45
surrounding his scandalous affair with a younger woman, but he did so while retaining a half share in the bank’s profits. (A striking equestrian portrait of him in hunting pink with his hounds by John Charlton can still be seen in the bank.) ‘They tore through fabulous landed estates, art collections – Titians, Poussins, Canalettos – unbelievable wealth destruction, stately homes and so on,’ says Alexander. ‘Fortunately they didn’t sink us,’ adds Rennie Hoare, who joined the partnership in 2016. ‘But it meant that we learnt a lot of lessons about how you construct a partnership, what you look for in a good partner. The learning from lessons and having people that remember those mistakes is also pretty fundamental.’
It fell to the eighth generation, largely appointed to the partnership in the 1890s, to pick up the pieces. The Eights were led by Henry of Ellisfield and Peter of Luscombe in Devon (Luscombe drinks are served at the bank today). Henry and Peter in turn handed the baton on to Rennie’s grandfather (also called Rennie). ‘It’s funny,’ remarks Venetia, ‘just in terms of wealth and attitude. After the hugely profligate time, people settled down slightly. Henry of Ellisfield lived a jolly nice life but it wasn’t flashy at all.’ Alexander agrees: ‘In truth it’s probably a good thing, because here we are today, we’ve got an 11th generation who are all working hard, rebuilding some family wealth from a very low base relative to what it had been before,’ he says. ‘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; they were too rich and entitled.’
*** H
enry of Ellisfield and his son Rennie, who became a partner in 1928, steered the bank through the aftermath of the
Wall Street Crash and oversaw its structural reformation from a partnership proper to an incorporated company of unlimited liability – another important moment for the bank and its survival. In addition to the new structure, the eighth generation made another fundamental contribution: they didn’t sell up. In the aftermath of the First World War, private banks were selling like hot cakes. Coutts, which had dissolved its own partnership in the 1890s, was sold to the National Provincial Bank, later NatWest, in 1920. Then Child & Co, founded in 1664, was sold by the Jersey
family in 1924 to Glyn, Mills & Co. In the same year Drummonds, which had been going strong since 1717, was sold to the Royal Bank of Scotland. Meanwhile, Goslings, a Fleet Street bank founded in 1690, was part of the merger that created Barclays in 1896. Why didn’t Hoare’s sell? We know they were tempted – Henry C Hoare, writing in 2005, noted that ‘there was enthusiasm for sale within the partnership’, especially from one of the partners who was childless. Venetia wonders if the damage wrought by the seventh generation was a factor. ‘When a lot of the banks were selling up in the 1920s,
I think for about 60 to 70 years, we’d drifted along... over the period of a hundred years our deposits hardly grew.’ With a laugh, she adds: ‘So we were small and uninteresting when the other banks were selling.’ In fact, talks of amalgamating with other private banks did take place but came to nothing: ‘Harry Hoare [Henry of Ellisfield] does not feel at all attracted by a scheme of amalgamation,’ notes one record. ‘His view is that our business is very largely a personal one and this personal influence would be to an extent lost by an amalgamation, which loss would only be compensated for by a very
Venetia Hoare became a partner in 1996 and was the first woman to do so
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