1836-1936
Banking centenaries, which testify to the enterprise of Sir Robert Peel's generation, have accounted for some interesting volumes in recent years. The latest of them, anonymous and issued for private circulation, covers a wider field than usual and illustrates the part that London bankers have played in developing our oversea commerce. Barclays itself, one of the " Big Five," dates from 1896. The affiliated institution whose history is here recorded was established in 1926. But the three banks which it incorporated are much older. The Colonial Bank was set up in the West Indies in 1836 by some merchants interested in the sugar trade and, thanks to good management, it survived the troubles that ruined other banks as well as most of the planters. The Anglo-Egyptian Bank, founded in 1864, began with a loan to Ismail Pasha but by sheer good luck outlived this dubious beginning as well as successive crises in the Egyptian cotton industry and the Great War. The National Bank of South Africa, established in 1891 by the Transvaal Volksraad, served as the Government bankers and thus had a trying experience when the Boer war broke out. Three banks that have safely come through such adventures ought, one feels, to be equal to any emergencies, and the bank which has absorbed them and their many branches has prospered.
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