Handwriting

I had to look out some of my termly Reports from primary school, to confirm something I’ve always accepted as true: my handwriting is terrible.  The subject was labelled ‘Writing’, as distinct from ‘English Composition’, at which I seem to have done quite well (although ‘marred by untidiness’).  Here are some of the comments:

·         Poor – rather unsteady

·         Untidy – must try to slope all his letters the same way.

·         Uneven

·         Too much ink

·         Too large and irregular

·         Very poor and untidy

·         Probably tries too hard!

And a rare one:

·         Improving

My signature on official documents – cheques, the backs of new credit cards, contracts and suchlike – is similarly, let’s say, unsteady and uneven.  I blame this on a brief period during my banking career when I had to sign hundreds of ‘mail payment orders’ a day, at speed.  There’s a theory that people’s signatures evolve towards either a straight line or a circle; well, mine ended up as the contents of my green bin when the holly has just been pruned.  Complaints were received from banks around the world.

These actions and thoughts have been triggered by the arrival of my Book book, about which I wrote a few posts ago.  As a reminder, the idea is to record stuff about books – any stuff, there isn’t a plan – in this nice black-hard-covered A4 lined notebook, as a kind of archive.  My Book of Books.  Past, present, future; expectations, disappointments, love affairs.  I still like the idea, very much, but there’s one thing I hadn’t taken into account.  The blank first page is staring unblinkingly at me right now.  “If I’m to be what you think I am,” it’s saying, “you’re going to have to write considered words in me.  Preferably with a proper fountain pen, in properly sloped copperplate.”

I’m considering my considered reply.  At the moment it’s along the lines of “flip off, page one, I’ll scribble whatever I choose, with whatever writing utensil comes to hand.”  In fact, I’m just going to make some notes about ‘Lionel Asbo’, in a commensurate fashion.

At the same time, I can’t help thinking that the Book has a point.

 

Banking: The Money Takes Over The Asylum

Up until now (1981), the job of the Treasury was to lend, borrow and exchange currencies in order to ensure that everyone’s interests were protected: customers’ money was properly looked after, and the bank didn’t expose itself to undue risk.  In fact, they had to end each day with a near-enough ‘flat’ position, which had to be reported to the Bank of England.  Failure to fetch up within the statutory limits would meet with unspeakable retribution.  (I never found out exactly what this was, and nobody ever asked; we amused ourselves imagining ritual button–snipping humiliations before a Star Chamber of hooded pinstripes, with loaded revolvers left discreetly behind the aspidistra, but I’m pretty sure it never actually happened.)  In a phrase, the culture was one of avoiding danger rather than courting risk.

All that changed when in 1980, as one of her very first actions, Maggie abolished Exchange Controls and the markets blinked and realised they didn’t have to bother with all that anymore; they could do whatever they wanted.  A very significant moment.  Not only could the volume of transactions explode, but they could invent new ones willy-nilly: money had begun its inexorable path from being the means of exchanging commodities to becoming a commodity in its own right.  (You know the rest.)

From where I and my fellow academics sat across the river, it became obvious that they’d need our help.  In particular, they’d need the computers to tell them what they’d been up to; which meant capturing the information as early as possible.  The days of filling in* a piece of paper, a ‘deal slip’, and passing it through a window to the back office to be processed sometime before close of play were gone – the deal slip had to be visible as it was written.

The trouble was, our computer systems weren’t up to this kind of challenge.  When I suggested to John, the departmental guru past whom all proposals had to be run, that we might have a need for one transaction to be revamped into another, then to be queued up in the back office for completion, he frowned for a bit, then smiled.  “Always one for pushing the boundaries,” he said.  “You do realise we’ll have to rewrite the whole lot, don’t you?”**

So we did.

Once again, it was seat of the pants stuff.  I knew how it worked by now, so I got myself a Test Team before I had a single programmer.  The programs gradually started to trickle through, in more or less testable condition but by no means stable.  It didn’t take long for one of the Team to uncover a trick which would infallibly crash the system, and would take at least two hours to recover.  This would tend to happen once or twice a week at around five to twelve.  As I was on both sides of the river, I didn’t always get down the pub with the Team: indeed, I sometimes heard the southern end of the conversation, which might have gone something like “….”  “Oh, again?”  “….”  “Yeah.  Couple of hours at least.”  [Programmer rings off, glances around the room.]  “Pint, anyone?”

Anyway, somehow it got done.  One of my fondest memories is of a parallel run, where a cloned and converted day’s live work was run through the new overnight programs to make sure everything came out looking the same.  It didn’t.  At about two a.m., Malcolm, the guy in charge of this portion of the process, looked up and suggested a coffee break.  He was deep in thought for a while, then delivered his diagnosis.  “The trouble is,” he said, “we’ve either got too many debits or not enough credits.”

