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Since I have had
so little time for blogging this past month, here instead is the first
chapter of my book.
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One spring day, young Tommy was
out a-walking with Mr. Malever. Down a lane, it was, back of the church. They
chanced upon a Gypsy. She stopped them on the path. “Would you be after having
your fortune told?” Malever laughed and reached into his pocket. He crossed her
palm with a coin. She pocketed the coin, took the palm of young Tommy into her
hand, and studied it carefully. Then she took the hand of Malever and as she
held it palm upwards, the look on her face darkened. She shook her head and
said, “One of you will be known all over the world and one of you will meet a
dastardly death.”
As told by Thomas
Andrew Jackson. 2004
There were four identical silver
bowls – at least, according to the stories that I grew up with. Our family had
one of them, but it was my quest for the other three that led me to meet Thomas
Andrew Jackson. I could so easily have missed him. He died, at age
seventy-seven, in a hospital near his home in Bangor, Co. Down, December 20th,
2007, three years after we had first met. The story of his great-uncle and
namesake, Thomas Jackson, remains the earliest of such stories I have found. I can
easily imagine young Tommy in the late 1840s, as he walked the lanes by his
parent’s home near Crossmaglen in short pants or breeks. There would be the ever-present
dog at his heels, and a walking stick at hand as he intermittently thwacked the
leaves of the nearby whin bushes. Although he had been born in an Irish cottage
with a thatched roof and a dirt floor, by the time that he died in 1915, on St.
Thomas Day, at Gracechurch Street in the City of London, he was internationally
known as Sir Thomas, or TJ, a much celebrated banker. His story is inextricably
linked to the story of the four silver bowls, even though they were not his.
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| Myself in 2015 - posing at Gilford Castle with one of the four silver bowls. |
Every year or two, my mother would
pack our silver bowl into a large crate along with a mix of cutlery, linens,
and children’s toys as we followed my father from one RCAF posting to another. I
recall unwrapping it, time and again, from month-old newspapers, polishing it,
and centering it on the mahogany tea table which had cracked the first winter
we lived in North Bay, Ontario. The air up there was too dry for a Lancashire
table. The table and the bowl were the only two special things that our family
had to speak of. The table was my mother’s, and the bowl was my father’s. He
always said that it had been given by the Emperor of Japan to one of his
ancestors, a son of an Armagh farmer, a man who –like him - was also named David
Brown.
It had never occurred to my
childhood mind that there might be more than one Emperor. There was simply “the Emperor” and his connection to “my ancestors”. Whenever I rubbed Silvo
into the tarnished ridges of the embossed chrysanthemums and leaves on the
outside of the bowl, my fingers may have blackened, but my imagination soared. The
bowl allowed me to imagine a better time for my family. Throughout my
childhood, we lived in rented houses or apartments, didn’t own a car, wore
second hand clothes, and unlike most of our neighbours, didn’t even own a
television. But we did have that bowl.
In the early years of my research,
I had assumed that my great-uncle David Brown (1872-1919), a banker based in
Persia, had been the first recipient of this bowl. After all, he had the right
name, profession and lived in the right era. I had set aside the inconvenient
fact that Persia is a considerable distance from Japan. It took me many more years
before I discovered that it was actually another family banker, my
great-great-uncle David Jackson (1855-1903) who had been the recipient of all
four bowls. They had been given to him, along with a silver candelabra, when he
was awarded The Order of the
Rising Sun. I later learned that David Jackson had first gone to Hong
Kong in 1877, on the coattails of his older brother Thomas, aka young Tommy.
Thomas had started work in Hong Kong a decade earlier in 1864, when he was
twenty-three. By 1877, at age thirty-six, he was already the Chief Manager of
the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, now known as HSBC. In 1899, he was knighted by
Queen Victoria, and then three years later, made a baronet. Not bad for the son
of an Armagh tenant farmer.
The brilliance of Sir Thomas’
career may have eclipsed the life of his younger brother, but David was also a
banker to reckon with. From the 1890s until his death in 1903, he served as the
manager of HSBC in Yokohama. Thomas had held that same position a few decades earlier,
but the timing for David was good. Japan was in the midst of reinventing
itself, trying to adapt to the forces of globalization that had undermined its historic
ways of conducting trade. It also needed cash to fund the building of railways,
as well as its war with Russia. To do this, it needed entry into the foreign
loan markets, and David’s work was key. As part of his role as the HSBC manager in
Yokohama, he was also a chief negotiator for a consortium in London handling such loans. This was
essential for the next phase of international trade for Japan. Even
though David was never knighted, some of my elderly Irish relations – those a
generation or two older than I am - claim that David Jackson drunk was a better banker than Thomas Jackson sober.
In 2006, our silver bowl made it
possible for me to meet the current inheritor of the baronetcy at his home in
Co. Dorset: Sir Michael Jackson It was from letters in his family archives that
I learned that Eliza Jackson, Thomas and David’s mother, had also been essential
to the success of the bank, even though she’d never left Ireland’s shores. At
least once a week, she’d written to her sons from her home on the family farm,
letters that took months to arrive on steam ships to Hong Kong, Yokohama,
Shanghai or whatever other branch of the bank her sons happened to be managing.
