Britain: A Prince Among Princes

Most ordinary Britons bank with “The Big Five,” a quintet of commercial banks* with deluges of deposits from branches around the world. But in London, 17 smaller merchant banks, most of them family-dominated, rank as “The Princes of the City.” The biggest of the tight-mouthed princes, who ignore common customers for corporations and countries, is Hambros Bank, Ltd., which has arranged financing for Scandinavian timber, South African diamonds and $20 million worth of Manhattan’s Pan Am Building. In a move symbolic of the new direction that London’s princely bankers are now taking, Hambros has just announced that in partnership with the U.S.’s Meyers Bros. Parking System it will build Euro-park parking garages in major European cities, starting in Germany.

Consciously Unorthodox. The idea of parking lots would have shocked earlier directors of the 125-year-old bank, which has been headed by the Hambro family since it was founded six generations ago by a Danish immigrant. But parking lots are exactly the kind of enterprise sought by forward-looking Executive Chairman J. H. (“Jack”) Hambro, 59, who believes that the times have passed when merchant bankers could concentrate on regal requirements. He has turned Hambros to bigger profits from a multitude of smaller ventures. “We are consciously unorthodox,” says he. “Anything that concerns money we attempt to cater for.” Hambros is profiting from this unorthodoxy: it has $500 million in assets, almost triple those of ten years ago.

Profit will lure Hambros’ seven partners almost anywhere. The bank was the first to help continental diamond cutters fleeing Nazism; from this risk it built a hefty business in London’s diamond center. Hambros also runs 45 investment funds, and its Bishopsgate Property Investment Co. is the world’s biggest fund dealing in real estate shares. In the U.S., Hambros has fared unevenly. “We lost our pants,” admits Jack Hambro of a 1950 attempt to export more kippers and British honey. But in another project in which Hambros increased the exports of British cars, “we recovered our pants.”

Unexpected Benefit. An authority on rose growing as well as on banking, Jack Hambro intends henceforth to cultivate fields he knows. Hambros now offers package plans for Scandinavia in which the bank handles all arrangements for British investors from plane tickets to plant location. It is also capitalizing on Britain’s exclusion from the Common Market. “The failure to go in,” says Hambro, “has created lots of problems we can help solve. We always say our advice is free until somebody makes a profit.” Once that happens, Hambros is not too princely to hold out its hand for its share.

* Barclays, Lloyds, Midland, National Provincial and Westminster.