Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business
When I first met the former Bank of England governor Gordon Richardson, at a bankers’ jamboree in Japan, I remember thinking that he was smaller than I had imagined. So I was not surprised to read Sir Win Bischoff — long ago Richardson’s junior at Schroders and now chairman of Lloyds Banking Group — making a similar observation in David Kynaston’s great history of the City: ‘I think his personality was such that he seemed to be quite tall but he wasn’t. Very elegant; very imposing. A God.’
Lord Richardson died last week, aged 94, and Bischoff must be one of the few bankers working today who knew him at the height of his powers. His leadership of the City during the 1973-74 banking crisis, and his marshalling (with his deputy Sir Jasper Hollom, still with us at 92) of high-street banks to fund the ‘lifeboat’ for endangered smaller lenders, was the Bank’s finest hour in modern times.
And although Richardson’s self-taught patrician manner (he came from a middle-class home in Nottingham where, like Ken Clarke, he was educated at the high school) could be intimidating, it certainly stiffened City sinews at a difficult time. My father, a lifeboat crewman on behalf of Barclays, secretly admired the Governor’s way of commanding meetings across a vast desk empty of papers, with a silent male secretary in a corner taking notes. And it must have been another Barclays man who — in the hearing of the sometime Treasury minister and Spectator columnist Jock Bruce-Gardyne — was brave enough to remark jocularly to Richardson that ‘Of course, the Bank hasn’t always been right’, citing Montagu Norman’s hostility in 1925 to the creation of Barclays’ overseas arm which, so Richardson’s interlocutor declared, had turned out a great success.
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