The Sutherland Bank wants you to think it’s always been here, which, given that it was founded in 1632, is a very easy thing to believe. The Sutherland Bank wants you to believe that it only ever does the sensible thing, and its dour and steady approach to everything it does in public helps make a persuasive case. More than anything else the Sutherland Bank wants you to believe they’ll always be around, and that that’s a good thing, and they’ve carefully crafted a sense of inevitability to that effect. Despite their seeming omnipresence, the Sutherland Bank is a business like any other, and when you treat it that way its vulnerabilities come further into the light. Just as there are challenges in its future there are stories in its past, some that they have spent centuries keeping to themselves. In this two-part essay we will seek to bring just some of them into the open.
The power of the Sutherland family in Challaid stretches far back beyond the bank they would eventually found, with the clan involved in the twelfth-century wars of independence that would bring Scotland its nationhood and the family its first taste of real power. The Sutherland clan was given extensions to its existing land holdings on the north coast as reward for their role which included Challaid, then a port town with a reputation as wild and unpleasant, less than a century removed from bloody slaughter over its control that ended with the ragtag army of Raghnall MacGill saving it. It was in this moment that we witness the first example of the Sutherlands’ brilliant instinct for politics. Rather than attempt to impose control over his new domain Dand Sutherland indulged the unruliness of its people, and so won them over, a stepfather who turned a blind eye.
For generations thereafter the Sutherland name pops up only occasionally, rulers of a large swathe of the northern Highlands that they didn’t really control, obviously wealthy and politically influential but never at the forefront. It’s always been assumed this was simply a family trait, a genetic quirk in a clan that loved power and money but loathed the attention it brought. Instead we should look at the Sutherland attitude of secrecy, of being the power behind the throne and never sitting on it, as a product of their environment. The family didn’t become who they are in a vacuum; they were shaped by Challaid, a city that has, since its very beginning, cherished its isolation from the south, its separateness. The family have lived for centuries in a culture which stubbornly clings to the Gaelic language to be different from the rest of Scotland, that has its own poetry and storytelling and songs and sports so that it can look in the mirror each morning and see nothing of the rest of the nation. The Sutherlands, like almost all the people of Challaid, don’t want to be like us. They have always looked at anywhere south as bad and suspicious, the Gaelic word for southern, deasach, being appropriated for use there as a mild insult. Those from what we call the central belt, and they refer to sniffily as “the south,” have always been seen not as countrymen or friends but as rivals or obstacles. Even Inverness, barely ninety miles of rail line south through the glens, is viewed as being suspiciously Anglo these days. Challaid has always looked north and west for allies. North to the northern isles and Scandinavia, west to the Western Isles and Ireland. It has, as a quirk of its early involvement, been an enthusiastic home for large numbers of Caledonians. Anywhere but south.
The key to their current influence lies in the century and a half between the arrival in Challaid of Queen Iona, The Gaelic Queen, in 1545 and the first Caledonian expedition in 1698. The additional power gained by the family’s support of the queen’s bloody power grab made them rich to the point that, in 1632, Lord Cruim Sutherland formed the bank we know today. The official story, as told in the subtle and sometimes rather dull advertising the bank engages in that’s supposed to foster that sense of reliability, no bright colors or whacky taglines for them, is that Cruim wanted to help several local people in Challaid to set up businesses trading with the rest of Scotland and other North Atlantic nations and so set up the bank as a temporary measure to help them out. What a noble, gracious and friendly chap that makes him sound. The story tends to stop there, simply a man fortunate enough to be able to help some friends and nothing more to see, the bank’s subsequent success presumably an unrequested reward for his goodness. Taking a closer look at the few companies he initially bankrolled and what they meant is difficult because the Sutherland Bank doesn’t share that sort of information from their extensive archives and extracting any secret from Challaid is virtually impossible. What we can see is what people in the south thought those deals were by accessing the previously private Buchanan collection, a collection of letters and files from the desk of the long-serving seventeenth-century leader of the house in the parliament, Lord Buchanan of Stirling.
In his letter to Prince Robert, Lord Buchanan speculates that the Sutherland Bank derived much of its income in its first ten years from four deals, one with Brochan Campbell, one with the Portnancon Shipping Company, one with Einar Asbjornson in Iceland and another with the Purcell family in Ireland. Brochan Campbell was, to put it generously, a notorious swindler and crook based in Challaid, the Portnancon Shipping Company made its fortune shipping slaves, Asbjornson was at the time a wanted man in both his own country and ours for murder and theft and Gerard Purcell was a pirate turned land grabber. These people may well have been friends of Cruim Sutherland, PSC and Campbell were based in Challaid, Asbjornson lived there for at least two years when on the run and Purcell docked there often in his seafaring days, but it’s easy to guess why the story of the bank’s early clients doesn’t go into any detail about who they were.
The first fifty to sixty years of the bank’s existence can be separated from the rest because of a reasonable difference in attitude. In those first two generations almost everything they did seemed to be full of risk, while almost everything since has been centered on the steady consolidation of those successes. Having created a bank that quickly came to dominate Challaid commerce, in the 1650s it expanded south in a brazen attempt to place its wealth close to the throne and parliament in Edinburgh. Priorities and policies began to evolve again as the bank’s influence grew, and it’s almost possible to see the strings of history being pulled when we look back through the records of laws passed in that era. A law in 1662 to place a tariff on money loaned from outside of Scotland of sixteen percent. A law in 1664 to limit any financial institutions lending in relation to its holdings. A law in 1669 stating that no financial institution should be given lending power in Scotland without parliamentary permission. That last one was crucial, meaning that no new bank or institution could be formed without all of the Lords in parliament being given full details of it, which meant the then Lord Sutherland knew what everyone else was going to try to do before they could do it. It was said these laws were passed to protect investors from a series of banking collapses that happened in the central belt in the decade previously. Letters in the Buchanan collection suggest at least two of those banks collapsed because of aggressive moves of the Sutherlands, costing many small investors and businesses in Glasgow and Edinburgh their livelihood. Buchanan’s letters also suggest that the family had been making significant donations to the crown since the days of The Gaelic Queen and had never stopped.
It was in 1698 that the bank pulled off the last of its great gambles. An expedition to Panama had been proposed to create a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific and was viewed in Challaid as a risky investment that the government, who backed it, could scarcely afford. Many thought they were playing with the nation’s future, the economy already close to ruin, and records suggest Lord Niall Sutherland was one of the doubters. Two debates were held on what became the Caledonian expedition and Lord Sutherland spoke against it in the first and didn’t attend the second. Not long before the mission was set to depart the Sutherland Bank, at remarkably short notice, stepped in and funded a massive expansion to the numbers sailing, assigning its own people. As we know, those people included the likes of Alexander Barton and Gregor Kidd, brutal former pirates, or privateers if you prefer the official version, who would lead the ships to their violent and ultimately successful conclusion, earning themselves knighthoods and legitimacy and the bank untold fortunes.
The Sutherland Bank was set. Political power was guaranteed, and a constant flow of income merely needed to be protected by keeping up with the times, the need to gamble on the future now behind them. In part two we’ll look at the bank’s more recent history, including the power it continues to wield over what is supposed to be an independent parliament. While their political influence has been somewhat curtailed by the abolition of the Lords in 1952 and its replacement with an elected second chamber in Edinburgh, other routes to influence have been found. We’ll also examine how the Sutherland family themselves have changed in the modern world, but how in many ways they, and the city they still call home, have hardly changed at all.