Admittedly I've not read J. R. Jarvie's
1933 book The Old Lady
Unveiled: A Criticism and an Explanation
of the Bank of England, but the
BBC's Economics Editor Paul Mason owns a
copy, and he wrote:
In my extensive collection of obscure books, there is one called "The Old Lady Unveiled" by J.R. Jarvie (Wishart 1933). Purporting to be a critique of the Bank of England, it contains an exchange of letters between Jarvie and the-then Secretary of the Bank, Ronald Dale, in which Dale unceremoniously tells Jarvie to get lost for requesting a list of stockholders in the bank.
"The bibliography of the bank is meagre and leads to nowhere in particular," Jarvie observed.
Central Banks Are Part Of The State - BBC News Jan 4, 2011
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16413230
The Old Lady Unveiled was
reviewed in a superbly written article
in The Milwaukee Journal
on December 15th, 1934. The piece
contains several further quotations from
the book:
"The object of this book is to
awaken the public to the truth that
the Bank of England, commonly
believed to be the most
disinterested and patriotic of the
nation's institutions, has been
since its foundation during the
reign of William of Orange a private
and long sustained effort in
lucrative mumbo jumbo and that it is
in these days under international
control, serving foreign nations
better on occasion than it serves
England."
The foreign interests of the directors include British India shipping, Chinese Central railways, the Hongkong & Shanghai bank, the Orient line, the Suez canal, Marconi's, the Eastern Telegraph co., African Explosives & Industries, Ltd., De Beers and other mining interests, Austrian, German, Scandinavian and Hellenic affairs, and important connections in South America and Turkey.
One of the most highly international directors is Kenneth Goschen. "Here," says Mr. Jarvie, "you touch something great-almost Rothschild-like. When a city man is heard to utter the oath 'By gosh,' he means , not 'by God' but 'by Goschen,' who cuts more ice, as it were, in places where the Golden Calf is best preserved. Goschens & Cunliffe are foreign bankers and pretended to be nothing else. They are on the board of the Bank of Roumania and the Ottoman bank, and it is the accepted belief that they are one of the small hereditary circle that controls the bank." Relations with American banking come through E. C. Grenfell, senior partner of Morgan, Grenfell & Co., the Anglo-American private banking house affiliated with J. P. Morgan & Co. of New York.
Mr. Jarvie pauses in his toting up of foreign interests of directors, to ask what has become of the Rothschilds. Why has there not been one of this great family on the directorate? "For all we know," he remarks, "Rothschilds may be the bank in most that matters. They may be the 'hidden hand' which has excited many imaginations." He hastens to add, "I do not think for a second that the Rothschilds do control the Bank of England, or ever did, but the extraordinary point is that we cannot say and it is impossible to find out."
