The forgotten names that have played role in HSBC’s family tree

Victorian businessmen meeting in Yorkshire taverns played an unsung role in helping to create one of the world’s biggest financial institutions.

Tina Staples, the global head of archives at HSBC, looks after a vast collection of documents and notebooks which includes fragments of Yorkshire’s financial history.

Today, HSBC is one of the largest banking and financial services organisations in the world, with 8,000 offices in 88 countries.

But, in the 19th century, banking was truly local and many transactions were carried out over a flagon of ale.

Ms Staples said the collection chronicled the errors made by financiers in the past, and the lessons they tried to learn from them.

She added: “The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation opened its doors for business on March 3, 1865 in Hong Kong; with offices opening in Shanghai and London in the same year.

“This British bank had an international outlook from the very beginning. Our founder, Thomas Sutherland, was a Scot – and the provisional committee consisted of other Brits, Americans, Indians and Europeans.

“The bank quickly established a reputation for trade finance which was fundamental to the burgeoning flow of commodities between East and West during the nineteenth century.”

It was the acquisition of Midland Bank in 1992 which transformed HSBC’s presence in Europe.

The Midland, which opened for business in Birmingham in 1836, snapped up plenty of smaller banks in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It was these acquisitions that gave HSBC its Yorkshire connection.

Few people today have heard of the Yorkshire District Banking Company, which opened in Leeds in 1834. It was reconstructed as the Yorkshire Banking Company in 1843, and in 1901, was acquired by Midland Bank.

Ms Staples added: “The York City & County Banking Company was established in York in 1830. In 1909 it was acquired by the London Joint Stock Bank, which was subsequently taken over by Midland Bank in 1918.

“This deal transformed Midland into the biggest bank in the world at that time.

“Our complex family tree stretches back even further with links to a number of other local joint stock banks – such as the Bradford Banking Company and the Huddersfield Banking Company, which were both established in 1827.

“There were also a host of local private banking companies in the early 19th century, which were soon swallowed up by the joint stocks – such as Perfect & Co, which was established in Pontefract about 1800, Dresser & Co, which was founded in Thirsk in 1820, and Fletcher & Stubbs from Boroughbridge, which was established in 1804.”

The small banks’ proud provincialism was reflected in a series of bank notes they produced, which can be found in the HSBC archive and The British Museum.

They include a £5 note from the Scarborough Bank, York City and County Banking Company which dates from the 1860s. The note features a view of York Minster engraved by WH Lizars. Britannia and her lions are shown in front of a bracing view of Scarborough seafront.

But the archive isn’t a place where old documents gather dust. HSBC Group Archives are among the most heavily used bank archives in the world. The archivists are responsible for the collection and management of the records, which span more than two centuries of financial and international history.

It includes minute books, accounts from share-holder meetings and the histories of the banks that make up HSBC.

“We take our history very seriously. We are constantly adding to the archive,’’ said Ms Staples.

The archive comes into its own at a time of crisis, when researchers and bankers want to find out how their ancestors reacted to traumas such as the Great Depression.

Documents collected today will be studied by historians who want to gain an insight into how the world reacted to the raw panic caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

HSBC also has a French connection.

In 2000 it acquired CCF, which can trace its roots back to 1894, when Ernest Meja and Benjamin Rossier founded Banque Suisse et Francaise in Paris.

With the acquisition, HSBC was listed on the Paris Stock Exchange for the first time.

The deal enabled HSBC to build a platform for growth across the Eurozone, in the same way as the Midland Bank’s acquisition of small Yorkshire rivals helped it to expand across northern England in the 19th century.

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