A FAMOUS BANK.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XIV, Issue 80, 12 March 1924, Page 2

A FAMOUS BANK.

THE ROMANCE Tf DRUMMONDS The tears of the Jacobites who decorate King Charles’s statue every thirteenth of January should “doon fa’ ” at the news that Drummond’s Bank that overlooks the statue at Charing Cross has come to the end of 'its long history and is being merged in the Royal Bank of Scotland, says the London correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian.” It is the only bank still in the hands of the family whose name it bears, and there is hardly any test of romance that it does not triumphantly pass. Its founder, Andrew Drummond, son of Sir John Drummond, of Marhany. walked from Edinburgh to London with a price on his head and-the Scots’ Jacobite ftind in his wallet- The malacca cane with a gold crutch handle that he carried in his travels can still be seen in the bank parlour beside his portrait by Zoffany and a Duach ledger of the seventeenth century with a record of the moneys gathered on behalf of the Stuarts

It was the Jacobite bank, as Coutts’s with its Campbell cfflTnexion was the Whig bank, and funds gathered from the forfeited estates of the families “out of the Forty-five” were secretly ■lodged thereIt must be owned, however, that the Hanoverian Government too had connexions with Drummond’s for there is still in the batik a civil list order authorising Drummond’s to pay to Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat. part of his secret service allowance of £4OO a year, due in 1740- Six years later Simon was driven past the bank on his way to the Tower to be beheaded as a traitor, for that famous octogenarian had played the double game. The partners are said to have watched him from their window as he passed to his doom on Tower Hill And Drummond’s have gone on till to-day paying th e secret service commissions.

The position of the bank beside King Charles’s statue and at the entrance to the Processional Mall leading to the Palace appealed to the imagination of the true Londoner and when, the old Jacobite firmly refused to move to make more splendid the new approach to the Palace of the Georges, that seemed a gesture properly in characterThe bank is to remain with its old partners, managers, and staff. But it can hardly be Drummond’s!