One of the lesser-known streets in Adelaide is Halifax Street, which runs east/ west in the south-west quadrant of the city proper. It lies in the popular but very quiet residential section abutting the Victoria Park precinct and the South Park Lands.
This street is named after one of London’s leading bankers of the early- and mid-nineteenth century who was sometimes known as Thomas Hallifax Jnr because his more famous father, Sir Thomas Hallifax, also a banker, was Lord Mayor of London in 1776–77 at the time of American independence and a Whig member of the House of Commons who served under William Pitt.
The Street Naming Committee agreed on the name of Hallifax, but it was published incorrectly in the South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register in June 1837 and misspelled thereafter as ‘Halifax’ Street. This had the unfortunate effect of leading some historians to conclude that the street was named after Sir Charles Wood, later to be known as Lord Halifax, who was a Whig politician in the House of Commons at the time the South Australia Act 1834 passed into law. The conclusion was not entirely unreasonable but is unfortunate because Sir Charles Wood did not become Lord Halifax until a decade or so after Adelaide was settled.
In trying to second-guess the thought processes of the Street Naming Committee on 23 May 1837 it is possible, and even likely, that as they moved southward in the city proper they devoted consideration to some of the more substantive bankers and investors whose services and capital enabled the colonial experiment to proceed. Hence we have a cluster of bankers, financiers and money-men well represented in this pocket of the city. Angas Street, Carrington Street, Halifax Street and Wright Street are all nearby and they each have an association with banking and investment.
From 1826, Thomas Hallifax Jnr was a partner in the private banking house known as Glyn, Hallifax, Mills & Co., arguably the largest private banking house in London in the late 1830s. This dynasty, usually known as Glyn Mills & Co., prevailed for 200 years between 1753 and 1953 and was led by six generations of the Glyn family and their partners.
Just why Thomas Hallifax was named in Adelaide rather than either of his partners remains a mystery. However, it is tempting to conclude that one of the initiatives he introduced in the banking process might provide a reasonable clue. From the time of the ‘South Sea Bubble’ and onward into the nineteenth century the British economy passed through some tough times which required innovative and monumental changes to the way in which business was conducted in the empire. As a result, banks and financial houses became much more closely linked to government.
Glyn, Hallifax, Mills & Co. was no exception. It was such a strong bank that it was more like a government institution than a business and therefore provided backing and security not unlike what is now described as government-secured bonds. The banking house became so respected that its name and credit was also good internationally.
Thomas Hallifax, the subject of this chapter, was apparently responsible for what became a new banking instrument of the day, namely ‘letters of credit’. Such was his bank’s resources and reputation that customers travelling overseas could confidently present such letters of credit to overseas banks and businesses in Europe, India, Canada and Australia and expect them to be fully honoured. This development was surely of great comfort to those emigrating to South Australia as they passed through Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, Capetown, Hobart or Sydney. Moreover, as the new colonists did business among themselves in the fledgling township of Adelaide, letters of credit in an economy where there was no unique coinage or specie were probably compulsory.
Thomas Hallifax was born into wealth but not nobility. His grandfather, John Hallifax, was an accomplished clockmaker in Barnsley who married Anna Archdale, the daughter of George Archdale of Pilley near Barnsley. In preceding generations the Hallifax line produced a number of men of distinction. Sir Thomas Hallifax, our subject’s father, was the third son of the clockmaker. He went on to become a rich banker and partner in the firm of Vere, Glyn and Hallifax and eventually became Lord Mayor of London, a Whig parliamentarian during Pitt the Younger’s years as Prime Minister, and a Knight of the Realm.
Thomas Hallifax Jnr, the subject of this chapter, was the first of the mayor’s children to survive his formative years. Sir Thomas first married Penelope Thomson at Ewell, Surrey, on 27 April 1762. Unfortunately, she died towards the end of the first year of marriage as she was giving birth to a son, who survived her by only 29 days. Sir Thomas remarried ten years later, in November 1772. On 9 February 1774 he and Margaret Savile were blessed with a son, Thomas Hallifax, after whom the street in Adelaide is named. Thomas Jnr was only 3 years old when his father was again left a widower, after his second wife also died during childbirth.
Little is known about Thomas Jnr’s early years. He was 15 when his father died on 7 February 1789 and may have already been a junior clerk in the bank. Six years later, and on the day he reached his majority in 1796, he was taken into Glyn’s as a partner. He has been described as ‘typical of the early-nineteenth century businessman – contented with an existence bounded by hard work and good living’. He had a love for ‘un-veneered, unrouged and well-furnished things’.
As the eighteenth century closed and Napoleon began to run amok, Thomas Jnr, still in his 20s and now ensconced in the bank, married Maria Staunton, a young woman from an old and long-established Warwickshire family. They had five children – three daughters and two sons.
In 1803 he was commissioned as a Major in the 2nd Regiment of the Royal London Volunteers and soon rose to Lieutenant Colonel (in 1805).
Although not a particularly flamboyant man, Thomas Hallifax, probably in the mid-1820s, began to proudly arrive each day at the front entrance to the bank in Lombard Street in his splendid ‘coach-and-four’. The other partners thought this behaviour to be too extravagant, so they asked him to retire, claiming that such ostentation was offensive to some of the customers. He immediately obliged, but after a financial crisis threatened to destroy the bank’s reserves, he was asked to return with his capital, without which they might have easily crashed heavily into bankruptcy.
Hallifax triumphantly returned to Lombard Street and blithely carried on until his death in 1850. Ironically, the bank grew even stronger, and as the industrial revolution delivered up trade and opportunity it evolved into an even larger business.
One of Hallifax’s passions, or obsessions, was his interest in yachting and travel. He was a founding member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, which formed at Thatched House in 1815, and he remained a member until the day he died. He sailed to and fro’ between England and the continent and also had the pleasure of joining the flotilla escorting King Louis XVIII back to France from Dover to Calais as Napoleon fled southward to exile in Elba.
At the time of European settlement in South Australia Hallifax was approaching his 60s and at the pinnacle of his banking career. By 1824 or thereabouts, possibly as a consequence of his partners asking him to retire, he began to buy more property in the vicinity of Chadacre Hall in Suffolk. In 1834, when the owner Vice Admiral Plampin died childless, Hallifax seized his opportunity to buy the hall itself and outlaid what some of his colleagues and acquaintances described as ‘small change’ amounting to £17,684 to purchase it outright.
The two Hallifax spinster daughters especially enjoyed Chadacre Hall after their father died. When the estate was finally sold in 1918 it comprised 2,300 acres, twenty-two farms and fifty-four houses, some of which were finally donated to tenant farmers and estate workers. Today this property is worth well in excess of £10 million. In the twentieth century it was used as an Agricultural College. In the twenty-first century it is again in private hands as a well-presented Grade 2-listed Manor.
During his time at Chadacre, which coincided almost directly with European settlement in Adelaide, Hallifax amassed thousands of acres of land and several villages. The villagers of Shimpling benefited from his generosity. Hallifax commissioned many houses for his workers, poured substantial monies into the Parish of St George’s, and in a specially innovative stroke of liberal thinking commissioned among the first purpose-built schools for girls in the country. Such a school was somewhat revolutionary for the times.
Thomas Hallifax could be described as one of the nineteenth-century ‘worthies’ of the eastern counties. He was revered by his tenants and villagers. He rose to become the High Sheriff of Suffolk; was the Senior Director in Glyn Mills & Co. at the time of his death; and an accomplished yachtsman for nearly half a century. He lies at peace in the purpose-built family mausoleum in the churchyard of St George’s.
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