Set alongside John Monk’s roguish charm, his eldest brother Charles always seemed rather stuffy and uptight to me, unfairly so perhaps. He may not have had John’s exciting stories, but he had a strong sense of civic duty and could regularly be found on committees or supporting local initiatives. Even far into his retirement, Charles remained an influential figure locally.
In 1864 however, to Charles’s horror, he was implicated in a major fraud, albeit incorrectly. The actuary at the Neston Savings Bank was discovered to have embezzled funds for almost twenty years, and newspapers voiced understandable outrage that this had not been identified earlier. As the finger-pointing began, the Liverpool Mail named Charles as a wealthy trustee of the bank and implied he had been short-sighted both in his eyes and in his financial governance of the bank. Horrified that his good name was being tarnished, Charles wrote to correct the newspaper, stating that he was neither a trustee nor had ever had anything to do with the bank. The newspaper’s printed apology was lengthy but with a note of sarcasm when conveying the good news that Charles’s eyesight is not failing.
We rejoice to learn, and from himself, that our worthy friend, Mr. Monk – whom we have known and respected for half-a-century – is not now labouring under any defect of vision, but is still able, even in his 84th year, to write to us without spectacles and, we may add, in a far better handwriting than 999 out of every 1000 of our correspondents.
With what was presumably intended as tongue-in-cheek misogyny, the same paper was also critical of the wider management structure of the bank when the fraudster comes to court:
The hideous Clerical mismanagement of the Neston Savings Bank,… is sufficient to confirm and strengthen the profound conviction we (in common with the London Guardian) have long felt, to wit, that, as a body, Clergymen are the very worst business people in the world – far worse than Women.
Oddly, Charles’s good eyesight seems to be something in which he did indeed take pride. Slipped in among other papers from the family are two slips of paper, prepared when Charles was in his 92nd and 93rd year, to what end I have no idea, other than a quiet sense of pride.
Neston May 1873
This is a specimen of my writing, without the aid of glasses, in the 93rd year of my age.
Chas Monk, late commander of Her Majesty’s Quarantine Guard Ship, Liverpool
