The Orcadian Features - Mergers leave bank memories

The recent items in your Blether column relating to Farrow’s Bank and the other banks in the burgh are a reminder of how time marches on and how things can become so easily forgotten, even within our own lifetime, not just in our own local history but also national history as well.

More banks in Kirkwall than pubs! Just how many banks did we once have in this small city and royal burgh?

According to Peace’s Almanac, in 1866 there were three bank agencies in Kirkwall — the National, the Commercial and the Union. According to Hossack’s Kirkwall in the Orkneys, the National Bank’s agency was established in 1825 by Captain John Baikie RN, quite a remarkably early agency considering the bank was only founded in Edinburgh in the early 1820s.

The bank was first established on the opposite side of Victoria Street in what had once been the old Sub-Dean of the Cathedral’s manse. (Many people forget, or maybe do not realise, that Victoria Street actually starts at Tankerness Lane. The car park opposite the current Royal Bank was the site of Nos. 2-8 Victoria Street, demolished at the beginning of the 20th century).

In 1832 Baikie demolished the properties of 1 and 3 Victoria Street which had come into the possession of his grandfather, John in 1752.

This John Baikie was a brother of James Baikie, the 6th Baikie laird of Tankerness.

The properties dated from the early 17th century, No. 1 belonging to the Douglas family of Egilsay, and No. 3 to Hew Sinclair of Damsey.

Captain Baikie built a magnificent new edifice on the site, which remained the National Bank and house until its merger with the Commercial Bank in 1962. In 1968 the National Commercial - as it was now known - merged with the Royal Bank which today occupies Nos 1 -3 Victoria Street.

The Royal Bank, though founded in Edinburgh in 1727, was one of the last banking agencies to come to Kirkwall. The Almanac lists it for 1922 in Junction Road. (Agencies, by the way, remind us that in rural or remote communities a prominent businessman or merchant would act as a bank’s agent while running his own business which could be any type of merchandising).

Some months ago, The Orcadian published a photo of a procession of about the mid-1930s exiting Albert Street and passing the property of Foubister and Bain at 4 Broad Street, which seemed to have Royal Bank above the door.

Certainly, in the 1940s the bank was in Castle Street, where Radio Orkney now is, and it remained there until the merger with the National Commercial.

It had been founded in Edinburgh in 1810 by people with a Whig Party interest, including Henry Cockburn, later Lord Cockburn, the judge.

In Kirkwall, the bank appointed James Spence as its agent. Spence had been in a general merchant partnership with Alexander Logie in premises which are now part of Scott and Miller in Bridge Street.

Logie, related to the famous Rev Dr William Logie, acquired the northmost part of the property (next to the lane) from John Balfour of Trenabie in 1797, who, in turn, had inherited it through marriage to a descendant of the Covingtrie family who settled there in 1613 and began Kirkwall’s first baking business.

Logie died in 1817 and Spence continued on his own. He built up sufficient capital to begin lending out money on interest. On one occasion he loaned a gentleman £1,000. When the man came back for another £5,000, though his security was good, Spence decided to put the matter in the hands of the Commercial Bank.

The next property south had been known as Skipper Baikie’s, approximately where the southmost window and door of Scott and Miller’s is now. Spence bought this and it was here that the bank agency was established. His son and grandson both became agents for the bank successively.

Towards the close of the 19th century the bank bought the derelict property in Albert Street known as Parliament Close and put up the building known as the Hydro offices. The Commercial was here until its merger with the National in 1962.

The next agency was that of the Union bank in 1855, when Robert Scarth of Binscarth opened it at 22 Albert Street, currently the Alliance/Leicester offices.

This site, in the 17th century, had been occupied by the mansion of James Baikie of Burness. Baikie’s daughter, Elizabeth married into the family of Bishop Mackenzie and sometime late in the 18th century a Mr Gilmour, leather merchant and tanner bought it from Mackenzie’s descendants, pulled it down and erected a new building on the site.

At the same time, he moved his property back, thus widening the street by a few feet.

This building is described in Kirkwall in the Orkneys as “the present building.”

