Pip Marshall explores the forgotten story of one of the first female capitalists, and one of EC1’s most impressive historical figures.
Maybe it’s because I used to walk through Bunhill Cemetery on my daily commute that I now think of it as an economic dividing line in EC1. This oasis of mortality separates the Magic Circle law firms on the Bunhill Row side from the software startups on the City Road side.
You can gauge the ambition of the young lawyers by the crispness of their white shirts, and the techie types by the tailoring of their t-shirts. What both tribes share is drive and a desire to make money. In that light, Bunhill Cemetery is a good vantage point to survey contemporary London.
Naturally, being a cemetery, it’s a good place to look back in time too, and feast your eyes. It has an abundance of heavy hitters, so much so that I’m not even going to mention Blake, Bunyan and Bayes.
But in fact, it’s a small burial ground where one of EC1’s most impressive historical figures lies at rest. In the unassuming Quaker Gardens, in the shadow of the monolithic Braithwaite House, a woman called Joan Dant is buried.
Born in Spitalfields in 1631, she’s certainly not one of the household names of Bunhill Cemetery, but she had a career of which local aspirants would be deeply envious.
It all begins with unfortunate circumstances: the death of her husband, leaving Joan to fend for herself financially. In the face of adversity, she set herself up as a pedlar. You’ve got to love the term pedlar. What does it mean? Well, it means that she hit the streets and started selling. Fabrics, hosiery and haberdashery in this case, door to door. Flash forward to the end of her life, and she left behind an estate of £9,150, roughly £1.7 million today.
It wasn’t long before she’d progressed from pounding pavements to wholesale trade on a much larger scale. Her executors’ accounts show that there were debts owed to her by contacts in Paris and Brussels, an indication of the breadth of her enterprise. We also know that alongside her main trade, she made shrewd investments, holding stakes in five trading ships, lead mine shares and East India Company bonds.
As any career-minded local will know, it’s not just what you know but who you know, and connections were key to Joan’s success. This was all underpinned by her devout Quakerism, and she developed a reputation and network commensurate with her piety. Fellow Quakers welcomed her with open arms, and this was a boon to business.
Her faith underpinned her whole approach to life, and not least money. She was known to be incredibly frugal, so much so that a friend helping her prepare her will was astonished to discover she had such a fortune.
In letters that Dant wrote, she set out her desire to help poor people, orphans and widows, and the fund that she set up to help poor Quakers was reportedly still making grants in 1844, 129 years after she died.
So Joan Dant, a woman you may never have heard of, epitomises EC1 and its indomitable, industrious spirit. Regardless of which side of Bunhill Cemetery you’re on, the besuited or the t-shirted, aspiring folk of all stripes and shades should use Joan Dant as a template not only for their success but also for their generosity.
