The Anonymous Widower

A Life Hanging Around Banking

I first worked for a bank in about 1971, as a consultant programmer on a system that worked out how much various actions cost them to do. It was a rather clever system, that took all of the bank’s costs and numbers like the number of cheques cashed and worked out for each branch how much things actually cost. The system had been designed by Bob, the bank’s Chief Management Accountant, a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of accountancy and banking, and with whom I became firm friends over the next few years. Over the time, we consumed several bottles of good wine, notably in a restaurant called Mother Bunches near St. Paul’s. Sadly, in about 1978, Bob died and I lost a good friend.I was a scruffy man in those days and one memory stands out. I was painting the flat in the Barbican and Bob phoned and asked me to run the software to calculate costs for the last quarter.  It was only because his assistant was on holiday. So I cycled to Time Sharing in Gt. Portland Street and did the run.  Bob then phoned me at Time Sharing and asked that I bring the results to the bank and give it to the usher at the door. But when I got to the bank it was closed and on ringing the bell, the massive bronze door opened and the usher in full morning suit and top hat, asked if I had comuter output for Bob.  I said yes and he replied that Bob had asked to see me.  I protested because of my appearance and I was firmly ushered inside and told to go to the fourth floor. When I met Bob for the first time in his office, I apologised for my appearance and he just smiled, took the computer output and started checking the answers.  Before I returned to the Barbican, we had more than a few good glasses of wine.

Before I leave Bob and the system I programmed, I’ll put in a few observations.

1. Bob always reckoned bankers were likely to be called John.  A boring name for someone expected to be boring at work. Perhaps with all the banks’ problems, these days, they could improve their profile by hiring a few more Johns.
2. I didn’t have any access to the banks main computer system, as I didn’t need to, but I got the impression, that they had hardly changed the design since the system had been first-written and only had a limited number of places to store information on customers. So consequently, their summary statistics on their customers wasn’t very good at all. I’d love to know, whether they are any better now.
3. A lot of fundamental pieces of information on the bank’s costs were almost impossible to find.  Bob had come from a major FTSE 500 company and put it down to the fact that they were a bank therefore cost control wasn’t a problem.
4. A very dominant factor in the costs of a branch was property and who in particular owned the building. The bank actually owned most of the branches themselves, but where they rented a branch building costs were a lot higher.
5. But the most important factor in the costs, was inevitably hanky-panky, where a manager was giving loans for sexual favours. I suppose that these days, where you never meet your bank manager has cured that problem, even if it has introduced a lot more.
6. One of the design rules, Bob put into the system, actually ended up in Artemis.  If say you split a sum of money into several fields in a database, then just to round the figures to the neatest penny wasn’t good enough, as although it might be correct, the pence column might not add to the original value. So any error was lost in the largest value, just as it was in Artemis. The reason was because bankers in those days, always checked the answers by adding them up and woe betide if they didn’t agree.
7. It must have been a good system, as it was still running fifteen years later.  Although by that time Time Sharing had long since gone, so they ran it on one of the last PDP-10s somewhere in the United States.

At the time, I was banking with Barclays and wasn’t very pleased with them. So I asked the people, who I worked with to set me up with a new branch.  After all, if I was doing business with a bank, it might not be a bad idea to bank with them.

I don’t know whether it was chance or whether I was setup by the people I worked with. A few days later, I turned up in the branch of the bank by the Barbican and met David for the first time. I’d actually been working late on the bank’s cost accountancy system and I was rather surprised, that David knew about it.  He did disclose that he’d been on the committee that had decided that Bob should develop the system. I remember that day, that David and I were scheduled to meet at ten and I finally got back to the flat at one.

It was the start of a life-long friendship, that only stopped on David’s death within a few days of that of my wife in 2007.

I can remember a lunch in an expensive City restaurant, where at four after a long lunch, his second-in-command came in, saying that the branch needed to be signed off. In some versions of this tale, I say that he said to his number two to forge his signature, but I suspect it was more that he should have had the right to sign-off the branch. If it was the latter, that would fit David’s character, as I know from other things he said, that he believed very much in delegation.

He also introduced me to some of his customers, who had got the Miss World-that-wasn’t, Helen Morgan to open their new shop. David kept a signed photograph of the Welsh model on his desk for many years.  David never did anything inappropriate concerning the ladies during his banking career.

David got further into my business life, when we started Metier.  The company needed a good bank manager and I introduced David to one of my partners. I remember we all met over lunch in the Honourable Artillery Company.

soon after, David was promoted to a bigger branch in the West End. It wasn’t a planned promotion, but one that was necessitated by an early retirement of the manager there. To say it was a mess, would be a very large understatement.  But David was the sort of person, who rose to challenges using any legal method.

One thing that illustrated his competence, was when we presented him with one of the first computerised spreadsheets, the bank had ever received, he immediately passed it to his area manager on his Area Manager’s first day in the job. Many would have ducked that challenge. They used it to educate themselves, and we got the funding we needed. In fact, David told me some years later, that he reckoned we weren’t asking for enough and got the clearance for more on that very first spreadsheet.

June 28, 2012 - Posted by AnonW | Computing, Finance, World | Artemis, Banks, Management, Metier Management Systems, Time Sharing