Baring Brothers Co. signatures - Thomas Baring, John Baring and Joshua Bates - RARE

Unique document from the Baring Brothers showing the signatures of Thomas Baring, John Baring Joshua Bates signing as Baring Brothers Company. This document is undated but was was issued prior to 1864 when Joshua Bates passed away. This item is over 144 years old. The document has some stain on back probably when it was glued in a book for reference purposes. We have not seen this document before and believe it to be quite rare.

Thomas Charles Baring (16 May 1831-2 April 1891), was a British banker and Conservative politician. From that time the chief business of the House of Baring Brothers lay in the negotiation of foreign loans. Throughout Europe it was second only to the Rothschilds ; among the American States it had the preeminence. Nearly all the merit of this must be assigned to Alexander Baring. Having brought the house, however, to the highest pitch of its greatness, he retired from all active part in its direction when he was only fifty-four years old.

One of his nephews, Mr. John Baring, had, in 1823, joined with Mr. Joshua Bates, an American, in establishing a large commission agency in Boston. Another nephew, Mr. Thos. Baring, had been for some time engaged in the house of Hope, at Amsterdam. In 1825, on the advice of hia brother-in-law, Peter Labouchere, Alexander Baring resolved to take into partnership with him his son Francis, both his nephews, and Joshua Bates as well ; and three years later, in 1828, finding that the young men worked well, he left the business altogether in their hands, surrendering his part in the management, and appointing as a substitute his son-in- law, Mr. Humphrey St. John Mildmay. Henceforth the house was known as Baring & Company, to have for its principal directors, during more than thirty years, Mr. Joshua Bates, who died in 1864,* and Mr. Thomas Baring, present member of Parliament for Huntingdon.

---

Joshua Bates financier, born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1788; died in London, England, 24 September 1864. He came of an old Massachusetts family, and his father was a colonel in the revolutionary army. At the age of fifteen he entered the counting-house of William Gray & Son, of Boston, where he displayed so much aptitude for business that in a few years both father and son trusted him with their most complicated affairs. When twenty-one years of age he entered into partnership with a Mr. Beckford, but, on account of the war of 1812, he was unsuccessful, and returned to the Grays, who sent him to Europe as their agent.

Here he was thrown into intimate relations with the Hopes and Barings and other great commercial houses, and, as he continued to have the control of Mr. Gray's affairs throughout Europe for several years after the peace, these houses became impressed with his business abilities.

In 1826 he formed a partnership in London with John Baring, and two years later they both were received into the firm of Baring" Brothers & county, of which Mr. Bates in due time became senior partner. In 1854, when a joint commission was appointed to make a final settlement of claims between citizens of Great Britain and the United States, arising from the war of 1812, Mr. Bates was appointed umpire between the British and American commissioners in all cases where they could not agree. The justice of his numerous decisions has never been called in question in either country, and some of them contain full discussions of important questions in international law. Mr. Bates, in his youth, had felt the necessity for a good public library, and, though he succeeded in obtaining the books that he needed, he never forgot the difficulties encountered for want of them. Hence, when he learned, in 1852, that the city of Boston was about taking measures for the establishment of a free public library, he immediately offered $50,000 toward such a library, on the sole condition that the interest of the money should be spent in the purchase of books of permanent value and authority, and that the city should always provide comfortable accommodations for its use day and night by at least one hundred readers. He afterward gave to the library about 30,000 volumes, raising the value of the entire gift to fully twice the original amount. After his death the large hall of the library was called, in his honor, Bates Hall. His interest in his native country continued to the close of his life, and during the civil war his sympathies with the government were freely manifested. See "Memorial of Joshua Bates" (Boston, 1865).

---

Barings Bank (1762 to 1995) was the oldest merchant bank in London until its collapse in 1995 after one of the bank's employees, Nick Leeson, lost £827 million ($1.4 billion) speculating - primarily on futures contracts.

Barings Bank was founded in 1762 as the 'John and Francis Baring Company' by Sir Francis Baring. In 1806 his son Alexander Baring joined the firm and they renamed it Baring Brothers & Co., merging it with the London offices of Hope & Co., where Alexander worked with Henry Hope.

Barings had a long and storied history. In 1802, it helped finance the Louisiana Purchase, despite the fact that Britain was at war with France, and the sale had the effect of financing Napoleon's war effort. Technically the United States did not purchase Louisiana from Napoleon. Louisiana was purchased from the Baring brothers and Hope & Co.. The payment for the purchase was made in US bonds, which Napoleon sold to Barings at a discount of 87 1/2 per each $100. As a result, Napoleon received only $8,831,250 in cash for Louisiana. Alexander Baring, working for Hope & Co., conferred with the French Director of the Public Treasury François Barbé-Marbois in Paris and then went to the United States to pick up the bonds before taking them to France.

Later daring efforts in underwriting got the firm into serious trouble through overexposure to Argentine and Uruguayan debt, and the bank had to be rescued by a consortium organized by the governor of the Bank of England, William Lidderdale, in the Panic of 1890. While recovery from this incident was swift, it destroyed the company's former bravado.

Its new, restrained manner made it a more appropriate representative of the British establishment, and the company established ties with King George V, beginning a close relationship with the British monarchy that would endure until Barings' collapse (Diana, Princess of Wales was the great granddaughter of one of the Barings family). The descendants of the original five male branches of the Baring family were all appointed to the peerage with the titles Baron Revelstoke, Earl of Northbrook, Baron Ashburton, Baron Howick of Glendale and Earl of Cromer. The company's restraint during this period would cost it its pre-eminence in the world of finance, but would later pay dividends when its refusal to take a chance on financing Germany's recovery from World War I saved it the painful losses experienced by other British banks at the onset of the Great Depression.

History from Wikipedia and OldCompanyResearch.com (old stock certificate research service).