Barclays’ banking business grew up in the country districts of England, carried on by successful traders who had correspondents in London, choosing to use the descendants of the goldsmith bankers, mainly grouped in Lombard Street and its vicinity. What these associations of traders set up was a clearing house system by which transactions were made possible between the country agents and a London bank without transporting cash. According to a history of Barclays Bank: English merchants abroad [in British colonies] gradually developed into bankers in much the same fashion; so that a century later, the bill [of lading] on London had become, what it still remains, the most valued form of international currency. Thus first the country bankers, and then the merchant bankers abroad, created the famous bill on London, which by the punctuality of payment of their London agents ultimately obtained world-wide repute. The book explains British banking history, including the rise of joint-stock banking, limited liability and the great banking amalgamations after 1915, but it indicates that there was a "quite peculiar" manner which amalgamation has taken place in the case of Barclays bank, as follows: The nucleus of the combination consisted of two great firms united in 1888; Barclay, Bevan, Tritton & Co., and Ransom, Bouverie & Co.; each of them London agents of a number of country banks; and their first amalgamation of 1896, a most natural one, was a union with some twenty of these country banks, in which the Gurneys of Norwich and Backhouse of Darlington figured most actively. From time to time after 1896 there were many similar unions with local banks, especially in districts where the bank was not previously represented. Finally, after 1915, Barclays joined in the general movement for concentration on a far larger scale, and amalgamated with large centralised banch-banks of a different type. In the end it has become the third in size of our Big Five clearing banks, with deposits of over 300 million pounds, and 1838 bank offices. A review of the Barclays history book found in The Economist in 1927 summarizes as follows: In the course of the narrative the reader is introduced to a large number of the best known names in English banking: Alexander, Backhouse, Barclay of course, Bevan, Birkbeck, Bolitho, Bosanquet, Bouverie, Buxton, Eaton, Foster, Gosling, Gurneys, Hoare, Leatham, Lucas, Pease, Peckover, Seebohm, Tritton, Tuke, Williams and many others. * * * * It is really astonishing how intimately the English banking families were inter-related. The writer was once shown by an English banker a very elaborate pedigree, some four feet square, on which he made out his descent from Sir John Houblon, the first Governor of the Bank of England. It further appeared from this tangled web of descents and marriages that he was also connected with almost every banking family one had heard of. This intimate and complicated relationship is fully illustrated in the book we are considering. It largely extends our printed record of such connections, and perhaps even more of those religious sympathies on which they were grounded. The Quakers have played a great part in English banking, nowhere more than in the Barclay group; the Huguenots may rank next; but a certain pietistic and mystical form of religious feeling seems to have characterised nearly all the original Barclay bankers. According to the writers of Dope, Inc., the clearinghouse for the banks involved in the drug trade is the Assicurazioni Generali of Venice, whose major stockholders are the S.G. Warburg merchant bank of London and the Paris Banque de Pris et des Pays-Bas. The Warburg chairman, Lord Eric Roll of Ipsden became chairman of Kissinger Associates in 1984, replacing its founder, Lord Carrington, who had also been a director of Hambro’s Bank, when it financed Michele Sindona’s entry into the United States, as well as a director of Barclays Bank—which is, incidentally, the principal financier for the gold and diamond mining in Africa. As stated in Dope, Inc., these men are representatives of the ancient fondi who have collaborated for centuries. What is new and ominous is that the men who perform the dirty work of the fondi have moved out of shadows of Caribbean offshore banking and Hong Kong smuggling, and into the board rooms of the most powerful American financial institutions, and close to the councils of the United States government itself. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sunday, October 01, 2000 11:06 AM Subject: Fwd: [CTRL] A Funny Thing Happened... >Bucky, no matter how many times ya read him, ya always learn something. > >MHO >Om >K >
