Eye occasionally delves into the Quaker archives to find an explanation for current woes. We were not disappointed, therefore, when we followed a hunch about the first recorded British bank to suffer a run. Yes, it was indeed a Quaker company, Overend & Gurney, the ‘bankers’ bank’, and it collapsed spectacularly in 1866. But what really astonished us was the similarity between the cause of that crisis and our present ‘credit crunch’. Apparently the financial situation in the 1860s mirrored our own. Because of changes in liability law, credit began to be more easily available from a new type of finance company, accepting securities from farmers, traders and domestic servants. The bank provided the money. Defaults piled up and the bank lost millions (£11 million – equivalent to around £6 billion today). Sound familiar?

We checked out our regular source on these matters, Ted Milligan’s Biographical Dictionary of British Quakers in Commerce. The Gurney who took the brunt of anger from his Quaker contemporaries was Henry Edmund, a broker who followed his father into the family firm. He lived in a splendid house in Reigate. A committee of Dorking, Horsham and Guildford Monthly Meeting (MM) was scathing: it reported that the firm had entered into ‘a series of transactions of great magnitude, foreign to the scope of their regular business’. But it did not believe Henry was wilfully deceiving. He had let his better judgement be tampered with, leading into grave miscalculations and unwarrantable risks. Apart from urging him to make reparations, the MM took no other action. The directors of the firm were tried for fraud but did not go to prison. Henry took the criticism to heart, sold his posh house, bought some cows, became a treasurer for a temperance group and generally kept his head down. Obviously, some lessons can never be learned across generations.