| ||||||
OCR Rendition - approximate
50 Life and Letters of Francis Galton Plate XXXII). Joseph Farmer died in 1741 and his son James succeeded him. In 1746 Samuel Galton married Mary Farmer and went to live at 13 Old Square. When James removed to London, Samuel left the Square to live in the Steelhouse Lane house. He appears to have remained there after James' bankruptcy and his return to Birmingham, for the latter then wentt to live at Bingley House, which afterwards passed into the hands of the Lloyds: The Galton-Farmer house bore the initials J. F. in monogram over the doorway, and this fine old house, scarcely recognisable, still exists. In 1782 Galton rented Duddeston', he took a 99 years' lease of it in 1789 and his grandson purchased the freehold in 1820. Samuel his son lived immediately after his marriage also in the Steelhouse Lane house, he then went to Hagley Road, Edgbaston, and afterwards to Great Barr, finally settling at Duddeston on his father's death. Thus in Francis Galton's childhood from 1822 to 1832 Duddeston was the much frequented home of the grandfather ; it was superintended by a highly respected Quaker housekeeper, Lizzie Forster, after the death of Lucy (Barclay) Galton in 1817. When in 1804 the gunsmith business was wound up2, the Farmer-Galton house was converted into a bank, possibly at the suggestion of the Barclays. In this bank Samuel and Samuel Tertius were partners with Paul Moon James, and later Hubert Galton, a younger brother of Tertius, also became a partner. In 1825 there was a general panic in the money market involving a run on the banks throughout the country. Hubert Galton, going up to Barclay's in London to borrow, found no less than ten partners of the Gurney banks come up for the same purpose. The run lasted about a week, but the strain on Samuel Tertius Galton was very great during the crisis-a crisis indeed which he had actually predicted in his tract of 1813. His friends, however, stood firmly by him during this trying periods, and the bank weathered the storm well. The strain, however, ' A Mr Freame appears to have rented Duddeston from 1757-1780, I am uncertain whether a relative of the Freames discussed above. 2 It would appear that Samuel Galton the second determined on his father's death to wind up the gun-factory (at one time producing guns at the rate of one a minute!) and start. the bank. Whether this change was due to altering economic conditions, or to a religious scruple, reaching freedom of expression on the death of his father, we cannot say. s One friend collected 1000 sovereigns in a bag and threw it on the counter with a loud chink at the height of the crisis before the clamouring depositors asking the partners to take care of them for him, a most seasonable kindness. Mrs Wheler's Reminiscences.
|