‘A helpless class of shareholder’: newspapers and the City of Glasgow Bank failure

The 1878 failure of the City of Glasgow Bank (CGB) was a significant event in the history of auditing and became the catalyst to remove the unlimited liability of bank shareholders. This study assesses the role of newspapers in relation to the failure. Newspapers typically portrayed CGB shareholders as socially vulnerable and financially ruined investors with small shareholdings. The study tests the accuracy of this stereotyping by comparing newspaper accounts with archival data of shareholders’ personal characteristics and financial circumstances. The analyses show that, at failure, CGB shareholders typically had significant shareholdings and were very different from their newspaper stereotype. Post failure, despite extraordinary share calls, a small minority of shareholders entered bankruptcy administration and a large majority revealed signs of relative prosperity. These inconsistencies are reviewed in the context of the Victorian press and an investing middle class.