Kettering
in Northamptonshire is sometimes called The Town That Gotch Built. The Gotch
family were prominent in the town for 150 years, but in many ways my 3x great
grandmother’s cousin Mary Anne Davis married the Gotch who made the most.
John Cooper Gotch was the only
surviving child of thirteen of Thomas Henry Gotch, a Leicestershire farmer who
brought the family to Kettering and
started making boots there. Thomas Gotch was a deacon of his local Baptist
chapel in Kettering and influential
in the founding of the Baptist Missionary Society in October 1792. His
financial support of its early missionaries developed into a fully fledged
banking operation, which was grown when John Gotch took over the running of
both the financial and footwear operations. (John in turn handed them on to two
of his sons, who – initially at least – made a bit of a hash of things. But that’s a story for another time.)
Gotch boots were originally made as piecework in the homes of the
bootmakers – this factory in the centre of Kettering was designed later in the
nineteenth century by John Cooper Gotch’s grandson, renowned architect John
Alfred Gotch (1852-1942) – another reason why Kettering is The Town That Gotch
Built
With John at the helm things went
from strength to strength. The bootmaking factory employed 500 people at its
height and the bank had added an insurance operation for the benefit of
missionaries for whom such earthly protection could be hard to find. At the
time of his death the Gotch assets extended beyond the firm’s core activities to
a tannery and a brewery.
The bank was at first a
partnership, Keep, Gotch & Cobb, only later known as Gotch & Sons. In
1812, when it was still called Keep & Gotch’s Bank, it had the embarrassing
experience of being broken into without knowing it. A gang led by a local ne’er-do-well
called Huffey White entered the premises of the Kettering bank so easily and
with so little trace that Messrs Keep and Gotch were completely unaware that Huffey
had been there at all. It was only some time later that it came to light; when
White was arrested for another burglary, one of his accomplices turned king’s
evidence and confessed to the earlier crime.
Even then, Gotch and Keep were
incredulous – surely such a thing was not possible without their knowledge? Only
when the informant recited information about accounts and balances which he could
only have known by reading ledgers kept in the bank did the owners accept the
truth of the matter.
An 18th century iron chest used by the Bank of Scotland;
and
a wrought iron chest from the 1820s,
this one made by James Gray of Edinburgh.
Safes in the modern sense began to appear in the 1830s and 1840s.
Apart from their tidiness as
burglars, another reason for their invisibility was that they didn’t take
anything. As they were searching the premises for loot, the gang came across a
big old iron chest which they couldn’t open. Rather naively, they imagined that
it must contain gold, in the manner of a pirate’s treasure chest; but with a
certain criminal logic they decided that, since they had broken in so easily
this time, they would slip away leaving everything as they had found it, and
come back again another time with a selection of suitable keys.
It was a good plan in essence,
and might well have worked had Huffey White not soon afterwards been fingered
by around forty witnesses for the theft of money and papers from the strongbox
of the Leeds-London mail coach. White and his accomplice Richard Kendall were
arrested, despite their violent resistance, in a house cellar in Liverpool
the following April. They were to be tried by Judge Baron Thomson, who two months earlier, in January 1813, sent 17
Luddites to the gallows with the no-nonsense remarks, “It is of
infinite importance to society that no mercy should be shown to you. It is
important that your sentence should be speedily carried out and it is but right
to tell you that you have but a short time to remain in this world. I trust not
only those who now hear me but all without these walls to whom the tiding of
your fall may come, will be warned of your fate.”
White and Kendall cannot have
held out much hope for their own future.For this crime there was no turning king’s evidence. They were
found convincingly guilty by the jury, and sentenced by the learned judge to death by hanging. Which rather put an end to any plans to return to
Gotch’s bank for another crack.
A one-pound banknote
issued by John Keep, John C. Gotch & Co in the
1810s
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