Part III / City Walk
Walk down the road that runs along the left side of the building, on Queen Victoria Street.
Following the passing of Blanchard, Francis Child I inherited all of Blanchard’s assets along with the company that he renamed Child & Co. Child’s bank was one of the most successful goldsmith banks of the time and also one of the few that would survive the first ever financial crash: the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720. The stockholdings of Child & Co. which included the shares held by the Child family, together with another goldsmith-bank partnership named Swordblade, had accounted for a third of all goldsmith bank holdings for East India Company stock - so, this institution held a substantial amount of East India stock and concentrated power.12
© Library of Congress.
By way of a mortgage default from its previous owner, the house and estate of Osterley Park too became a part of the banker’s wealth.13
Francis Child was a man of many titles:
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A leader in jewellery trade at the time,
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Jeweller in ordinary to King William I,
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A councillor, alderman, Sheriff and Lord Mayor of London,
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A Member of Parliament,
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Owner of the house and estate at Osterley Park,
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Head and co-founder of Child & Co.,
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An investor in the South Sea Company: an English corporation that enslaved over 42,000 Africans and caused the ‘Bubble’ of 1720,14
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A committee member and a heavy investor in the the East India Company,
- A billionaire by today’s standards15 and
- The patriarch of a dynasty of imperial agents, bankers and politicians.16
In the early 1700s, Francis Child’s sons Robert Child and Francis Child II were directors of what had then become the British East India Company.17 The age of colonial extraction and exploitation dawned, with the Company helming fleets of trading ships called the East Indiamen. The East Indiamen were responsible for ferrying several colonial goods and slaves, voyaging between England and China and Benkulen in the east, St. Helena in the west and the Company’s three presidencies in the Indian Ocean region: Bombay, Bengal and Madras. The ships were often used by its sailors and the Company men as vessels for private trade and corruption.18
In 1759, Osterley I - an East Indiaman ship co-owned by Francis Child III - arrived on the shores of Madras for the first time.19 The ship was entrusted with carrying porcelain, tea and lacquerware brought from imperial China; redwood, ivory and cotton from the Indian subcontinent, silk and cotton textiles from both and pepper from Bencoolen. It also carried foreign silver into China to receive shipments of porcelain in return20 and this trade of silver represented one of the many maritime connections between the imperial projects in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Between the 1500s and the 1700s, on the other side of the world, large amounts of silver had been extracted from mines in the Americas that were built upon the slavery of Andean peoples and Africans by the Spanish Empire. Close to 40% of the silver produced in these mines found their way to China, where the metal was used as currency in exchange for exports of their goods.21
At the intersection, walk down Cannon Street on your right. Keep to the right side of the road.
Along with other East Indiamen, the Osterley ships brought into England and to the Childs’ treasury a variety of colonial goods and private commissions with which they even ran lotteries for fun. The Child family’s estate of Osterley Park now holds within its collections 17 pieces of objects and furniture that bear the Child family coat of arms,22 thus confirming that these were consequences of private trade undertaken by them. These transactions bore witness to the penetration of an empire into foreign lands and are a testimony to the deep ties between the colonial corporation and the Childs, whose wealth sustained Child & Co. for four centuries.23
In 1777, a second Osterley ship docked at Madras Harbour beside Fort St. George. Within the premises of the Fort was located the office of the Madras Bank - founded for and by European traders and worked closely with the Company to support its endeavours.
