At the head of the money-making men, I suppose, are to be placed “Plum Turner” and “Vulture Hopkins.” The former, who was a Turkey merchant, died in 1793. When possessed of £300,000 he laid down his carriage because interest was reduced from five to four per cent. Vulture Hopkins, as Pope, in his satire, calls him, I fancy has been abused much more than he deserved. He was a wealthy merchant; the architect of his own fortune; and resided in Broad Street. That he was a very economical man there can be no doubt. We are told he paid an evening visit to Guy, the founder of the hospital in Southwark, and the story is too characteristic to be omitted. Guy lighted a farthing candle for the reception of his guest, who explained that he had come to learn from him the art of frugality. “And is that all you come about?” replied Guy. “Why, then, we can talk the matter over in the dark.” Another man of money was Sir John Cutler, a member of the Grocers’ Company, to whom the physicians had erected a statue in Warwick Lane, but from which they erased the subscription which adorned it when the executors claimed the cash which they considered given. Some of these men had pompous funerals. That of Sir John Cutler cost no less than £7,000. Cooke, the great sugar-baker, who died in 1811 at Pentonville, had a grand funeral; but the mob pelted the procession with cabbage-stalks. He, however, atoned in some degree for his avarice by leaving £10,000 to four charitable institutions. There is little virtue in being liberal with one’s money when one has no further need of it; but society gains, and such men as Guy, in spite of all their meanness, are public benefactors. At any rate, the study of the lives of these men is interesting. It is no great art, that of money-making; but it is natural that a City man should try to make money, and that he should be interested in the lives of those who have succeeded by their industry, or their luck, or their talent, in this respect. I find that in this, as in other matters, a man may be too clever by half, and that, as a rule, honesty is the best policy. “I have tried them both,” said the Yorkshireman to his sons on his death-bed. And the testimony of the Old Bailey is equally conclusive. Among the Jews, success in business was believed to be a blessing; but in our more critical age we can see that, to gain wealth, much of the charm of life has to be sacrificed, and that gold may be bought too dear. It is the opinion of most people that it is easier to make a fortune than to keep it.
Entered in “Memoirs” and “Diaries,” it is really wonderful what a volume of recollections and statements there are relating to City ways and City life. Every one, of course, comes to London, and is more or less connected with that great hive of industry and enterprise known as “the City.” One of the latest anecdotes is the following, relating to the origin of a great City house, to which in these scraps we have before adverted:—“On the 1st of January, 1818,” writes Mr. Macaulay, “a new tragedy was produced at Covent Garden. The author, John Dillon, a very young man, was the librarian of Dr. Simmons, of Paddington, famous for a very splendid collection of valuable books. With great promise of dramatic power, as evinced in this his first essay, he wisely left the poet’s idle trade for the more lucrative pursuits of commerce, and became partner in the well-known firm of Morrison, Dillon, and Co. This play was called Retribution, and the chief weight of which—in a very powerful character, Varanes—was on the shoulders of O’Neill. Charles Kemble and Terry were his supporters—the villain of the story being well represented.” In the person of Mr. Frank Dillon the artistic taste of the father has proved itself to be hereditary.
Another money-making man was the founder of the Baring family. The origin of them in England is to be traced to Johan Baring, son of a Lutheran pastor in Bremen. Johan, when still a lad of sixteen or seventeen, came to England, engaged for a few years in clerkly duties, studied hard, amassed a little money, and finally settled down as a cloth merchant and manufacturer, in a little village near Exeter. He had four sons; and the third of them, Francis, born 1740, came to London, where, after finishing his education at Mr. Fuller’s academy in Lothbury, he set up in business as an importer of wool and dye-stuffs, also acting as agent for the original family cloth factory. “Starting,” writes Mr. Frederick Martin, “with a fixed determination to become rich, and having a fair amount of money to begin with, he was uniformly successful in all his designs. Nothing failed that he undertook, and whatever he touched became gold. Having amassed a fortune by dealing in cloth, wool, and dye-stuffs, he resolved to quintuple the fortune by dealing in money itself—that is, to be a banker.” As was natural, the successful man became also the honoured man—a leading director of the East India Company, and the friend and adviser of the premier, Lord Shelburne, who invariably followed his counsels in matters of finance. After obtaining a seat in parliament for Exeter, the son of Johan Baring was made a baronet, under patent of May 29th, 1793, by William Pitt, Shelburne’s successor in the government, after the short interregnum of the Duke of Portland. Valuing the friendship of the shrewd man of finance, William Pitt, as much as the Earl of Shelburne, listened to the counsel of Sir Francis Baring, both statesmen delighting to style the reputed possessor of two millions, on all occasions, “the prince of merchants.”
There is another great house now flourishing in the City, of whose origin a still more extraordinary tale is told. One of the family is now a baronet and an M.P.; and yet the first of the line, he who laid the foundation of the fortune of his descendants, was a ragged street boy.
A curious anecdote relative to Nathan Rothschild and Mr. Gompertz, not many years ago, found its way into print. Nathan (so the story runs) was leaning one day, early in the spring of 1824, against his favourite pillar in the Royal Exchange—long known as “the Rothschild pillar”—his hands in his pockets, when his relative, Gompertz, ran up to him in a high state of excitement. “Vat ish de matter?” queried Rothschild. Thereupon the other recounted, in gasps, how he had been applying for the vacant actuaryship of a large insurance company, and had been beaten in the competition. Though being admittedly the best candidate, on account of his religion, the directors declared they would have no Jew. Now Nathan, too, got excited. “Vat!” he cried, disengaging his hands from his pockets, and laying hold of his brother-in-law by the shoulders, “Not take you pecause of your religion! Mein Gott! Den I will make a bigger office for you than any of ’em.” And Nathan was as good as his word, founding not only a bigger company than any other, but appointing Mr. Gompertz actuary under the deed of settlement.
