THE CHISHOLM FAMILY HistChis 01 This family of Chisholms displays outstanding qualities of professionalism and public service. Henry Williams Chisholm, grandfather, Hugh Chisholm, father and Sir Henry Chisholm, Archibald and John,sons, all showed and proved the leadership, integrity and forthrightness which ran through their make-up. Family tradition has it that the ancestry goes back to the fifth century when a Danish Chief and his followers invaded Scotland and settled in Inverness-shire; as yet the detailed links have not been ascertained and recorded. Tradition links this family of Chisholms with Oliver Cromwell who might have been Oliver Williams if his great great grandfather had not changed his name to Cromwell from Williams,a famous Tudor family, and for what reason is also not known, perhaps on religious grounds. Basically the Chisholm Clan was Roman Catholic, but there are now many protestant families and when and where the change took place are not specifically known, except in the case of this family which abides by the following tradition. That is to say, in 1714 probably to avoid the anticipated Jacobite rebellion, William's father left Strathglass for London, where Queen Anne, who was to die later in the year, appointed him to a minor post, with residence, at St.James's Palace. She is believed to have shared the Royal preference,with her successor Queens Victoria and Mary, for tall good-looking Highlanders. He stood six foot four and a half inches in kilt and hose and is believed to have changed his religeon in order to keep his employment. In the course of time he was succeeded in his post and residence at St James's Palace by his son William and the latter by his son George with the post and residence enlarging all the time. George died in 1811 from his exertions to stop a big fire at the Palace. In view of that bravery, his widow was then appointed to his post of Keeper of the Royal Appartments with residence and perquisites to match. She occupied that position until her death in 1872 by which time great trust was reposed in her at the Palace. She was well-known and respected by the older members of the Royal Family and especially by Queen Victoria. Respect for her extended also to King George IV who invited her to his Coronation Banquet where she sat next to the author, Sir Walter Scott. The 1821 banquet was the last at which Dymoke, the Royal Champion, rode his horse into Westminster Hall in full medieval armour and threw down his gauntlet as a challenge to all. Henry Chisholm, at chart C/Bel 1, page 1, became secretary and librarian to Lord Grenville, auditor of the Exchequer and later in 1806 Prime Minister, gave Henry a clerkship in the Exchequer, where he eventually became Senior Clerk in the Exchequer Bills Office and King's Agent for Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast, now Ghana. Henry Williams Chisholm, also at chart C/Bel 1, page 01, became Warden of the Standards in the Board of Trade, now in 1991 the Ministry of Trade and Industry, the function of which is briefly described below, and worked closely with colleagues in other Standard Departments in Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Rome, St.Petersburgh, Vienna, Washington as well as many British Colonial territories. The British Board of Trade had the custody of the Imperial standards of weights and measures which historically had been in charge of the Chamberlains of the Exchequer. In 1826 the Standards Department was abolished but responsibility remained with an officer of the Exchequer, which office was in turn abolished in 1866 by the Weights, Measures and Coinage Act of 1866. This act created a Standards Board and yet another act of 1878 made the office a part of the Board of Trade and defined its functions. These included the custody of the Imperial Standards, periodical comparison with the Parliamentary copies of the standards, which were datum, measuring standards of all sorts, including gas meters, and more latterly, apparatus for determining the flash-point of petroleum products. No doubt this task influenced Henry William's grandson Archibald, of whom more in a following paragraph, into a career in Petroleum. In 1904, after Henry Williams' death in 1901, a further act included the making of regulations for verification of the use of standards in the care of local authorities etc, stamping weighing machines, setting the tests to be applied, allowable limits of inaccuracy and safeguards against fraud. Tasks made all the easier thanks to Henry William's earlier conscientious work carried out with a mind dedicated to specific accuracy and meticulous detail. It was Henry Williams who brought order to this complicated jungle of weights and standards, difficult enough on its own without the frequent changes imposed upon him by constant changes in his instructions. One hundred years before his time, he had sought to introduce the metric system of measurement.At the Exchequer he had become a recognised authority on public finance and published his "Great Account" in 1869 as a Parliamentary Return in three volumes. They dealt in fine detail with the history, unrecorded until then, of the public revenue and expenditure of Great Britain and Ireland since 1688 and furthermore with the origins of the the whole British Fiscal System;it took ten years of patient research and study