Three Osterley ships had traded for the Company and made about nine voyages to Madras over a period of 42 years. The Childs only owned Osterley I directly, but were indirectly connected to the other two through a partner of Child & Co - William Dent - who co-owned the second and third Osterley ships.24
© Yale Center for British Art. Paul Mellon Collection
With the marriage of the family heir Sarah Sophia Fane to George Villiers, the 5th Earl of Jersey in early 1800, the Child family became the Child-Villiers or the Jersey family and continued carrying its colonial wealth through generations25
In 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was passed, criminalising the centuries-old practice of enslavement in Britain and all of its colonies. It is not accurate to say that the system had ended there, because for Britain and the East India Company, the wheels of empire needed to keep running, their plantations needed harvesting, their thirst for power and control needed quenching. Indentured servitude was brought into practice to replace slave labour, and thousands of workers were taken by the British empire from India to their plantations across the world, under unclear terms of work and harsh conditions. From 1839 onwards, Madras was brought under this system, when the Company transported Tamil people as labourers from the port-town to British plantations in Sri Lanka, peninsular Malaysia, Mauritius, South and East Africa and the Caribbean.26
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
In India, land and caste have been historically tied, for land and its ownership continues to play an important role in sustaining caste apartheid that had existed for centuries before British colonial rule.27
To your right is the famous St. Paul’s Cathedral
inside which stands a monument to Charles Cornwallis. Lord Cornwallis, as Commander-in-chief of British India, established the Permanent Settlement Act that turned land into an extractable commodity on which taxes were imposed indiscriminately. 28
Cross over to the other side of the road, and board the next bus from St Paul’s Cathedral, bus stop SJ. Play the next audio after you board.
Images:
1. Moll, Herman. 1732. A new & exact map of thecoast, countries and islands within ye limits of ye South Sea Company, from ye river Aranoca to Terra del Fuego, and from thence through ye South Sea, to ye north part of California &c. with a view of the general and coasting trade-winds and perticular draughts of the most important bays, ports &c. © Library of Congress. (Public Domain)
2. Fort St. George, 1736. Print made by Gerard van der Gucht, 1696–1776. Yale Center for British Art. Paul Mellon Collection, B1978.43.272. (Public Domain)
3. A Tea Estate. Sri Lanka, 1891. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2006BC5463).
12 Mays, Andrew, and Gary S. Shea. 2012. "A social network for trade and inventories of stock during the South Sea Bubble" CDMA Working Paper , no. 1110. University of St. Andrews Research. pg. 31-32.
Bell, Stuart. 2012. “‘A Masterpiece of Knavery’? The Activities of the Sword Blade Company in London’s Early Financial Markets.” Business History 54 (4): 623–38. doi:10.1080/00076791.2012.683416. Pg. 625.
- The Hollow Sword Blade Company was the foundation for the creation of the South Sea Company (SSC) and played a role in the collapse of the Company in 1720, dubbed the “South Sea Bubble”. Although founded to manufacture hollow blades, the business was transformed into a joint-stock company for which Sir Franchis Child funded the charter. Today, the institution exists in the form of a financial advisory firm of Swordblade & Co, based within the Royal Exchange in London.
14 Moll, Herman, and H. Moll. n.d. “The South Sea Company and the Slave Trade.” CURIOSity Digital Collections. Accessed October 1, 2024. https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/south-sea-bubble/feature/the-south-sea-company-and-the-slave-trade.
- “Over its entire trading lifetime, the [South Sea Company] forced nearly 42,000 people to leave the African coast. It disembarked almost 35,000 people meaning that just over 7,000 people died on the crossing,” economic historian Helen Paul writes. “Their bodies would have been thrown to the sharks. These facts are at odds with some of the contemporary satires and entertainments about the SSC, none of which deal with the horrors of the trade.”
- Britain granted the South Sea Company a monopoly on trade with the Spanish footholds in South America (the ‘South Seas’) and supplied 4800 slaves per year to work in Spanish colonies, including their gold and silver mines.
15 Beresford, Philip and Rubinstein, William D. 2007. “The Richest of the Rich Wealthiest 250 people since 1066.” Harriman House Publishing.
Sharma, Yuthika et.al. op.cit. Pg. 7.
“...when he died in 1713 Sir Francis Child was a very wealthy man, with assets of £250,000 – assessed by Philip Beresford to be equivalent to £3.8bn today.”
16 Natwest Group Heritage Hub. “Francis Child”. Accessed Aug 15, 2024. https://www.natwestgroup.com/heritage/people/francis-child-i.html
17 Natwest Group Heritage Hub. “Francis Child II”. Accessed August 30, 2024. https://www.natwestgroup.com/heritage/people/francis-child-ii.html
Sharma, Yuthika et.al. op.cit. Pg. 15-18.
18 Sharma, Yuthika et.al. op.cit. Pg. 23.