Such is the stuff of which banks are built.  It did get done in the end***; actually, most of those systems were still doing the business when I made my final escape (eighteen years later to the day, and thirty years to the day after I’d turned up as a rookie on the doorstep of 67 Lombard Street) on 1 June 2000.

 

The remainder of my banking career was mostly spent attending and chairing various standards-making committees, which involved swanning around the world to meaningless meetings solving problems nobody else knew existed, whilst pretending to be important; I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that, so I’ll shut up now.

 

 

* If you were lucky –  as often as not the trade would remain on the dealer’s pad for hours, until he remembered to do his paperwork just before pub time that evening.

** I know how much you like it when I talk dirty, so I’ll just say that this involved converting the entire system from a TCAM to a VTAM platform, with old Assembler code being rewritten in the industry-standard PL/1 language – a classic example of my favourite intellectual concept, the inverted pyramid.

*** I have no idea how much of a contribution this made towards today’s sleek, efficient financial trading mechanisms.

Banking: Someone Has To Write The Rules

I hadn’t intended to write even this episode, but was encouraged to do so today by Z – thank you darling!  And now I feel like doing another one.  If I’ve put any of you on suicide watch, please alert me and I’ll shut up on the subject and write about something else, or nothing, instead.

 

 The first thing I had to do was pass the interview, about which I remember very little except for a question from a madman called Duncan, something like “do you prefer applied or theoretical psychology?”  I think I got a left-eye wink from Barrie, the Head of Department, which I somehow took to mean ‘applied’, which turned out to be the right answer.  This was the same Duncan who later, unannounced and uninvited, burst into a test session and stormed around the comms control room in Great Tower Street randomly pulling plugs out of wall sockets, in order, as he put it, to test the system to destruction – which he almost managed.

The second thing was to relocate across the river to London Bridge, also not a problem.  The tube journey was one stop more; the pubs were better and much cheaper.  There were rules about who went to which pubs and when.  Computer Department was a world apart from the rest of the bank, and contained cliques within cliques.  You only socialised within your own team, which was project-based; and within each team analysts and programmers tended to keep their distance.

Nobody explained any of this to me; indeed I don’t think they were fully aware of it themselves.  It was an astonishingly isolated society.  I got the hang of it fairly quickly, and joined in, of course.  But I think that an injection of influence from the world beyond the castle, in the form of me and a few others like me, helped to break down both the monolithic elitism and the internal factionalism, much like in the former Soviet Union.  As in that case, though, we were careful to close ranks when the outside world started to think they might know better than us what they needed.  If a ‘user’, as they were disdainfully called, should appear down the Wheatsheaf one Friday, you could hear the air freeze. 

SWIFT ruled, and I became Mr SWIFT.  The zealots in Brussels were determined that any sphere of business involving communication between two banks was fair game for messaging standardisation, and hence analysis of the actual underlying business structures and transactions.  I think it’s fair to say that such an exercise had never been undertaken before – the creation of a set of business rules that would enable pairs or groups of organisations with no prior relationship to conduct trade in a common language.  Nor has it been done since.  It was a world-changing achievement, and it’s worth briefly digressing to explain what I mean by that.

Nowadays, we take telecommunications for granted, obviously.  To be technical, TCP/IP gets the bits and bytes from A to B, http provides an agreed method for unscrambling them, RSA for making sure they’re safe, html for a common grammar in which the content of the message is assumed to be written.  But none of these say anything about the content.  The ‘l’ in html and gml* is a semantic error, because a language consists not only of phonics, grammar and syntax, but also vocabulary.  SWIFT standards  were a brave initiative to supply that vocabulary on top of all the rest.  A financial Esperanto.

After a lot of faffing about, designing systems that were never going to get built, simply because SWIFT had reached too far beyond the banks’ catch-up capabilities, my next big project came from a completely opposite direction: inside the bank.  What was called the Treasury was flexing its muscles, and knew that they would be harnessing computers.

 

 

* html – hypertext mark-up language –  grew out of an IBM product , gml, generalised mark-up language, which I used to write my reports back then in the 70s.  I could probably write this post in gml –  :p. means new paragraph, etc.  Not html though.