to write and it became known as The Treasury Bible. His worth was recognised by the French Government by the presentation to him of a Sevres vase today in the possession of his great grandson Rory at C/Bel 1 page 1. As Warden of the Standards he was the British delegate to the International Metric Commission in Paris from 1870 to 1875 and took a leading part, as a member of its Scientific Committee, in preparing and constructing the newly adopted international standards. At the desire of the Government his retirement from office was postponed until the end of 1876 when he had been fifty-two years in the public service. Henry Williams wrote his memoirs "Recollections of an Octogenarian Civil Servant" in the periodical "Temple Bar" in 1891. He was also much involved, by being brought in on the investigations in 1841, of a large fraud on the issue of Exchequer Bills by a senior clerk in that department. Recital of the events of this fraud is given at page 3 of these historical notes. Page 2 HistChis 02 THE CHISHOLM FAMILY cont Henry Williams' son Hugh was at one time editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. After education at Felstead School, he obtained a scholarship to Christ Church College Oxford and graduated with First Class Honours in Literae Luminiores. He then read for the Bar and was called at the Middle Temple in 1892; he also did occasional journalism and finally adopted that profession. Between 1892 and 1900 he had various journalistic assignments, joining The Times and then becoming co-editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with Sir Donald Wallace and A T Hadley, President of Yale University. In 1902, he became its Editor-in-Chief for the 11th edition and throughout his editorship worked closely with H E Hooper, publisher of the Encyclopaedia. The relationship between these two men, based on mutual respect and confidence, with Hooper supplying the business ability and Chisholm supplying the scholarship, enabled the 11th edition to appear in 1910/11. Hugh Chisholm rejoined The Times in 1913, firstly as a leader writer and later, as financial editor, which responsible position he occupied throughout the 1914/1918 war. In 1920 he resigned his position with The Times in order to reassume the editorsip of the Encyclopaedia and to organise the publication of the 12th edition. Hugh had a gift for organisation combined with ability and a wide range of knowledge. His paramount gift was to visualise the right arrangement of detail, plan a subject for an article, at times better than the expert he had invited to write it, and finally to see it into the Encyclopaedia. In politics, Hugh was a Tariff reformer with clear and definite views. In literature he was a voracious reader and his judgement was sound. In finance, he was courageous and quick to grasp the essential details even on the somewhat arcane workings of the money-market. Despite being fresh to the subject he wrote with lucidity and authority on the intricacies of that market. In patriotism, both public and private, he rendered valuable services to Britain in connection with the raising of War Loans. He died in 1924. Hugh had three sons, Henry, Archibald and John, all educated at Westminster. Henry, the eldest, by profession a Chartered Accountant, was knighted in 1971 for his public services, largely from 1950 on for creating and developing Corby, a new town. Henry was widely known and respected in financial and industrial circles for his many interests in several of Britain's companies and industries. Hugh's second son Archibald was educated at Westminster and followed on to Christ Church, Oxford where he became MA. Following a short period as a journalist with The Wall Street Journal, he joined the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, now part of British Petroleum. He took this step on the suggestion of Archibald Graeme Bell who had joined that company in 1923 when he retired from the Colonial Service. Archibald was invited to join the oil company by Sir John Cadman, later Lord Cadman. Later, he edited The Financial Times in London. During his service in the army in the second World War he was twice mentioned in despatches and granted a CBE. He was also a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. Hugh's third and youngest son John was a solicitor and a gemmologist of high repute. He inherited many of his father's abilities such as his literary skill, the use of words and their precise meanings. He was educated at Westminster School then, following family tradition went to Oxford University and gained a MA degree. In 1932 he was admitted to the Law Society as a solicitor and joined the Equity and Law Life Assurance Society where he established and developed their legal department. He became a well known and respected figure in the Life Offices Association and the Life Assurance Legal Society of which he was, at one time, Chairman. He retired in 1974. In 1948 he took up gemmology as a hobby. He developed an intense interest in this scientific subject with its emphasis on observation and measurement which probably came to him through his grandfather Hugh Williams Chisholm. The Gemmological Association appointed him an Examiner in 1955, Editor of the Journal of Gemmology in 1973, and its vice-President in 1984. Perhaps the final indication of John's unusual versatility