I’ve long been fascinated by this photo. Taken, as I write this, exactly 125 years ago on 3rd February 1900, and about half a mile from where I sit, it shows an anxious crowd around the ominously closed doors of the freshly crashed Dumbell’s Bank in Douglas, Isle of Man.
The downfall of Dumbell’s was a hugely chaotic and disturbing event in Manx society of the time. The bank held the accounts for some of the Isle of Man’s biggest employers. The Steam Packet, the railway company, the main mining operator, even the Manx Government itself all paid their workers with money invested in Dumbell’s.
Henry Bloom Noble, whose instincts in these things were always pretty savvy, seemed to have Dumbell’s sized up years before the crash. When he sold a state-of-the-art water works to Douglas Commissioners (as they were then called) he refused to accept a cheque drawn on Dumbell’s Bank.
It was a ghastly dance of fiscal hubris that had been danced before 1900 and danced again many times since. But the Dumbell’s crash isn’t what I want to write about here. It’s been documented in fine detail elsewhere, and is a fascinating tale, well worth investigating.
What I want to talk about is this photograph. This particular copy is the one available from the Manx National Heritage’s excellent (and with the potential to be even more excellent) iMuseum. At first glance it looks like the sort of photojournalism you would expect to see from such a dramatic event. The high angle shows that it was taken from an upstairs window across the road from the holed-beneath-the-waterline bank. However, the cameras of 1900, although capable of being quite lightweight, were expensive. specialist bits of kit. Few people had immediate access to them. So how was somebody able to be in the right place at the right time to simply lean out of a window and snap the drama playing out below them in the February frost?
The clue lies in the signature on the edge of the picture. The Keig family had a renowned photography business in the Isle of Man from the 19th to the 21st century. In 1900, they operated out of Number 6, Prospect Hill – immediately across the road from the main office of the doomed Dumbell’s Bank. What a splendid twist of fate that as the Bank was in its death throes, they could hardly have had a neighbour better equipped to record the grimness for posterity.
Being taken by a professional using the best equipment available certainly helps the picture enormously, but there are so many aspects of the raw material that make it so striking. Using the zoom facility of the iMuseum, you can move among the sharply in-focus faces in the crowd, like a time traveller. The viewer has a sense of the deep worry, the pit-of-the-stomach anxiety. Depression and bankruptcy lurk in the shadows of this cold Saturday morning long ago. There’s no sense of panic though, no hysteria. There’s a policeman at the edge of the throng. His body language seems relaxed, as he chats to some other men. Everybody seems to be facing financial catastrophe with an admirable mix of sang-froid and traa dy liooar.
Another remarkable thing about this picture, that’s true of many vintage shots of local places, is the number of details that remain recognisable today. The heavy gate and the curve of the cast iron railings as Prospect Hill starts to rise are still visible today. The notice board that hung on the ironwork is long gone, but just a couple of hours ago, I inspected those railings, and the positions of the fixtures can still be made out.
The building itself continued as a banking hall for another century and more. Changes in the way people bank meant that it closed in 2013 and has lain empty since. Prospect Hill has a building that resembles a wedding cake at the summit and at the foot. Sadly, the lower wedding cake now looks like Miss Havisham’s, crumbling grandeur rotting genteelly. I’m sure some canny investor could do something sumptuous with it. But with the main entrance boarded up and padlocked, as you pass Dumbell’s Bank today, you can almost see the ghosts of those stricken unpaid workers in the picture, waiting on the steps for wages that will never arrive.
You can find out much more at: https://www.imuseum.im/
Mark Trevor Owen 