Christopher Fildes’s City and Suburban column first appeared in June 1984 and notched up over a thousand appearances; before that, he served as business editor under Nigel Lawson in the late 1960s. As a chronicle of modern City life, the Fildes oeuvre has only one equal and that comes in the weighty form of A Club No More, the last volume of David Kynaston’s magisterial history of the Square Mile. In the lighter field of daily and weekly journalism, Christopher has been peerless in his combination of wit, learning, firmness of judgment, appetite for gossip and enthusiasm for lunch — preferably at the Savoy Grill before its tragic refurbishment.
As the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, wrote in his introduction to A City Spectator, the selection from City and Suburban which I assembled in 2004, Christopher has combined ‘a real affection for the City — both old and new — with a readiness to be trenchantly critical when the occasion demands, criticism which is all the more effective when it comes from a know-ledgeable friend’. He has also been very kind to me personally, so I hope he won’t mind me telling some old stories about him in lieu of the speech I might have given if Spectator largesse had stretched to hiring a sufficiently capacious venue (Epsom racecourse would have been ideal) to invite all his loyal readers to a farewell party.
One afternoon, back in my banking days in 1989, I was staring idly across Hong Kong harbour from my office window when a colleague rang from London to ask whether I knew who Christopher was. Of course, I said. Not only was I a long-time Spectator fan, but his bowler hat, buttonhole flower and general bonhomie had made a big impression on me when he lectured to my graduate training course in 1976, and had made me wonder even then why on earth I was trying to be a banker when being a journalist was clearly so much more fun.
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