was the acquisition of a pilot's licence at the age of 66. Page 3 HistChis 03 The Exchequer Bills Fraud The year 1841 saw a great forgery of Exchequer Bills and rumours started to be circulated by word of mouth. Henry Williams Chisholm was in Edinburgh at the time when the crisis broke and immediately received a summons to return to the Exchequer Office in London. This he did suffering all the discomforts of an urgent journey, and because all the inside seats of the stagecoach had already been allocated, he travelled that March morning coldly and uncomfortably as an outside passenger. At Newcastle-upon-Tyne he was able to travel onwards by the new method of travel, a train drawn by a steam engine. On arrival in London he learnt to his astonishment and dismay of the great forgery of Exchequer Bills by Beaumont Smith leading eventually to his confession of guilt and his arrest. Beaumont Smith, a senior clerk of the Office, had a good salary,lived inexpensively and was a trusted member of that Office. He had a wife and sons, lived in the respectable suburb of New Cross in a house rented at a modest and supportable #60 a year. The family life was quiet, no dinner parties, no flamboyant company and only two female servants to minster to the family. His only extra expense was that he kept a phaeton drawn by a pair of cobs. His wife, with an income of some #400 a year had died in 1837. Shortly afterwards, the widower gave up the house at New Cross and lodged for a time in Richmond. In 1841 he married again, the widow of Captain Reynolds an army officer with a son aged about twelve. This lady was a fine handsome woman, good figure, agreeable, intelligent and they settled in London in a house on Camden Road. The morning after HWC's arrival from Edinburgh he was fully briefed on the problem which in these late 1980's and early 1990's has its financial fraud parallels today. It is unnecessary in these notes, to recite the personal standing of, reputations, methods of working and Bill Broking of bygone days of entrepreneurs, stock jobbers and other financial institutions of those days, suffice it to say that as a financial class they were in high repute yet financially acute. Suffice it also to say that the pattern continues today in 1992, high interest, plausible marketing, lack of full information and so on. Details of the fraud would cover many pages; when and how discovery of bad bills came about, duplicated numbers, where was there access to numbering processes and forged signatures and seals. The Bills were cleverly duplicated as to quality of paper, printing, signature and seal, scrolls of indentation by which bills are torn off their counterfoil and other meticulous detail. But it was the matching of bills with the counterfoils in the Exchequer Office which proved the fraud. Genuine Bills exactly matched the indentations of the counterfoils, those of the forged bills did not. Beaumont Smith at first tried to blame the numbering on the forged bills. Exchequer custom was that small bills were numbered by one of the clerks, but that Bills of #1,000 and over were numbered by a senior clerk; examination showed that the numbering on the forged bills was in the handwriting of Beaumont Smith. He then confessed to copying meticulously the #1,000 bills including forging the signature of Lord Mounteagle and marketing them through an Italian Jew called Rapallo. When the fraud became public knowledge, alarm was widespread. There were 30,000 Bills in issue to a total value of #30,000,000 and many were in circulation as deposit against loans. Depositors rushed to have their bills examined and it later transpired that only the #1,000 bills had been forged to an extent of #400,000 of the forged bills, #300,000 had been advanced by different people as security. Naturally HWC's investigations were exhaustive and deep. How he set about his task is not necessary information for historical notes such as these. The conclusion of the case was that Rapallo turned Queen's evidence, Solari who had been Rapallo's partner had died and Madame Solari quickly turned twenty of the bills into money and absconded to St Petersburg. On the basis of Rapallo's knowledge and probable later evidence, Beaumont Smith pleaded guilty, was convicted and sentenced to be transported for life to what was at that time known as Van Dieman's Land. While there he wrote a complete report on how he did it and this was taken into account by the Royal Commission which later sat to tighten up the financial fraud laws. After seven years he received a Royal Pardon on condition that he never returned to England. The incident closes with the above paragraph, but HWC was a generous-minded humane man. He was sorry for Mrs.Smith and visited her in her deprived state of life. All of her husband's assets had been sequestrated by the Treasury so HWC assisted her in her petition for their return. Regretfully this ended in failure; the Treasury view was that if Mrs.Smith, previously married to an army officer could produce evidence of her marriage, the assets would be returned to her. Was she married to Beaumont Smith or did they just live together while she continued to draw and enjoy the widow's pension which would cease on her remarriage. In the event HWC took part in the Royal Commission into the manner in which future Exchequer Bills would be made and issued.