The House of Brunet

A merchant bank before there were banks

The Brunets did not become bankers; they began as bankers and added factories. The earliest hard evidence we recovered — the general balance of the Casa de Comercio José y Francisco Brunet, 31 October 1823, transcribed in Gárate Ojanguren's study from the original notarial protocol — reads like a bank's, two generations before the family chartered one.

Of a 4.91M-real balance sheet, 2.09M reales — 43% — was customer current accounts: third-party deposits the house held and lent against. That is a deposit-taking bank operating inside a merchant firm. The rest is a diversified trading book — tobacco-monopoly financing (10%), merchandise, real estate, credit paper, and ships — carried on strikingly little debt: liabilities were just 16% of assets. Net capital stood at 4.14M reales de vellón (≈1.0M pesetas). A cash-rich, conservative, deposit-funded house — the profile that would later self-finance an entire industrial estate.

The banking franchise then formalised and grew. In 1862 the family co-founded the Banco de San Sebastián, a chartered note-issuing bank (1862–1874): Fernando de Brunet was one of just four men named in its royal charter, and five Brunets sat among the founding shareholders — a stake the family then carried into the Banco de España for two more generations (the bank's own charter and 23 semi-annual balance sheets survive, free, in that archive). The commercial house recapitalised repeatedly: “José Brunet y Cía” with a 1.1M-peseta fondo social in 1889, doubled to 2M, and from 31 December 1901 “Brunet y Cía, Sociedad en Comandita,” with capital reaching 4M pesetas across three declared divisions — banca, textiles, and especulación — the bank run by Luis Gaytán de Ayala, the mill by Guillermo Brunet (our direct ancestor).

A house that ran for two centuries on ledgers, correspondence networks, and the judgement of whom to extend credit to.

Correspondents in three capitals, and a windfall from a defeat

By its maturity the little San Sebastián house kept company with giants. Its named correspondents were the National City Bank of New York, the Midland Bank of London, and the Crédit Lyonnais — a provincial private bank clearing paper across three financial capitals.

Its single best asset came disguised as a loss. When the state nationalised note-issue in 1874, the family's stake in the Banco de San Sebastián — the note-issuing bank they had co-founded in 1862 — was swapped at par into Banco de España shares. Those shares went on to pay dividends averaging 21.7% a year, never below 16% in 44 years, and rose to nearly six times par by 1922. The family held them for half a century: the consolation prize handily outperformed the thing it replaced.

And because Spanish law made a bank's clients publish, the house surfaces in its customers' notices even though its own ledgers are lost — banker and depositary to the Casino de San Sebastián (sixteen printed year-end balances), share agent for the Pasajes port company (capitalised by the Pereire brothers of Paris), and, a favourite detail, the place where shares in a Guatemala bullring were paid, «en la casa de J. Brunet y Compañía». It ended quietly: absorbed by the Banco Zaragozano in August 1951, the doors reopening under the new name that same month — the last act of the oldest bank in the city.

The industrial estate the bank built

The banking capital had an outlet: a cotton mill at Oria (Lasarte), founded 1845 and running from 1848 to its demolition in 1993 — 145 years. It was a full company town — worker colony, church, school, and a dam and canal of 1845 that still stand.

The mill spun and wove cotton — and, by its own 1926 catalogue, a full home-linen range: sheets, pillowcases, bedspreads and crepe table linen, plus espadrille cloth, lonas, guineas and ticking, under nine trademarks registered 1886–1898. Its flagship was the “Antílope” sheet brand, advertised into the 1970s — and one physical labelled bolt of it still survives. From the single surviving 1918 invoice we could reconstruct the unit economics: fine white sheeting earned ~32% net margin in the WWI boom, while coarse cloth sold at a loss when raw cotton spiked — the branded sheet line carried the mill. By the mid-1920s it sold through twelve peninsular depots, reaching the Rioja and Navarre espadrille country, trimmed to a leaner eight by 1934 — shipped over two rail gauges according to destination.

Sheets, table linen and dishcloths from a mill that also owned a bank — and the branded sheet was the one line that reliably made money.

Paper, glass, iron, gas — and a newspaper

The bank sat at the centre of a diversified family holding. The industrial money was made outside the bank, in a cluster of ventures the house seeded and financed across a century.

There was the La Esperanza paper mill (the Patriarch's first project), the Ondarreta glass and bottle works, and the Fossey iron foundry at Lasarte — whose colonial ironwork won exhibition medals at London 1862 and Paris 1867. Add a gas works, the Pasajes port company, and — not least — La Voz de Guipúzcoa, the family's own newspaper. The house owned the credit, the factories, and the press that reported on them.

It left a graphic signature, too. The Oria mill's nine registered trademarks (1886–1898) are small masterpieces of commercial lithography — a red devil playing a mandolin for the sewing thread, a leaping antelope for the sheets, an anchor for the darning cotton, and the family coat-of-arms flying over the name of a Louisiana cotton port (proof the mill spun imported American cotton). Every mark has long since lapsed; the artwork, all published before 1910, has passed into the public domain.