British banks and their Aesop’s fables: organizational memories of the governance and management of financial crisis

Using the framework developed by Scranton and Fridenson, this chapter explores the way British banks invested in their active learning memory, focusing on the visual cues used to remember stories about managerial behaviour and the narrative surrounding images of individual bankers, in particular, general managers of joint stock banks. What do artefacts tell us about the way banks remembered their past and the lessons of past crises? What stories are told through them about the person and the bank’s past performance, failure, and financial crisis? What morals or lessons about governance can be found in them? We draw upon the printed and archival literature to reveal the nature of the exchanges that were had over these objects and about these characters. We examine two key individuals and how they were remembered, in particular their role in steering their respective organizations through crisis.