On Monday I walked across London for lunch at the City of London club in Old Broad Street. On the way home I snapped this bronze at the back of the Royal Exchange. In thirty-nine years working in the City I saw it countless times without having the curiosity to learn more.
It is of George Peabody, American banker and philanthropist. JP Morgan, Morgan Grenfell and Morgan Stanley all trace their roots back to Peabody but he left Londoners a rather more useful legacy: the Peabody Trust. The Trust provides affordable housing across London. They have 55,000 properties and an asset base of around £3 billion. Here is one of their buildings on my manor, the Fulham Palace Road.
Peabody’s decision to tackle the London housing crisis in the 1860s was inspired and is even more relevant now, 150 years later. His statue is a fitting memorial to this great man and, unusually, he was alive when it was unveiled in 1869, a few months before his death. Surprisingly it was cast in Rome. It is the work of American sculptor William Story, who moved there in 1850 basing himself in an apartment in the Palazzo Barberini. Another casting of his bronze was unveiled in Baltimore in 1890. Peabody first started making money there and the George Peabody Library is another manifestation of his philanthropic munificence.
There is a similar William Story statute of George Peabody in Mount Vernon Place, a lovely square in downtown Baltimore.
After Peabody moved from America to London in 1837, he worked in finance and helped establish the United States’ international credit. Since all international transactions were settled in gold or gold certificates, a developing nation like the United States had to rely upon agents and merchant banks to raise capital through relationships with merchant banking houses in Europe. Only they held the quantity of reserves of capital necessary to extend long-term credit to a developing economy like that of the US.
He founded his financial company in order to meet the increasing demands for American securities, particularly American railroads. As his company grew, it became the premier American merchant bank in London.
While Peabody’s philanthropy is renowned in England for creating housing for the poor, in the United States he is revered for his support of a multitude of educational initiatives, including the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, which is now part of Johns Hopkins University.
I am glad to see you bigging-up Peabody. In the 70s I used to photograph any of his trust’s buildings I came across, and still do, a bit. (BTW, I love the pic you share of the Baltimore library. It is of a piece with the splendid Victorian proto-Brutalism of the Peabody Estate buildings.)
It may be news to you that Peabody was part of an astonishing movement whose core thought is still valuable. He and others believed that the way to achieve large scale improvements for the poor was to operate what came to be called “Five Percent Philanthropy”. The idea was that the poor could afford rents which would attract very large investment from lenders or donors who would be drawn to the scale of social improvement they could be part of. (Actually, this philanthropy could only help the respectable poor, but that was a beginning at least. I don’t remember whether the movement cleverly realised that without 5pcP there would eventually be patronising socialism on a vast scale.)
I find it all interesting because it seems to me that infrastructure, money-lending and some utilities might benefit from the marriage of capitalism and philanthropy that the Victorians pioneered. I suppose it would be a question of building firms and trusts which prioritised long-term financial stability and social purpose over profits. I know you already like the way you can help with micro-finance.