Ian Hislop: When Bankers Were Good, BBC Two

There were those who laughed and those who spat outrage when Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs, said in a press interview that he was simply “doing God’s work”.

Ian Hislop is no fan of the modern banker and last night he turned his chipper nostalgic gaze to the days when bankers were England’s most generous philanthropists – housing the labouring poor, building schools, hospitals and libraries, reforming prisons and even providing goat shelters. Many of them were from Quaker families – the Barclays, the Lloyds, and the Gurneys from Norwich who didn’t survive the financial crash of the 1860s but from whence sprang Elizabeth Fry (née Gurney), the great prison reformer.  

They learned to tread the fine line between speculative financial investment (good for business) and gambling (the devil’s work)

As non-Anglicans they were barred from the professions and had to square their consciences with money-making. This they did by giving much of it away. They also learned to tread the fine line between speculative financial investment (good for business) and gambling (the devil’s work). Intent on doing God’s work, many probably considered their charitable deeds a necessary tithe, as did the Jewish Natty Rothschild, the first non-Christian to sit in the House of Lords.

There were many, of course, who weren’t particularly religious. That list included George Peabody, whose legacy lives on in the thousands of properties for the working poor that were built from the 1860s. And Angela Burdett-Coutts who, while not actually a banker herself, inherited phenomenal wealth as a member of the Coutts family. Both for the sheer vastness of her riches and for the staggering number of causes she aligned herself to (it was she who was the first patron of the British Goat Society) Burdett-Coutts was utterly peerless. Her good name, however, was sullied in her late sixties when she decided to marry a man who was not only 40 years her junior but, as an American, a foreigner, thereby not only causing a national scandal, but breaking the terms of her inheritance. 

Of course, as Hislop acknowledged, philanthropy on its own is never enough to alleviate poverty. For that we need taxes, an active state and regulation, things that bankers, then and now, have some unaccountable difficulty with. And as for Hislop’s line-up of good’uns, only Burdett-Coutts appeared vaguely interesting as a character. None of them were a patch on the Do-Gooders, Hislop’s previous set of Victorian worthies. This might lead one to ask, not “Are bankers greedy?”, but “Are bankers inherently dull?"