercantile and blue-blooded roster of clients


(including Samuel Pepys, who left him a mourning ring in his will). In his estate Sir Richard left diamonds and pearls valued at £24,800 (£5 million in today’s money), though the bank’s loan book was worth considerably more. In 1690, the bank moved to Fleet Street and it has done business there, under the famous sign of the golden bottle, ever since. Today, it remains under the watchful eye of Sir Richard’s descendants. The bank now has around 15,000


customers – including many of the largest landowning families in Britain. When, in 2019, it opened its first branch outside London (in Cambridge) and its third in all, one City wag noted: ‘The joke is they open a new office every hundred years.’ But despite its relatively small physical footprint, Hoare’s customers, reputation and history make it a giant in the world of private banking. Its coffers are healthy too. With the value of the share capital at a record £398 million according to the last annual report, the bank holds deposits of £5.54 billion, of which £1.7 billion is held with the Bank of England. This gives C. Hoare & Co. a capital ratio of 21.6 per cent. ‘We have a very strong balance sheet,’ the


bank’s recently appointed CEO, Diana Brightmore-Armour, tells me with relish when we meet in a beautifully furnished


meeting room at the bank’s Fleet Street HQ, along with four of the bank’s seven partners. Six of the seven partners are 11th- generation descendants of the founder, while the seventh is the first of the 12th generation to be recruited: Amy Rodwell, 31, who was appointed last November. As well as being the 50th partner in the bank’s history (and only the third woman), Rodwell, an Arabic graduate from Leeds University, is also the first non-Hoare-surnamed family member to be a partner. This marks a change in tack, notes Alexander Hoare. He adds, though, that finding the brightest and best family members has been part of the C. Hoare & Co. formula from the beginning. The founder himself deviated from the norms of the day to exclude his eldest son – now known in the family as Naughty Richard – from the partnership, because he thought he wasn’t up to it. ‘You don’t want people who’ll just treat it as a nice sinecure,’ says Alexander. ‘You want people who’ll own it. I am looking for people that are quite capable enough to have good careers anywhere, not people who have got the right gene pool.’ In the case of the Hoare banking dynasty, there is a stark reminder of this in the memory of the seventh generation of partners – ‘rotters’, according to Venetia Hoare – that really let the side down. Henry Junior of Iden was one of the


seventh generation. His disastrous overseas trading speculations amassed a debt of £196,546 (about £22 million today) and brought the bank close to financial ruin in 1874. He was sent to New Zealand – where ‘despite going bankrupt he had a jolly nice estate’, according to his great-great- granddaughter Venetia. ‘His wife lived to 100; she reputedly said she would trust him with her body but not her money,’ she laughs. Another was Charlie Arthur, whose passion was for horses, not banking. He was eventually obliged to retire after a court case


I sense that too much wealth is


a very bad thing in families; in fact that’s presumably why the seventh generation went off the rails


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