ABSTRACT
Economists and economic historians sometimes assume that the poor don’t save, or don’t
save much.2 Controversies about the trade-off between economic ‘justice’ and economic growth turn, in part at least, on this assumption. Social reformers, though, have long sought to make the poor save. The early savings bank movement is an important part of the story. That movement can be traced back to the bank set up by Reverend Henry Duncan in the Scottish village of Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire in 1810. In the following decades hundreds of savings banks were established throughout the United Kingdom. Ireland’s first savings bank dates from just a few years later, and by 1830 there were eighty-one. Still, the charitable savings bank movement was far more successful in Britain than in Ireland, where the famine and a series of highly-publicized frauds impeded its progress (Pratt 1845; Porter 1849; Black
1960a: 152-3; O’Shea 1989).3
