Bank Holidays - And Much Else

The fact that it is a hundred years since the Bank Holidays Act was passed, and that bank holidays were for many years thereafter known as St Lubbock’s Days, in honour of their inventor, is of relatively minor interest when one enquires more closely into the career of that remarkable and now strangely forgotten man.

For Sir John Lubbock, the first Lord Avebury, was a Victorian outstanding even in a period when diversity of achievement was perhaps more general than it is today.

He was a banker, who joined his father in the family bank, Lubbock, Forster & Co, at the age of fourteen, his father having removed him from an Eton still, in his view, too concentrated on the classics to be a source of useful education.

He quickly became prominent in the banking community; and when, much later, the Institute of Bankers was formed in 1878, he was its obvious first choice as first President.

But he was also a scientist, taking in his stride anthropology, geology, entomology and botany - a scientist whom Darwin rated one of the two men in England - Huxley was the other - whose opinion he valued most.

He was a prolific writer, too, whose published works ranged from The Origin of Civilisation to Coins and Currency. And, as a member of Parliament, he was an active social reformer, concerned, like some of the best of his contemporaries, with improving the lot of the working classes.

The list of his public offices is monotonously long - it includes Presidency of the Entomological Society, of the Royal Anthropological Institute, of the British Association, of the Linnean Society, and of the Royal Statistical Society, as well as the Vice-Presidency, three times, of the Royal Society.

Indeed, the available record of his life has something of the monotony of unbroken achievement and unbroken virtue.