Hossack tells us that Scarth’s father had years earlier had an agency for the bank of Sir William Forbes of Edinburgh. According to Alan Cameron in Bank of Scotland 1695-1995, A Singular Institution, this Forbes, the 6th baronet of Pitsligo, put together the rescue package for Sir Walter Scott when the author ran into difficulties in 1826.

Forbes’s father, also called Sir William, had, in 1754, aged 15, started life as a clerk in a banking house which eventually became Forbes, Hunter and Company, and which, in 1838, merged with the Glasgow Union Banking Company, the root of the Union Bank.

In 1843, the Union Bank, consisting of another five banks in addition to Forbes, and the Glasgow Union was formed.

In Kirkwall, later in the 19th century, the bank bought a property at 56 Albert Street from Dr Omand of Monzie which stood where Halcro of Crook in 1677 had had one of his residences.

After Halcro it had passed through a succession of owners, including Honeyman of Graemsay, until it came into the possession of the Omands.

The bank knocked down this property which had decayed and built the new edifice.

The Union Bank operated from there until 1955 when it merged with the Bank of Scotland.

The Bank of Scotland, the oldest in Scotland, founded in 1695 in Edinburgh, established an agency in Kirkwall in 1879 with Peter Sinclair Heddle, Town Clerk of Kirkwall 1861-1884.

Heddle, of the firm of Drever and Heddle, operated from 31 Albert Street, site of Woolworth’s store.

Again this property has a site history dating back beyond 1677 when it belonged to the heirs of Patrick Prince and went by the name of “Hell.”

Early in the 20th century, certainly by 1921, the bank obtained the premises at 22 Albert Street, curiously a former home of the Union Bank, and operated here until the merger with the Union on March 1st, 1955.

The North of Scotland (Clydesdale) Bank came to Kirkwall about 1921 to Broad Street. At that time its present premises was that of Peace and Low the drapers.

In early times, the South Block House of Kirkwall Castle had been here. Then some time in the 18th century until 1770 it was the site of Kirkwall‘s Flesh Market.

Provost John Riddoch purchased the site from the council and built his house here.

By 1941 the North of Scotland Bank had established itself in the premises. The bank originated in Aberdeen about the 1840s. In 1950 it merged with the Clydesdale, which itself had been established in Glasgow by the 1840s.

In 1934, The Aberdeen Savinigs Bank set up an agency in Castle Street, but by 1951 it had moved to premises at 24 Bridge Street.

In olden times this had been part of the burial kirkyard of St Olaf’s Church. Indeed, the kirkyard extended all the way from R. Garden’s to the “Bridge.” Until about the 1770s St Olaf’s had nominally been used as the burgh’s “poorhouse.”

Towards the end of the 1970s the bank moved to 1 Broad Street, site of W. T. Sinclair’s draper shop, which in 1900 had been the site of the Castle Hotel.

In the mid-1950s The British Linen Bank opened up in premises at 65 Albert Street, the site today of Klaize. The bank was formed in 1746 as The British Linen Company to encourage the growth of the industry and get the producers to sell to the company, which also employed its own spinners and weavers.

This cut out the intermediaries with whom the producers had formerly had to deal.

In 1774, it became the British Linen Company Bank, and after the decline of linen it was solely a bank. In 1906, it became The British Linen Bank.

The bank’s premises in Kirkwall had, in 1900, been the home of a Miss Iverach, whose brother, in the 1870s, set up the chemist business at 69 Albert Street, which was known eventually as Stewart and Heddle, and is now Ridgways.

No. 65 in 1925 became Dr Park’s surgery, then Dr Macleod’s and finally Dr Sibbald’s, until he built his surgery in the Clay Loan in the 1950s. On March 1, 1971, the British Linen Bank merged with the Bank of Scotland and ceased to exist as a separate entity.

For a very brief spell about 1954, therefore, Kirkwall had possibly eight banks, though I tend to think the Union Bank/Bank of Scotland merger happened before the Linen Bank arrived.

And as a final observation, I seem to remember that the Commercial Bank, the Union Bank, and Drever and Heddle’s (Woolworth’s) all had railings in front, even after the war.