Walter Eltis (Emeritus Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford and Visiting Professor of Economics in the University of Reading)
Abstract
This paper will focus on the powerful contributions to the winning side, the currency school, of Loyd, its most formidable member. His father Lewis Loyd, was a Welsh Classical Tutor and Unitarian Preacher who married the daughter of a Manchester banker. Lewis Loyd turned a small bank into a great one, and his son consequently acquired personal assets of £2 million in the 1850s at a time when Britain’s National Income was no more than £500 million (O’Brien 1971, 14–15). Several Chancellors of the Exchequer relied extensively on his advice, and a vast correspondence survives, edited by Denis O’Brien in 1,500 pages in 1971. Lord John Russell as prime minister sought his advice on the suitability of particular industrialists for elevation to the House of Lords. When the billionaire banker son of a Welsh preacher (Loyd’s 0.4 per cent of Britain’s national income would now amount to about £3 billion) himself became a peer in 1850, Russell wrote to express the expectation that he would advise the Leader of the House of Lords on banking and currency questions (Corr. 476). Loyd became Lord Overstone in 1850 and it is as Overstone that he is generally known and will be referred to in the remainder of this paper.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Catherine McNeill).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: