The story of the Brandt family’s international trading and banking activities is told by Peter Augustus Brandt who has based his research on an annotated copy of a genealogy produced by Dr Erik Amburger in 1937.

The merchant, Paul Brandt, moved from Stettin (now in Poland) to Hamburg in 1686. His business prospered and four generations later, fifteen-year-old Wilhelm Brandt was apprenticed to the merchant Alexander Christian Becker in Archangel. Trading flourished in a variety of commodities including timber, flax, skins and sugar, and in 1805 Wilhelm’s
older brother Emanuel Heinrich moved to London and set up the agency for the Archangel business which subsequently became the family bank.

Peter Augustus Brandt (ninth generation) was born in 1931, and after Eton, Cambridge and national service in the Royal Navy joined Wm Brandt’s in 1954, becoming managing director in 1966. After the bank’s successes in the 1960s, it was taken over by National and Grindlays and eventually sold in 1972, 160 years after its founding. With over 70 illustrations, many in colour, including family portraits, houses, documents and artefacts from the archives. Maps of Germany, the Baltic, England and Archangel show places with which the family and its businesses were associated.