Lord Overstone and the Establishment of British Nineteenth-Century Monetary Orthodoxy

This paper will focus on the powerful contributions to the winning side, the currency school, of Loyd, its most formidable member. His father Lewis Loyd, was a Welsh Classical Tutor and Unitarian Preacher who married the daughter of a Manchester banker. Lewis Loyd turned a small bank into a great one, and his son consequently acquired personal assets of £2 million in the 1850s at a time when Britain’s National Income was no more than £500 million (O’Brien 1971, 14–15). Several Chancellors of the Exchequer relied extensively on his advice, and a vast correspondence survives, edited by Denis O’Brien in 1,500 pages in 1971. Lord John Russell as prime minister sought his advice on the suitability of particular industrialists for elevation to the House of Lords. When the billionaire banker son of a Welsh preacher (Loyd’s 0.4 per cent of Britain’s national income would now amount to about £3 billion) himself became a peer in 1850, Russell wrote to express the expectation that he would advise the Leader of the House of Lords on banking and currency questions (Corr. 476). Loyd became Lord Overstone in 1850 and it is as Overstone that he is generally known and will be referred to in the remainder of this paper.