Description:Amongst the Estate and Agency Records surviving in the Sutherland Papers are many documents relating to the Savings Banks founded on the Trentham and Lilleshall estates in the nineteenth century. These banks were intended for use by both individuals and groups of people with the aim of offerring services to local people rather than to make money.
Why were the banks in Lilleshall and Trentham established?
The growth of banking outside London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was driven by the practical requirements of industrialists and the need to access capital in a fast developing economy. Small deposits by working class people were not the market which banks were intended to serve. Indeed, Loch appears to have established Trentham and Lilleshall Savings Banks with more idealistic aims. In a letter dated 30th November 1817 he refers to ‘the great advantages’ of Trentham Savings Bank for those ‘becoming contributors to it’. He suggests that if Trentham Savings Bank was a success it would 'lend to ameliorate the habits and improve the morals of the people more than any other institution’.
Trentham Savings Bank
George Granville Leveson-Gower (1758-1833), the second Marquis of Stafford, was the patron of Trentham Savings Bank which was managed by a Committee of Trustees including James Loch. The Bank was opened on 27th December 1817 for the inhabitants of the Parish of Trentham, and the tenants of the Marquis of Stafford living in Newcastle, Stone and Stoke-upon-Trent.