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Captain Samuel Hankey (1640-1686)
Samuel Hankey was baptised in May 1640 at Over, the fifth son of Robert Hankey, of Darnhall, Over.
He was the first of the Hankeys established in Fenchurch Street as a goldsmith, a business which he and his nephew Henry Hankey soon developed into one of the earliest banking houses in the City of London.
In 1657, when Oliver Cromwell was Protector, the seventeen year old Samuel Hankey came to London to seek his fortune in the City.
In July 1657, Samuel was bound for seven years as apprentice to Thomas Bigge, Citizen and Haberdasher of London; his father, Robert Hankey, died five months later.
He was admitted as a Haberdasher on 29 Jul 1664 and set up in business on his own account.
Two months after coming to his Freedom, Samuel Hankey (then living in the parish of St Margaret Pattens) was married at St Andrew, Holborn under a licence dated 28 Sep 1664 to Elizabeth Price of St Gabriel Fenchurch, daughter of Rice Price, Citizen and Cooper. Elizabeth’s sister Anne Price married Joseph Chaplin (who had been apprenticed to Rice Price) in 1671 and their daughter Anne married Samuel Hankeys nephew Henry Hankey in 1694.
Only six months after the marriage, the Great Plague was reaching its height, and one wonders whether Samuel and Elizabeth were forced to flee to the country. Samuel’s business career suffered further disruption in September 1666, with the calamitous destruction of much of London in the Great Fire.
In 1674, the year in which the rebuilding of the church of St Dionis Backchurch was largely completed, Samuel Hankey paid 1/- tithe in the parish of St Dionis Backchurch. In the same year he was in partnership with John Houblon of Threadneedle Street under the name of Houblon and Hankey, trading in Jamaica, Antigua and the Leeward Islands. Sir John Houblon later became the first Governor of the Bank of England; his portrait and his house in Threadneedle Street are on the £50 note issued by the Bank of England in 1994.
On 23 Mar 1683, when Charles II was still on the throne, Samuel Hankey, Citizen and Haberdasher, took his sixteen year old nephew Henry Hankey into his firm as an apprentice for a term of seven years. The earliest mention of Samuel Hankeys business as a goldsmith is to be found in the London Gazette of 14 September 1685: a great robbery of plate etc, had been committed in Lime Street (adjacent to St Dionis Backchurch), and a reward was offered by Captain Samuel Hankey, goldsmith, at the Ring under St Dionis Backchurch in Fenchurch Street.
On 14 January 1685/6 he served on a jury at the Old Bailey, but within six months he was dead.
In 1687, a few months after his death, Samuel Hankey was listed as one of the ‘goldsmiths keeping running cashes’ or current cash accounts for his customers; as his name was not on a similar list in the Little London Directory of 1677, he may have started business as a goldsmith banker between then and 1685, or 1683 when he took Henry as his apprentice.
Banking in England effectively dates from the emergence of the goldsmith bankers in the early 17th century. It was the goldsmiths who for the first time concentrated under one roof the essential banking functions of deposit and lending and then added a third function, that of note issue.
The goldsmiths’ role as bankers developed quite naturally from their normal business activities. They had strongrooms where merchants and other wealthy individuals could deposit surplus cash and valuables for safe keeping.
They kept money deposited with them at call as ‘running cash’ (similar to the modern current account) and paid interest on it. This money could be used productively by then lending it out at interest to other merchants.
The depositor obtained a receipt or note which represented a promise to pay him back the amount of his deposit. Before long these notes began to pass from hand to hand as a substitute for ready cash. In this way, the ‘goldsmiths’ note’ was the forerunner of the modern bank note.
The business of Banking commenced about the year 1645 as appears from a pamphlet entitled The mysteries of the new fashioned Goldsmiths or Bankers discovered in which it is stated that the merchants and traders of London no longer daring to confide as before in the integrity and care of their apprentices and clerks who frequently left their masters to go into the army began first at this period to lodge their cash in the hands of the Goldsmiths, whom they also commissioned both to receive and pay for them.
The Goldsmiths or bankers as they had now become quickly perceiving the great advantages they might derive from the disposable capital soon began to allow a regular interest for all sums so deposited and at the same time they began discounting the merchants’ bills at a yet superior interest than what they paid. These inducements producing a mutual benefit and greater confidence many gentlemen remitted to town the rents of their estates and surplus cash and which were subsequently increased by interest till the sums thus lodged became very considerable and the new Bankers were enabled to supply the existing government with money in advance upon the revenues as occasion required and on terms extremely beneficial to themselves.
St Dionis Backchurch in the nineteenth century
The earliest surviving records of the Hankey’s banking business date from 1697.
The Hankeys were probably also pawnbrokers, as most goldsmiths of that period embraced that profitable business in their trade; the Royal Annual Kalendar of 1765 states that Sir Joseph and Sir Thomas Hankey were at the sign of the Three Golden Balls, in Fenchurch Street, - ‘a sign very suggestive of their origin and descent from the early Longobards’.
As a Captain, Samuel Hankey was probably an officer of the Honourable Artillery Company, or of one of the City Train Bands, a form of militia which exercised each Thursday at the Moor Fields and Artillery ground outside the city walls.
In 1686, aged only 46, Captain Samuel Hankey died, leaving his nineteen year old nephew and apprentice Henry Hankey to carry on his business; his death was probably sudden, as he did not leave a will. He was buried on 2 Jul 1686 under the Churchwardens’ Pew at St Dionis Backchurch, where he had been upper churchwarden.
Samuel’s widow Elizabeth Hankey (1647-1724) was listed as a parishioner of St Dionis Backchurch in 1690. At about this time, the family owned two premises in Fenchurch Street:
-A property in the North Precinct of the parish of St Dionis Backchurch valued at £18, on which ‘Mrs Browne & Hankey’ and later ‘Richard Bullard & Hankey’ paid Land Tax. This was probably Samuel Hankey’s original premises adjoining St Dionis, referred to in 1685 as at the Ring under St Dionis Backchurch in Fenchurch Street, and mentioned in Sir Henry Hankey’s will as ‘the Sign of the Four Coffins’.
-The freehold was still owned by the Hankey family in 1773, when the tenant was James Green, watchmaker.
-Thomas Hankey (1791-1879) stated in about 1875 that he had always been led to believe that his predecessors were goldsmiths at a shop nearly opposite No. 7, Fenchurch Street (presumably the property in the North Precinct).
-A property in the South Precinct of St Dionis Backchurch valued at £38, on which ‘Widdow Hankey & company’ paid Land Tax in 1692/3.
-This was probably the premises commonly known as the Golden Ball in Fenchurch Street, and later known as No. 7 Fenchurch Street; it may also have been the premises referred to in an advertisement in the London Gazette of 8 Jan 1701, for some ships’ papers lost, where we see that Henry Hankey, goldsmith, was at the Ring and Ball in Fenchurch Street.
The use of the phrase ‘Widdow Hankey & company’ suggests that Elizabeth Hankey’s role in the business in the years immediately following her husband’s death was more active than that of a mere landlord.
Elizabeth Hankey was still living in the parish in 1695, probably with Henry and his family, but by 1724, when she died at the considerable age of 77, she was living at Clapham.
She was buried on 13 Dec 1724 at St Dionis Backchurch. Her will made on 30 Mar 1723 (witnessed by Thomas Hoare and Samuel Troughton, Henry Hankey’s lawyer) was proved on 24 Dec 1724 at London.