Banking on Computers (Day 3)

The move to the Computer Department, as it was called, was convoluted.  I’d been running the Cripps Warburg rundown for the best part of a year.  The job consisted of checking the list of defunct loans every morning, making a few phone calls if required, booking a dollar rate at eleven o’clock with Ken in the dealing room, sending out some telexes, filling in some forms, and going down the pub.  In the afternoon I’d set up the next day’s routine and then go home as soon as I could decently get away with it – that wasn’t hard, as I was sitting in a backwater where everyone’s key objective was to keep their heads down and not rock the comfy boat.  I was stultifyingly bored.  

So when the offer to join something called a ‘test team’ came, I said yes, even though I had absolutely no idea what this meant.  To be fair, nor did the person who made the offer.  It turned out that a new computer system had to be created, tested and installed, by a given date (1^st May 1977, I think), in response to something called SWIFT, standing for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, which tells you most of what you need to know about it. 
 

The brand new idea was that computers could be made, using internationally agreed messaging standards, to talk to each other; the actual banks, and their computers, would just have to agree and fall in line. Imagine it: banks from thirty countries across the world, having to agree for the first time ever to a single rulebook - written in English but spoken in as many dialects of computer as there were banks -  working together to a self-imposed timetable in which failure wasn’t an option.  It was a bold, visionary initiative, which couldn’t happen now.   

(I say that because today, the spirit of co-operation has almost been obliterated in favour of that of self-advantage, whereas back then everyone was just avid to make it fly.)

I turned up on day one, along with the other eight misfits, to find we’d been sat round a horseshoe desk layout.  Tom and Dave, the computer guys who were more or less on their own trying to get this system designed, specified, programmed, tested and implemented, whilst running on empty, had rightly decided this was the best way of getting the help they needed.  They gave us a pep talk, then we all went for a drink.  Then we came back, pissed and laughing, and worked out how to do it.

It was the most intense eighteen-month period of my working life, and the most exhilarating.  Who can say how we managed it, but we did.  My bank actually sent the very first live message over the brand new SWIFT network.  A few days later, to my honest surprise, I was offered a full-time job, with a modest salary increase, as a Systems Analyst with the Computer Department.  As always, I said ‘yes’.  This time, I meant it.

Banker, day 2

Some time after the merger, we relocated from the opulence of 67 Lombard Street (its awesome cupola already in the process of being trashed by the insertion of a mezzanine floor, the ripping out of the old marble counters in favour of more cost-effective plastic tops and security screens, and eventually the unforgivable demolition of the famous font – the outspring of an ancient artesian well, which had stood since the early nineteenth century in the middle of the grand old Banking Hall) to new premises in a slab of a sixties office block in Great Tower Street.

This was nothing but good news to us poor sods who had to work there.  The offices in 67 were slotted in like misplaced Lego bricks, wherever they’d fit, around that Banking Hall and its dome, which probably took up sixty per cent of the volume of the building.  This new office was open plan, adjustable by partitions, fully wired for power and phone (and even, later, computer – the floor could be lifted!).  In 1973, it was working heaven.

My sense of spatial adjustment not being particularly good, I did a couple of lunchtime dry runs to make sure I could find my way to work on the first Monday.  That was when I found out  a lot more about the amazing diversity of the City of London.  It was an eye-opener.  You’d pootle down a bland Eastcheap, turn a few corners at random, and suddenly fetch up against a Wren church which would grab you by the neck and haul you in to worship; another corner and there’s the magnificently useless Monument to The Great Fire, insisting that you just get up there and do it again – Verticality is Power (says the Shard today).  I found the Minories, Mincing Lane, Fish Street Hill, Seething Lane – all names Pepys would certainly have recognised, and Shakespeare might have.  Botolph Alley.  King’s Head Court.   I looked for Gropec*nt Lane, but it must have got closed before I came on the scene.

Shortly after this relocation, I was moved to the Exchange Control counter.  Exchange Control was a quaint idea of the post-war government that people, or organisations, should have to demonstrate due need before being allowed to ship their assets willy-nilly out of the country, and therefore had to get  permission to do so.   Some of you may remember having to have your passport stamped and initialled before being issued with your £50 for your trip to Jersey or Marbella.  I dealt, though, with the bigger corporate stuff, which involved intricate knowledge of a seven volume manual of principles, rules, thresholds and delegations, which I devoured.  Because I was behind a counter, I also had occasional direct proximity with the public, which provided some freshness.  I remember most of an afternoon ensconced with Al Anderson, the lead guitarist with Bob Marley and the Wailers, sorting out how to get his cheque cashed; we both drew out the process and, as you can imagine, covered a lot of conversational ground.  I briefly got to play his Strat.

