How these paintings are connected to Barclays, Northallerton

As Looking Book told a fortnight ago, Bank House was built in the mid-1890s when Barclays took over the Darlington-based Backhouses Bank, and Barclays’ first manager, Thomas Russell, lived on the floors above the banking hall with his family.

Bank House in Northallerton High Street, built by Barclays around 1896 as the home for the Russells, but now deserted

His daughters, Harriet and Hilda, grew up there and became well known as artists in the town where they lived into the 1990s.

“I remember them telling me that the telephone number of Bank House was only number two because the doctor was number one,” says Jennifer Allison, who has paintings on her wall by both sisters and their father.

Harriet Gladys Russell, in the back garden of Bank House. Pictures courtesy of Colin Narramore

She’s not the only one. Another reader sends in a painting by Harriet – or “H Gladys Russell” as she signed her paintings.

“I first met the sisters in the late 1980s when I moved to Northallerton and they lived together on Hatfield Road,” he says.

This painting – “an anonymous woodland with fence scene”, as its owner describes it – appears to have featured in a sale, perhaps when the sisters' home of Elmscott in Hatfield Road was broken up, because it has biographical notes written on its reverse.

Hilda Russell, in the back garden of Bank House

The notes say they came from a family who were living prosperously near Byland Abbey in Ryedale until William de Russell was killed by the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War and had his land confiscated.

His four-year-old son, William, was taken in by one of the family’s former tenant farmers in Snilesworthdale. In later life, he settled at Osmotherley and started a lengthy line of Russells, one of whom, Elizabeth, became the second wife of William Harry Vane, the 1st Duke of Cleveland, of Raby Castle, near Staindrop, where her portrait still hangs.

A country scene by Hilda Russell, belong to Jennifer Allison

There’s a whiff of scandal about this as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that Elizabeth was the daughter of a market gardener of Newton, Yorkshire. It says that the duke’s first wife, Lady Katherine who was the daughter of the Duke of Bolton, had died in 1807, and that in 1813 the duke married the market gardener’s daughter who “had been his mistress for some years, and previously that of Thomas Coutts, the banker”.

Another branch of the Russell family settled in Northallerton, where Nathaniel was born in 1821. He became a grocer and businessman and was, according to the notes, “a man of great character and had an eye for fine things and sound investments”.

A mountain scene by Harriet Gladys Russell belonging to Jennifer Allison

It was his son, Thomas, who became Barclays first manager in Northallerton, having started his banking career with the predecessor company, Backhouses, in 1871. Bank House was built for him and his wife, Mary Ann from Brompton whose father had been the principal engineer when the first stretch of mainline railway had been built through the district in the early 1840s.

Thomas Russell, the first Barclays manager in Northallerton, for whom Bank House was built. Picture courtesy of Colin Narramore

Thomas retired in 1919 after 48 years with the bank, 26 as Northallerton branch manager, and moved to Elmscott in Hatfield Road, which was probably built for him. Mary Ann died there in 1946, aged 78, while Thomas lived on until 1951 when, aged 96, he died as the oldest resident in the town.

Harriet and Hilda inherited Elmscott. Harriet won the Royal Drawing Society’s medal when she was 18 and taught art at Shrewsbury School, a prestigious private school where the old boys include the founders of Private Eye, the broadcaster John Peel, the Python Michael Palin and the Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine.

Still Life, by Thomas Russell, the Northallerton bank manager

Hilda seems to have come to painting a little later in life but, like her sister, exhibited regularly in London.

Towards the end of their lives, they sold Elmscott, which is now a B&B, and downsized to a bungalow they built in its grounds.

According to their headstone in Northallerton cemetery, Harriet died in 1992 aged 97 and Hilda in 1995 aged 96, but their paintings are still providing pleasure to people in and around the town.