20 - ALFRED HOARE

Summary

We much regret to record the death of Alfred Hoare on 6 November 1938, two days after his eighty-eighth birthday. He was elected to the Council of our Society in our first year, and had served without a break since 1892. He was Auditor of the Society in 1907, and had been our Honorary Treasurer for the past quarter of a century.

He was born on 4 November 1850, the fifth son of Henry Hoare, head of the historic banking family. At Eton he won the Tomline Prize for Mathematics, and came up to St John's College, Cambridge, as a scholar, graduating as 14th Wrangler in 1873. He was a close contemporary of H. S. Foxwell, whom he knew well as an undergraduate, but his main interest in economics came later. He never took any pride in his mathematical achievements; in his old age he used to say that he regretted the time he had given to them, and wished he had spent it on the Classics. He then studied medicine, and qualified as a surgeon, but never took his medical degree, accepting instead an invitation to go into the family bank in Fleet Street. He always considered this a good thing, saying that he would never have made a good doctor, as he had no faculty at all for ‘guessing’.

In 1882 he became a partner of Hoare's Bank, and so remained up to his retirement in 1925. Hoare's Bank is now the sole survivor of the private banks out of which British banking has evolved, and Alfred Hoare was one of the few men still privileged to occupy in the twentieth century the secure and esteemed position of the private London Banker, eulogised by Bagehot in 1870 in Lombard Street in words peculiarly applicable to his case.