Antony Gibbs & Sons
The company's interests spanned trading in cloth, fruit, wine, guano, and nitrate, which led to it becoming involved in banking, shipping and insurance.
After leaving Exeter Grammar School, Antony Gibbs was apprenticed to merchant Nicholas Brooke, whose firm exported locally made woollen cloth to Spain.
[1]: 110–116 [2] Following his business failure in Exeter, in 1789 Antony Gibbs moved to Madrid with his wife and children, where he spent nearly 20 years acting as an agent for several merchant houses in England (including the Exwick factory) and trading in his own right.
In 1804 with the likely outbreak of war between Spain and Britain, Antony needed a new market for his goods, and he realised that he could trade with the Spanish colonies in South America.
In 1806 he chartered the Hermosa Mexicana with a shipment of textiles for the round trip from Lisbon to Lima; on the return journey importing produce from Peru into London.
With the help of his brother Sir Vicary Gibbs (1751–1820), Antony was named as one of four Commissioners in London for dealing with Portuguese ships and goods sent to England following Spain's invasion of Portugal in the Peninsula War.
[1]: 220 : 353 Antony Gibbs died in 1815, and on his father's death his son William returned home to run the business with his brother Henry.
[5]: 127–129 In the 1820s, taking advantage of the break up of the Spanish colonial empire, the firm seized opportunities to trade with South America, and opened offices in Lima (1822), Guayaquil and Arequipa (1823), and Valparaiso (1826).
[6] The company's fortune changed in 1842 when their agent in South America signed contracts with the Peruvian and Bolivian governments to purchase consignments of guano.
The company were not the only foreign firm to sign a contract with Peru to export guano, but they were the most important because they were able to loan the largest amount of money to the Peruvian government.
[7]: 3 William called it 'an act of insanity' because of the huge loans needed to facilitate the business; but, rich in nitrogen and phosphate, thanks to the Gibbs' promotion of guano in Britain, it soon became accepted by farmers as an essential fertiliser.
[5]: 28 The National Trust asserts that 'the firm used enslaved labour to extract the guano before slavery was outlawed in Peru in 1854; their labour also included convicts, conscripts and army deserters', and that from 1842 to 1861 when they were operating their guano business, 'workers’ conditions, including pay and medical care, improved under Gibbs’s control, coupled with pressure from external observers.
His share of profits in the company allowed him to purchase land in what is now North Somerset and build the property now owned by the National Trust, Tyntesfield.
They invested in government bonds, and also expanded their business by exporting nitrate, copper, wool, cotton, rubber and other goods from South America.
[14] The Tambopata Rubber Syndicate used a form of bonded labour, which meant their workforce of 300-500 indigenous people were given benefits such as food or accommodation, which they were charged interest for and then had to pay off, leaving them in debt, even after they'd died.
'[13]: 159 By 1912 Antony Gibbs and Sons decided to gradually liquidate the business as they didn't feel they could compete with other rubber producing companies, and ended up making a significant loss.
George Junior was married to William Gibbs' sister, Harriet, in 1814, and became head of the firm with his father’s death in 1818, when another Bristol merchant, Robert Bright became a partner.
The company had originally made its money by being involved in the slavery economy, as merchants importing slave grown sugar from the West Indies.
[18][5]: 133 By the 1880s Gibbs, Bright and Co. still imported sugar and owned plantations in the Caribbean,[19] but its main business was as a leading shipping and insurance agent, having opened an office in Liverpool in 1805.
She returned to Liverpool from Australia, and lay idle at Birkenhead for five years before she was acquired for £6,500 by Antony Gibbs & Sons for bulk trade between Britain and San Francisco.
[24][25] Having dissolved the company in 2005 and fully absorbed the assets ito their group structure, HSBC later sold their commercial insurance broking arm to Marsh McLennan in 2012, many of which include the Gibbs name.
