Idiom: gnomes of Zurich: little gnomes sitting over ticker tapes in Zurich (antedating 1956 March 7)

[Garson O'Toole]

In the Harry Potter book series the bankers at Gringotts are goblins.
However, before J. K. Rowling was born the bankers in Zurich were
called gnomes. The Oxford English Dictionary recorded this colloquial
denotation with a first cite in the New Statesman in 1964.

(OED 1989) gnome (superscript 2) 1. c. colloq. An international
financier or banker, spec. one who is Swiss; esp. in phr. the gnomes
of Zurich.

The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (2005 edition) gives an earlier
citation for "gnomes of Zurich". "This phrase stems from a remark by
the British politician Harold Wilson in a speech in 1956: 'all the
little gnomes in Zurich … about whom we keep hearing'." The Oxford
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable points to the same speech.

Where did Harold Wilson acquire this phrase, or did he craft it
himself? The Hansard database of the Houses of Parliament is now
searchable online. It contains a speech by Harold Wilson on 1956
November 12 that matches the text fragments given in the Oxford
Dictionary of Idioms.

But several months before this the database contains a speech by Lord
Harold Balfour that uses the phrase "little gnomes sitting over ticker
tapes in Zurich". Balfour states that the phrase is from a journalist
at the Manchester Guardian.

Citation: 1956 March 7, Lord Harold Balfour of Burleigh, Lords
Sitting, The Economic Situation, Hansard Database.

A noble Lord opposite shakes his head. Let me refer him to the
Manchester Guardian of to-day. This is a quotation from the financial
correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, which says: A curiously
unequal struggle is going on in the exchange market. On the one side
are foreign speculators, a small but extremely powerful band of
European financial interests. These are the little gnomes sitting over
ticker tapes in Zurich.'…The little gnomes" - noble Lords on this side
of the House will be interested to hear this - are men of extremely
conservative opinion.

http://bit.ly/d7Bf9i

Someone with access to an archive containing the Manchester Guardian
(now The Guardian) could check financial articles on 1956 March 7 to
try and find the quote to which Balfour refers. Maybe the financial
correspondent of the newspaper created this idiom, or perhaps the
paper has earlier references to gnomes in Zurich.

The OED says that gnomes are "fabled to inhabit the interior of the
earth and to be the guardians of its treasures". The first cite is to
Alexander Pope in 1712-1714. (There might be an antedating in a 1711
text A history of the ridiculous extravagancies of Monsieur Oufle.) So
it is understandable that a connection was established between gnomes
and banking. But I could not find earlier cites for gnomes in Zurich
acting as currency traders or bankers.

Garson

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