These letters included her specific recommendations for hiring other young men from
South Armagh, men whose abilities had caught her notice. Some were Protestant;
some were Catholic. Her judgement about staffing was sound, but her greatest
contribution may have been her unwavering moral compass, a compass that her
sons inherited. One other trait they shared was not taking themselves too
seriously. When they wrote to each other about HSBC, they often referred to it
as The Old Cow.
The success of Eliza’s sons was
made possible by events that took place around the time of Thomas’ birth in
1841. This was when the British Empire defeated China. Hong Kong was then made
into a Treaty port, and its deep harbours were opened to British trade – free
of Chinese taxes, tariffs or regulations. The rulers of the British Empire also
imposed a relatively corruption-free civil service, based on the British model,
as well as a functioning judiciary. It is intriguing that so many of that
generation’s leaders were also Irish. In 1841, it had been Hugh Gough from Co.
Waterford who had headed up the troops when British forces won the first Opium
War, and it was another Irishmen, Henry John Temple aka Lord Palmerstone who had
negotiated the subsequent terms of the treaty. Then, it was Henry Pottinger from
Co. Down who had signed the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, a treaty which tilted the
deck in Britain’s favour. Eight of Hong Kong’s early governors were also Irish,
as was much of its civil service. The reason for this inter-generational
plethora of Irishmen was simple. In the mid-1800s, it was much easier for
ambitious young men to get rich in the Far East than it was in Ireland. They
also didn’t face the rampant discrimination against Irishmen that they would
have faced had they tried to succeed in England.
It was probably an advantage just
to have grown up in Ireland. England’s approach to governing their homeland had
offered several solid lessons on how not
to govern a colony. The biggest lesson was being clear about who you served. Not
surprisingly, the Irish in Hong Kong were therefore more inclined to respond to
the needs of the Hong Kong locals – or at least, to the members of the business
class who had their ear – than they were to heed commands from across the sea. In
the pre-telegraph era, when it took up to three months for communications from
London to arrive, and three more months for a response to be received, it often
benefitted Hong Kong that London’s directives were often either delayed or
outright ignored.
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| Andrew Hugh Gilmore Jackson (1881-1918) on the right - a nephew of TJ. |
The surviving photos of these
banker-farmers from Armagh, taken after they had done well for themselves, make
them look as if they had always known certainty, urbanity, and comfort. You
wouldn’t guess that most of them had spent their early lives being as much at
home with cattle, horses, pigs and potatoes as they now were with bank drafts, cocktails,
and government loans. Nor that most of their families had felt the sting of significant
financial failure, and that at least a dozen of them were nephews, brothers and
cousins of Thomas Jackson - or if not related, had at least grown up on nearby
farms. These were men who knew the names and habits of each other’s aunties and
cousins, as well as exactly who sat in which pews at church. Their childhood
had been shaped by the impact of the mid-1840s potato famine. For centuries,
that part of South Armagh where the Jackson brothers had grown up had been referred
to as bandit country, a hot bed of
agrarian and sectarian unrest. By the time that they arrived in Hong Kong, they
had already learned how to make and keep friends, tolerate differences, and to
work well with others for the benefit of all. They had also learned not to bet
the farm.
The leased farms they had grown up
on were large enough to be reasonably profitable – at least when a combination
of good crops and decent market prices were in their favour. Even so, whenever
the crops failed, or the markets dried up, or their cattle fell ill, their
families risked losing their home, their livelihood, and their lease, all in
one fell swoop. When there were profits, they ploughed money back into the
farm. On a day to day basis, they mostly lived in a barter and gift economy. Clothes
were hand sewn by wives, sisters, aunts, or mothers. Children did not have the
opportunity to be educated at the schools favoured by the professional classes.
When their chores were done, these future bankers had played with their
brothers and sisters, and also with the children of the hired help in the
enclosed farmyard, or in the acres of fields surrounding the barns. They’d
grown up listening to the tales of Finn McCoul, a giant who could outrun,
outride, out-throw, and outfight anyone. Together, they’d clambered onto large
rocks that Finn McCoul had tossed from his perch in the Slieve Gullion
mountains. They’d also behaved themselves - or not - during Eliza Jackson’s daily
readings of verses from the Bible, as well as snippets from the local
newspapers. In her home, the hired help had always joined the family both for
the readings as well as for the mid-day meals which were eaten in a room just
off the kitchen. When Thomas Jackson became the chief manager of HSBC, he was
known to have insisted – like his mother - that his staff be well fed. The
clerks and managers, young and old, all joined together to enjoy their
British-styled tiffin, a rare practice for banks in Dickensian times, but a
practice that proved to be profitable.
There were also other mentors who had
influenced the young Thomas Jackson. One of them was his uncle, the Rev. Daniel
Gunn Browne. He was well-known in mid-1800s Ireland for his sermons and
speeches agitating for the legal rights of all tenant farmers – including Catholics.
