Antony Gibbs & Sons — BrandWiki

Antony Gibbs & Sons

Overview

Antony Gibbs & Sons

services
type	Partnership (1808–1973) Public limited company (1973–1981)
fate	Dissolved
successor	HSBC Commercial Insurance (1981–2012) Marsh & McLennan (2012–present)
founder	Antony Gibbs William Gibbs Henry Gibbs
defunct	June 22, 2005
locations	London Bristol Liverpool Melbourne Lima Valparaíso
area served	Global
key people	Alban Gibbs Vicary Gibbs

Antony Gibbs & Sons was a British trading company, which was founded by Antony Gibbs in 1808 in London. The company's interests spanned trading in cloth, fruit, wine, guano, and nitrate, which led to it becoming involved in banking, shipping and insurance. Having been family-owned from its foundation, by the turn of the 20th century it was focused on banking and insurance rather than import and export.

Floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1973, it was bought by HSBC in 1981 and formed the basis of its insurance broking arm, now part of global insurance company Marsh McLennan.

Antony Gibbs (1756–1815)

Early life

Antony Gibbs was born in Exeter, Devon; he was the third son of Dr. George Abraham Gibbs (1718–1794), from Clyst St George, Devon, Chief Surgeon at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. After leaving Exeter Grammar School, Antony Gibbs was apprenticed to merchant Nicholas Brooke, whose firm exported locally made woollen cloth to Spain. Brooke sent Antony to Madrid, where he became fluent in Spanish.

Guano trade

First contracts

In the 1820s, taking advantage of the break up of the Spanish colonial empire, the firm seized opportunities to trade with South America, and opened offices in Lima (1822), Guayaquil and Arequipa (1823), and Valparaiso (1826). The firm exported English goods to South America, and imported on commission to Europe goods such as cocoa, cotton, and bark (later exports included copper, tin, silver, alpaca and wool). The firm also started insuring goods and accepting financial deposits and securities on behalf of other clients. By 1832 their business in South America, as well as their merchant banking in London, were doing well, and over the next ten years the company was consistently in profit as it became the principal firm in London trading on the Pacific coast.[6]

The company's fortune changed in 1842 when their agent in South America signed contracts with the Peruvian and Bolivian governments to purchase consignments of guano. The company were not the only foreign firm to sign a contract with Peru to export guano, but they were the most important because they were able to loan the largest amount of money to the Peruvian government.[7] William called it 'an act of insanity' because of the huge loans needed to facilitate the business; but, rich in nitrogen and phosphate, thanks to the Gibbs' promotion of guano in Britain, it soon became accepted by farmers as an essential fertiliser.[6]

William Gibbs and profits made from the guano trade

Between 1842 and 1847 their contracts with the Peruvian and Bolivian Governments for importing guano made net proceeds of £831,006 and £126,915 respectively. From 1850 they were dealing purely with the Peruvian Government.[5]

The National Trust asserts that 'the firm used enslaved labour to extract the guano before slavery was outlawed in Peru in 1854; their labour also included convicts, conscripts and army deserters', and that from 1842 to 1861 when they were operating their guano business, 'workers' conditions, including pay and medical care, improved under Gibbs's control, coupled with pressure from external observers.'[8] However, Johnson asserts that: 'Like many foreign merchants during the nineteenth century, Gibbs were removed from the guano extraction process. They had very little involvement in the physical loading and digging of guano at the islands', and she goes on to describe who the Peruvian Government contracted for the guano extraction.[7]

The firm was importing 100,000 tons of guano a year, buying at about $15 and selling for $50 a ton. They had a monopoly on the trade which peaked between 1850 and 1856 when they imported over 214,700 tons of guano into Britain alone.

At its height every year between 300 and 400 ships were leaving the

Acquisition of Gibbs, Bright & Co. and the SS Great Britain

Gibbs, Bright and Co., Bristol

In 1881 Antony Gibbs and Sons absorbed a company which originated in Bristol in the C18th and by 1839 was trading as Gibbs, Bright and Co. In 1789 Antony Gibbs' elder brother, George Gibbs (1753–1818) had entered into partnership with his cousin Samuel Munckley, a merchant trading with the West Indies in slave-grown produce, based in Bristol, but also originally from Exeter.[17] He was joined by his son, George Gibbs (1769–1863) in 1802. The company was renamed George Gibbs and Son in 1808. George Junior was married to William Gibbs' sister, Harriet, in 1814, and became head of the firm with his father's death in 1818, when another Bristol merchant, Robert Bright became a partner. The company had originally made its money by being involved in the slavery economy, as merchants importing slave grown sugar from the West Indies. With the abolition of slavery in 1834 George Gibbs and Robert Bright received compensation for some plantations on which they were mortgagees, or which they managed on behalf of the Bright family.[18][5]

By the 1880s Gibbs, Bright and Co. still imported sugar and owned plantations in the Caribbean,[19] but its main business was as a leading shipping and insurance agent, having opened an office in Liverpool in 1805.[20] In 1852 Gibbs, Bright and Co., had purchased the SS Great Britain (originally launched in 1843) for carrying emigrants to Australia sailing out of Liverpool. However, by 1876 the SS Great Britain had become outdated and emigrant numbers were falling. She returned to Liverpool from Australia, and lay idle at Birkenhead for five years before she was acquired for £6,500 by Antony Gibbs & Sons for bulk trade between Britain and San Francisco.

Merging of the two firms

1881 was the year in which Antony Gibbs and Sons absorbed Gibbs, Bright and Co., and the two companies became one. From 1882 the SS Great Britain carried mainly Welsh coal and wheat. In 1886 she was badly damaged in a storm off Cape Horn and beyond economic repair, so the company sold her to the Falkland Islands Company.[21]

In 1881 Gibbs, Bright and Co. had branches in Liverpool, Australia and Dunedin, New Zealand, and once absorbed into Antony Gibbs and Sons, the company established further branches across Australia. They established steamer services between Australia and New Zealand, and in the 1890s the Intercolonial Steamship Company serving Australian coastal ports. The company closed the Bristol office in 1887, which was primarily trading with the West Indies and transferred their staff to Liverpool. The Liverpool office closed in 1909, with staff transferring to London where their business was on the Baltic chartering ships for their nitrate business in Europe and the U.S.[5]

They branched out into many other areas of business, and by 1963 the company was the largest trading partnership in the Southern Hemisphere with interests in mining, shipping, farming activities (with several million acres of sheep and cattle stations), insurance, building materials, timber and merchant banking