time
that Noble’s father was active in trade. More research is needed. It should be
noted that there were also a number of people with the Sexton surname who lived
near these Nobles in Bombay. One of them, Frances Bertha Marion “Daisy” Sexton,
became George Edward Noble’s future wife, which is another thing that I will
get to.

George’s Older
Brother: Henry Noble – Manager of Agra Bank

The young George Edward was not the first family member to
be a banker in the Far East. His brother Henry – fourteen years older than
George - was manager of the Agra and Masterman’s Bank in Hong Kong in the
mid-1860s. He drowned in 1866, age 34, and left a family of three children in
Hong Kong, children who were already motherless. Their mother, Catherine
Haywood had already died November 15th, 1865at the Agra Bank where
they lived. She died in the same year that her youngest child was born. I do not
yet have a record of the cause of her death, nor the exact birth date of her
youngest, but it is entirely possible that the birth and the death were cause
and effect.

If the death of his wife wasn’t bad enough, Henry also faced
grief on another front. The Agra and Masterman Bank was facing bankruptcy. In
fact, it closed its doors a few months after his death, as a result of a bear
raid on its assets on June 7, 1866. Perhaps the grief of losing his wife as
well as the shaky fortunes of the Agra were part of the reason he had sailed to
Foochow [now called Fuzhou], even though The
Bankers’ Magazine