On this day … 3 June 1905

The Preston Guardian reported the demolition of the ‘Old Bank’ on Church Street. It was the town’s first bank, and came to be known as the ‘Old Bank’ after a second bank opened.

It was also known as Pedder’s Bank. A Pedder was one of the original partners when it was established in 1776 in what had been a private house on Church Street. Through the nineteenth century the Pedder stake continued to increase until, by 1861, it truly was the Pedder family bank.

The year 1861 was catastrophic for the bank, its depositors and the Pedder family. The managing partner, Edward Pedder, was found dead in his bed at his home, Ashton Lodge. He was just fifty and his death was both unexpected and disastrous for the family.

When the books were opened it was discovered that both Edward and his brother, Henry Newsham Pedder, had been borrowing heavily from the bank, which collapsed, with panicking creditors calling urgent meetings to try to salvage something from the wreckage.

In fact, there were enough family assets that when sold off enabled the Pedders eventually to pay their creditors in full. But the family was ruined and left town. The bank later became the Trustee Savings Bank.

Not surprisingly, given the spectacular collapse and the bank’s long association with the Pedder name, earlier partners in the bank have largely been forgotten. One of these was a founding partner, Richard Atherton, and, in fact, there was no Pedder in the bank’s name at the time of its foundation, when it was known as the firm of Atherton, Greaves and Denison.

The Atherton money came from the slave trade. The family owned a very valuable estate in the West Indies, which they kept after their slaves were emancipated, for which the family received generous compensation.

By the time the Pedders had control of the bank, the Athertons had left Preston to set up estates around Liverpool, where their wealth continued to grow. The family fortune was so great by the end of the nineteenth century, that when one of the descendants, Eleanora Atherton, died in 1870 she was reputed to be one of the richest women in England.

The Pedder family wealth also grew spectacularly during the course of the nineteenth century, so that when Arthur Edward Pedder, son of Edward Pedder and nephew of Henry Newsham Pedder, was at Eton in the 1850s, he was reputed to be one of the richest boys there.

In fact, there was so much surplus wealth swilling around in nineteenth-century Preston that banks such as the Pedders’ played an important part in funnelling that wealth into financing the growth of the town’s burgeoning cotton industry. The hard-headed businessmen at their head had the specialist knowledge necessary to judge which local enterprises had the best chance of success.

Preston’s cotton lords were as much financiers as they were industrialists, and the development of the town’s cotton industry owed as much to shrewd investment as it did to technological innovation and entrepreneurship.

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Sources:
The Pedders of Preston
Atherton family wealth