The deal that placed control of Dow Jones & Co. in the hands of media titan Rupert Murdoch last week shed light on Colorado’s ties to the Bancroft family, which controlled Dow Jones for more than a century.
A Bancroft family trust with 9.1 percent of the voting shares of Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, was represented by two lawyers at the Denver firm Holme Roberts & Owen.
The trust was established through the law firm years ago by Hugh Bancroft Jr. on behalf of his three children – Hugh Bancroft III, Christopher Bancroft and Kathryn Bancroft Kavadas.
Only Hugh Bancroft III maintains ties to Colorado.
He said in an interview Friday that he owns a home in Aspen, but his primary residence is in California.
The sale of Dow Jones played out over the past several months after Murdoch, who controls News Corp., made a $5 billion offer for the company. News Corp. controls Fox Broadcasting Co., 20th Century Fox and the New York Post, among other international holdings.
Initially, the Bancrofts rejected the offer, fearing that Murdoch would compromise the journalistic integrity of The Journal, the world’s foremost financial newspaper.
But by Tuesday, enough family members had lined up behind the sale, including a majority of the shares controlled by the Denver trust, that the deal went through.
“My brother (Christopher) was inundated by letters (from journalists) saying they feared the one bastion of true journalism was going to disappear,” said Hugh Bancroft III. “I rethought the thing every day. It’s a responsibility for something that has been in the family for a long, long time.”
Eventually, he decided in favor of the sale.
“I think it was a sound decision,” he said.
Bancroft’s mother, Jacqueline Orthwein Everts, was the daughter of a Denver socialite. Jacqueline married Hugh Bancroft Jr., who was a descendant of the Barron family. Clarence Barron bought Dow Jones in 1902.
Hugh Bancroft III said his parents married in New Mexico in 1948 and lived in Denver for a few years near the Denver Country Club area.
But his father wanted to live on a ranch, so the couple moved to New Mexico, where Bancroft said he and his siblings Christopher, 56, now of Texas, and Kathryn, 54, now of Massachusetts, were born.
Bancroft said he and his brother attended the Fountain Valley School, a prestigious boarding school in Colorado Springs, while Kathryn attended her mother’s alma mater, Kent School for Girls, now Kent Denver School in south Denver.
Of the three Bancroft children, only Hugh remained in Colorado after high school, taking advantage of ski trips to Winter Park, Breckenridge, Vail and Aspen.
He studied art at the University of Denver, then architecture at the University of Colorado at Denver and CU-Boulder.
Bancroft said that growing up, he and his siblings weren’t aware they were worth millions of dollars because their parents made a deliberate decision to shelter them.
“We were never really conscious of the fact that we were from Dow Jones,” Bancroft said.
He said his father wanted the children to have a real life “and do stuff like ranch work, mix with the normal blue-collar people.”
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-954-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
