In the late afternoon of 1 October 1878 the City of Glasgow Bank closed its doors against further business. The fact that the Bank was in trouble, and would have to cease trading, had been known only to its management – plus a few senior officers of the major Edinburgh-based banks, who had been called in to assist but decided that matters within the Glasgow institution had gone too far for any rescue package. The news of the Bank's demise therefore came suddenly and caught the general public by surprise. The next day, a curious crowd gathered outside its head offices on Virginia Street, requiring the precautionary stationing of special constables around the building, but in the event there was no trouble. Whether because of memories of the Bank's earlier closure and re-opening in 1857, or because the other Scottish banks let it be known that they would honour City of Glasgow Bank notes in circulation, there was no general run on the banks in Glasgow. By contrast, there was much excitement in the smaller cities and towns of Scotland as depositors sought to withdraw their money, many demanding only gold. The panic, however, was short-lived and, as public confidence returned, attention in the press quickly turned from the dangers of a bank mania to the question as to who or what had brought the City of Glasgow Bank to its knees. In the meanwhile, the backwash from the closure spread through the rest of the British financial system, bringing a tightening of money rates in London and Manchester and elsewhere, and even reaching as far as India, where the credit-worthiness of firms with Glasgow connections quickly came under question. Despite initial anxieties, it soon became apparent that this was no harbinger of a general financial crisis in the 1857 or 1866 mould. The City of Glasgow Bank's problems were uniquely its own, and its collapse did not herald the onset of serious trouble for the British financial services sector as a whole. Even so, the Bank's failure had a considerable economic and social impact within Scotland. Although only one other financial institution closed – the much smaller Caledonian Banking Company, which went out of business for about ten months – it brought about a sharp reduction in the share values of the other Scottish banks.