The clever radical who led the City’s transformation

It’s a vivid example of unintended consequences that the swimming-pool builders of southern England should owe so much to Sir Nicholas Goodison, the former chairman of the London Stock Exchange who has died aged 87 and whose obituaries suggested little inclination to frivolity, poolside or otherwise. Head-and-shoulders the most cerebral of the Exchange’s leading members at the turn of the 1980s, he was also one of its most far-sighted and probably, as a noted connoisseur of 18th-century clocks, its most cultured.

A traditionalist majority of his peers were content with the City’s clubbable old ways. But Goodison — a third-generation stockbroker who had originally thought of a career in teaching — argued for the competitive virtues of abolishing fixed commissions, integrating broking and jobbing which had always been kept apart, and raising the potential of London to challenge Wall Street by allowing combined firms to be owned by deep-pocketed banks.

He also recognised the Thatcherite urge to break up closed shops of all kinds, signalled in 1981 when the Office of Fair Trading launched a case against the Exchange in the Restrictive Practices Court.