Lives in Cricket No 38 - Lionel Robinson

16 The early life of Lionel Robinson extremely shrewd operator on the market here and in Adelaide, and he was backed up by ‘Bill’ Clark, a most sagacious dealer and daring speculator.’ In 1897, the partnership transferred to the Adelaide stock exchange, where the profits to be made speculating in gold mining shares were larger than those in Melbourne and, two years later, Lionel dissolved the partnership and transferred his centre of operation across the globe to England, joining the London Stock Exchange in search of yet more favourable trading conditions. However, Robinson felt the absence of his partner keenly and, after no more than three or four years, made a trip back to Australia in a successful attempt to persuade Clark to join him in London and resurrect their partnership. Within a couple of years, Lionel Robinson, Clark & Co. was the largest broking house in the Australian section of the mining share market and the pair had made a large amount of money, trading aggressively in shares for companies such as the Kalgoorlie gold mine Boulder Deep Levels Ltd. The company also became drawn into the options market and made large profits engaging in agency work for Australian stockbrokers. Before long Robinson, Clark & Co. ceased to be merely a firm of speculators and became more of a finance house dealing largely with the mining industry and offering a wide range of services to prospective clients. They also became, more or less, ‘loan sharks’, lending large amounts of money at high rates of interest to clients who were not always financially viable; a notorious case being that of Stanley Rowe, whose fraudulent activities were uncovered by Robinson, leading to a ten year jail sentence for the former and the return of a loan of £15,000 to the latter. Robinson & Clark suffered a setback when the boom in the mining of gold in Western Australia collapsed in 1901-3, and they were forced to diversify 16 16 It has been proposed that they felt obliged to ‘clean up their act’ after criticisms of their business activities were published. The unfavourable comments were described as ‘unsubstantiated’, but it is, perhaps, revealing 1901 census: the Robinson family in Prince Arthur Road, Hampstead.