The
Bancroft family are the former owners of
Dow Jones & Company — publishers of
the Wall Street Journal — which is now owned by
Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation (NewsCorp).
The Bancrofts are a family of publicly-reclusive Boston socialites who inherited The Wall Street Journal from Clarence W. Barron, who as a publisher built up the reputation of that newspaper.[1] Upon Barron's death in 1928, control of the company passed to his step-daughters Jane and Martha, children of his wife Jesse Waldron. Barron's son-in-law and Jane's husband, Harvard-educated lawyer Hugh Bancroft, ran the company and the paper for the next five years. Suffering from depression, Bancroft committed suicide in 1933 at the age of fifty-four. The family members maintained ownership of the company through ensuing generations, though management was placed in the hands of capable professionals, like Journal editor Bernard Kilgore.[2]
A notable family member of the following generation was Mary Bancroft, Hugh Bancroft's daughter by his first marriage. She worked for U.S. intelligence in Switzerland during World War II.[3] She wrote novels and a memoir, Autobiography of a Spy,[4] before dying in 1997 at age ninety-three. She was survived by six grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.
Jane Bancroft's daughter Jessie Bancroft Cox was another prominent member of the second generation. Her husband, son, and grandson — William C. Cox, Bill Cox Jr., and Billy Cox III, respectively — were "the only Bancrofts to have actually worked at Dow Jones since Hugh Bancroft's suicide."[5]
