Guinness Mahon - History

History

The firm was founded as a land agency in Dublin in 1836 by barrister Robert Rundell Guinness, a great-nephew of the brewer Arthur Guinness, and John Ross Mahon, an estate agent. A London office opened in 1873, closed in 1916 during World War I and then re-opened again in 1923. This became Guinness Mahon Holdings, which merged with Lewis & Peat Ltd in 1974, forming Guinness Peat (now Guinness Peat Group).

The Group ran into difficulties in the late 1980s and demerged into three parts: the Guinness Mahon investment banking business, Fenchurch Insurance and the off-shore investment activities. The offshore investment activities in Australia and New Zealand (still known as Guinness Peat Group) were bought by Brierley Investments Limited (a business controlled by Sir Ron Brierley) in 1990 and the Guinness Mahon investment banking business was acquired by Bank of Yokohama in 1991 and then sold on to Investec in 1998.

Meanwhile Fenchurch Insurance merged with Lowndes Lambert in 1997 to create Lambert Fenchurch, then with Heath Group in 1999 to form Heath Lambert and then with Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. in 2011 to form Gallagher Heath.

Read more about this topic:  Guinness Mahon

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?
    David Hume (1711–1776)

    For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)