He was also the father of Thomas McCullagh Browne, another HSBC Manager in the
Far East, and a cousin to Thomas Jackson. When these young men were growing up,
they had all heard Browne preach at Presbyterian churches in Ballybay,
Freeduff, and Newtownhamilton. Some of Browne’s speeches drew thousands, some
say as many as 30,000 in one instance. He was known to have refered to absentee
landlords as “exterminators”. His economic analysis of the situation in Ireland
anticipated the writings of Karl Marx, and both of them used language in their
writing which could have been lifted from the King James Bible. When Rev.
Daniel Gunn Browne lay dying in 1892, Thomas hurried back to Ireland to hold
his hand one more time. Long after Thomas had become an intimate member of the London
banking establishment, he still referred to the Rev. Daniel Gunn Browne as the
most important mentor of his life.
Aside from Rev. Browne and Eliza
Jackson, there was one other significant mentor that we know about in Thomas’
life: his great-aunt Barbara Donaldson née Bradford (1783-1865). I would never
have learned of her importance had it not been for two letters that I stumbled
across in the spring of 2015. From these two letters, it is obvious that they wrote
to each other on a regular basis. In the first of them, written on September
23, 1863, midway through the American Civil War, he talks of the need to
abolish slavery. A tale told by one of his daughters adds to our sense of his commitment
to treating all people of all faiths and races with respect:
My mother and I had had an
enjoyable trip from England and on our last night
before arriving at Hong Kong my
mother thanked the Chief Officer for all his care and
attention and asked him to dinner on shore
the following night, as my father would not wish to lose any time in thanking him too. We dropped anchor
the next morning and as I came on
deck a Chinese coolie woman crossed my path,
where upon the Chief Officer took her
by the shoulders and threw her so roughly
out of my way that she lost her hat and her shoes. I was then aware of a
raging 6 ft 2 tornado in the form of my father who seized the Chief officer
by the scruff of the neck and as he shook
him like a rat roared "How dare you treat a Chinese woman so, you
something something..".
I didn't wait to see the end but dived below and into the Wayfoong [a ship owned by HSBC] as quickly as
I could,
and needless to say the Chief Officer did NOT dine with us that night! Oct 12, 1951. Beatrice Marker.
The faith divide in Ireland has a
complicated history, and the lines were not always drawn as short-hand versions
of Ireland’s history often suggest. Like slavery in America, and the race
divides in the colonies of the European Empires, faith was a division that was exploited
to protect economic power and privilege. It divided people into three classes:
Protestants, Dissenters, and Catholics. Dissenters,
as the Presbyterians were called, not infrequently found common cause with
their Catholic neighbours, both in practical and political pursuits. Thomas’
father, David Jackson may have been a member of the Protestant Orange Lodge, but
he signed at least one petition advocating the granting of tenant rights to
Catholic farmers. Not that this reaching
across the faith divide always protected the families of Presbyterians. Attacks
by members of the more radical wings of Catholic resistance were not uncommon. In
South Armagh and Co. Louth, several of TJ’s friends, relations, or neighbours had
their fields burnt, their first-born sons murdered, or else woke up to find
their horses or their cows writhing on the ground, their tendons cut. Although many
of these attacks were carried out by men from outside the parish, often funded
by money raised in America, knowing these facts did nothing to lessen the fears
of these Presbyterian farming families. Some stayed, but most left for new
lives elsewhere.
Many of the Chinese businessmen operating
in Hong Kong were also economic refugees, and like the Irish farmer-bankers in
Hong Kong, were only one generation away from their agricultural roots. In the
province of Canton, just as in Ireland, the failure of potato and other crops
had gone hand-in-glove with dysfunctional land policies, leading to mass
emigration starting in the 1840s, and lasting for decades. These new arrivals,
both Irish and Chinese, continued to rely on their networks of friends and
family. Nepotism for them made perfect sense. Both had been raised in cultures
which relied on oral rather than written agreements when conducting business. Their
word was their bond. Just as importantly, they had all learned at the local
markets, how to hook a prospective client, how to bargain, and then how to
close a deal with enough good will on both sides to ensure more shared business
in the future.
The more I learned about these young
Irish bankers, the more I wondered: What
if today’s bankers could learn from the practices of farmers? Plan for times of
scarcity. Save seed. Manure the fields. Feed the workers. Don’t export profits.
Reinvest. In a word, stewardship. I also wondered: Can we learn from the past? Is ethical banking an oxymoron? Experiences
in one generation tend to have echoes in future generations. All of us are
shaped, inevitably, by the experiences of our ancestors, our cultures and our
times. Even so: How do cultures get
shaped and changed? How did the politics, economics, culture, stories, and
faith of the farmers of South Armagh in the mid to late 1800s impact on the
future of both Hong Kong and HSBC? What are the stories of these men and their
families?
Perhaps a good starting point is to
go back to that story that opened this chapter, that tale of a “dastardly”
death.