The job also offered direct proximity to my boss’s secretary.  Nothing actually happened, but it nearly did.  (I’m still a bit sorry it didn’t, to be honest.)  It must have been pretty obvious, because I was suddenly whisked off across town to an office in Chiswell Street, to participate in the shutting down of a failing merchant bank called Cripps Warburg.  They’d lent too much unsecured money to some dodgy customers, so had to be bailed out … How could that happen?  Unthinkable today of course.  The operation was overseen, I’ve just remembered, by the future Leader of the House of Lords, getting some work experience before he took up his proper position.  He was a super guy, actually. 

Once the old staff had been fired and the loans were in more or less rotational roll-over mode, this non-job went on for about twelve months, each more boring than the last; until I was suddenly whisked off again, this time in the direction of computers.

 

My Career as a Banker – Day 1

A while ago I promised you, as a follow-up to my rock’n’roll years, a day-by-day account of my life in the banking industry, and I always try to keep promises.  As it lasted slightly more than thirty years, the word ‘day’ need not be taken too literally.

After the dissolution of the band, I crawled back to England, broke, destitute and saddled with physical and emotional baggage.  So I – we – went back to live with my parents in Bournemouth.  They were generous, accommodating, and decreasingly sympathetic.  But my attitude was very different from the last time I’d done this.  Then, in 1964 after university, I’d assumed the world owed me a living, but wasn’t quite prepared to work for it.  This time, I still assumed that, but I’d learned a bit about work.  Not least, that you needed to do it to get money.

I applied for dozens of jobs.  One I remember was a door-to-door seller of pyramid schemes; another was the fourth member of an outfit which designed and marketed wallcharts.  (I probably should have gone for that one.)  But eventually I secured a post with a small, rather odd banking organisation called Glyn Mills & Co.  They were about to merge with two other banks to form Williams and Glyn’s, and it’s a nostalgic reflection that, in those days, when companies merged they felt they needed to take on staff.  But I like to believe that Peter Richards, Glyn Mills’ one-man HR department, saw something more in me.

I turned up for work on my first day.  How I reached this capability – London accommodation, transport, clothing (a light blue three-piece with 15 inch flares on tick from Alexandré the tailor at £5 a month) – is another story.  The Glyn’s banking hall at 67 Lombard Street was imposingly, echoingly Victorian.  I was greeted by a scary liveried doorman, who consulted a list, smiled, and handed me over to a frighteningly beautiful lady who escorted me up in the lift, where I was welcomed by my first boss, Geoff Stickland.

Geoff showed me around the Foreign Exchange Department, introduced me to the girl (whose name I’m afraid I’ve forgotten – Sally? – though not her face) with whom I’d be working, and then asked me whether I liked Guinness.  Not really, I said.  Oh well, never mind, the bitter’s just about drinkable, he told me, and took me up two floors to show me where the bar was.

My first job was to operate a comptometer.  Given an amount of, say, dollars, and an exchange rate (assigned by the dealers, of whom more later), you keyed in these two numbers and the machine spewed out the answer, which you wrote down and passed on.  Here’s a picture of a comptometer, though I don’t think it was the one I operated; it looks a bit modern. 

The international payment (for such, after a while, I discovered it was), then moved on along two different routes.  One part went to ‘slips’, the other to the typists.  I was quite quickly promoted to slips, where you had to write out two bits of paper, a blue and a yellow, representing a debit and a credit, which then got disposed into something called the Waste.  Of course, I asked why it was called that – given that these were the entries that would eventually appear on people’s statements, it seemed a reasonable question.  Nobody knew, and I still don’t.

The form went through to the typists, who created an immaculately typed payment order, which would eventually get checked, by checkers, and then signed (by the top boss, Tiger Homes) and despatched.  There were TTs (telegraphic transfers, which went to the cable room), MTs (mail transfers) and AMTs.  No-one knew what the A stood for (‘Air’, it turned out). 

I got promoted to a checker a few weeks in, which drew me into a closer relationship with the hitherto remote typists.  Brenda, Val, Jo, Donna, Jeanette.  Brenda and Val were middle-aged and married.  Jo, Donna and Jeanette weren’t.

The whole system ran on alcohol.  In particular, the dealers, whose job it was to make sure there was enough money in the kitty to keep all those payments flowing, would decamp en masse to a cramped, black hovel off Change Alley called the Jampot, returning just in time to catch the New York opening and, hopefully, cover their positions.  Once, a guy called Mickey staggered back, accidentally got it the wrong way round, and discovered, just before London closed, that he’d stumbled into buying the world’s entire stock of sterling.  I never found out just how much money the bank made out of this, but he wasn’t around for long afterwards.  You can’t often get away with that one.

I’d better stop for now.  More to come, if you’re interested.