Let me remark here, by way of parenthesis, that it is seldom, however, this kind of thing succeeds. A man who starts a business in a passion, merely to injure another, generally comes to grief. A remarkable illustration of this occurred, a few years since, in the case of the Illustrated News of the World. It was started by a gentleman who had long coveted the Illustrated London News, and had agreed, on one occasion, to purchase that paper of its original proprietor, the late Mr. Herbert Ingram. Negotiations had been carried on for that purpose, the price was named, and almost every detail was settled, when Mr. Ingram wrote to say that, on reconsidering the matter, he was determined not to part with the journal in question. The result was the establishment, in opposition, of the Illustrated News of the World, and the bankruptcy of the proprietor, who died hardly better off than a pauper. If Nathan Rothschild’s new venture succeeded, it was, under the circumstances, an exception to the general rule.
Next to making a business for one’s-self, the best way of growing rich undoubtedly is to purchase the business of one who has done well for himself, but who leaves a few ears of corn for his successors to glean. When Mr. Barclay, who purchased the property of Mr. Thrale’s brewery, &c., asked Dr. Johnson, who was one of the executors, what it was that he was going to purchase—how many were the brewing-tubs, drays, horses, and so forth—the latter replied, “Sir, I cannot enumerate them; but it is of more consequence to you to know that you have the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” And, as it turned out, Johnson was correct in his surmise.
The name of Gideon is now little heard; but at one time, most assuredly, he was one of our merchant princes. I refer to Simeon Gideon, who knew how to make himself the friend of Robert Walpole, who was tolerant enough to avail himself of the help of a Jew in those financial complications in which he was necessarily concerned. One of the principal sources of revenue for the State were lotteries, and it was thus Gideon made his money. But he made his masterstroke in 1745, when the great Jacobite insurrection threw the British world, and the mercantile public especially, into the wildest consternation. The panic on ’Change was universal. The funds fell with incredible rapidity, and men wanted to sell at any price. Simeon Gideon was almost the only man who did not lose his head. Instead of selling, he spent every penny he had, or could borrow, in buying. This was in the month of November. During the following month, the public mind oscillated between hope and fear. At length, at the end of April, 1746, the news arrived of the battle of Culloden, of the complete defeat of the insurgent army, of the flight of the Pretender, and of the triumphant suppression of the rebellion by the Duke of Cumberland. It was then Simeon Gideon began to sell, and found himself in possession of something like a quarter of a million—a sum which, in the course of fourteen or fifteen years, quadrupled itself. Gideon’s ambition was to found an English house. He was too old, he said, to change his religion, but he had his children baptized; and through Walpole’s instrumentality, his eldest son was made a baronet when in his eleventh year. It was hard work for Gideon père to make a Christian of the lad. “Who made thee?” on one occasion he asked the boy. “God,” was the proper reply. “Who redeemed thee?” was the next question, to which the boy replied, “Jesus Christ.” Then came a third question, which the father had unfortunately forgotten. “Who—who,” he stammered; and then, nothing better occurring to him, he asked, “Who has given you this hat?” The young catechumen is reported to have confidently replied, “The Holy Ghost.” Gideon, senior, died in the faith of his fathers in 1762. He left behind him, as heirs of his immense fortune, a son and a daughter, and legacies amounting to about 100,000 thalers, which were to be divided equally between Jewish and Christian benevolent societies and the poor. We read in a letter of a contemporary—“Gideon is dead, and his whole inheritance is worth more than the whole of Canaan.”
Another star which dawned in the commercial world about the same time, was Aaron Goldsmid. He came from Hamburg, and established himself in London, as a merchant, in the middle of the last century. The house arrived at its highest prosperity after his death, under his four sons. At the head of the business were then two brothers, Abraham and Benjamin, men of acknowledged integrity, and allied in friendship with Newland, the head cashier of the Bank of England. He was also a self-made man, who had risen from a baker’s shop to his enormously influential position. By means of Newland, the brothers Goldsmid were brought into connection with the government, which, since the year 1793, had been compelled to have recourse to continual loans, in consequence of the Continental war. But it was not only through this that they made their money. It was their cleverness and knowledge that saved them from losing money, when all over Europe great mercantile houses were breaking. One of the most notable characteristics of Benjamin was, we are told, his astonishing knowledge of firms, which was not confined merely to England, but embraced the whole money-market in or out of England. He valued, with a certainty bordering on the marvellous, every name on the back of a bill. In the panic year of 1790, the house only lost £50, when ruin swept away many of the chief firms of England and abroad. At the beginning of the present century, there was no house greater, or more universally esteemed; and yet the end was tragic in the extreme. One morning in April, 1808, Benjamin Goldsmid hung himself in his bed-room. In 1810, the elder brother, Abraham, in conjunction with the house of Baring, embarked in a government loan of £14,000,000. The business failed; the house of Baring survived the crash; but Abraham Goldsmid shot himself when he found how true it was that riches take to themselves wings, and fly away.
Here is a story of an alderman, extracted from Maloniana. When the late Mr. Pitt, or Alderman Beckford, made a strong attack on the late Sir William Baker, alderman of London, charging him with having made an immense sum by a fraudulent contract, he got up very quietly, and gained the House to his side by this short reply: “The honourable gentleman is a great orator, and has made a long and serious charge against me. I am no orator, and shall therefore only answer it in two words—Prove it.” Having thus spoken, he sat down; but there was something in his tone and manner that satisfied the House the charge was a calumny.