Punishment Batallion

That's how the Foreign Department was known in The District Bank. Once consigned to this, you rarely ever got out. I was, once again, off the mainstream of banking but looking forward to learning something new.

Aside - The Kevin Bacon Index
It has been proved that you can connect every film actor with Kevin Bacon in 6 steps:
Here is an example, using Elvis Presley:
Elvis Presley was in Change of Habit (1969) with Edward Asner
Edward Asner was in JFK (1991) with Kevin Bacon
Therefore Asner has a Bacon number of 1, and Presley (who never appeared in a film with Bacon himself) has a Bacon number of 2.
The full details can be obtained from Wikipeadia.
This idea has been extended to express anyone's relationship with another by their steps of separation. As you will see, soon, I have a separation with the high and mighty of this world of just 2!

What was the Foreign Department?
In Head Office, Manchester, there was the bank's main Foreign Department. There was a smaller one in London on the 2nd floor of 75 Cornhill, just one floor down from where my career started. There was a dividing line where branches in the south of England sent their foreign work to London whilst the rest went to Manchester. However, there were some areas where London reigned supreme because of its location in the middle of the City.

The department was managed by a Mr. John Battersby, who was reputed to have fought across Europe during the closing stages of the war.  He had the management of 7 main areas of activity:
1.Cashiers  - managed all of the foreign currency and travellers cheques for the branches
2.Outward Bills – processed outward bills of exchange*
3.Transfers – processed outward and inward cash transfers
4.Letters of Credit – issued letters of credit (LC) for exporters and managed inward LC processing.
5.Inward Bills – processed incoming bills of exchange*
6.Exchange Control - 1st line decision making on legality of currency purchases and liaison with the BofE over borderline or difficult cases. Exchange Controls were lifted by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1978 - removing the jobs of hundreds of City clerks and managers at a stroke!
7.Foreign Exchange Dealers – provided an interface between the bank's demands for foreign exchange and the international markets.
* Bills of Exchange. To make payment for an import easier and to provide finance for international trade, companies would issue a bill of exchange that was payable within a set period, normally 60 or 90 days. The bill would then be accepted payable by a bank and could then be sold on the money markets to raise the finance. This was useful for exports, for instance, as you could sell the goods and on the strength of a bill drawn by the purchaser, you could raise your money for the goods sooner rather than waiting for the goods to arrive in the overseas country. Needless to say, you didn't get the full face value of the bill because you were effectively borrowing money. What a bank would do is buy the bill 'at a discount'. This discount was related to the cost of borrowing but would vary according to the size of the bill and the quality of the accepting bank. Clear? Thought not.

I Start in International Banking
I turned up in September of 1965 and was placed on the Outward Bills desk. This was managed by two strange gentlemen who had been doing the same job for years but made it palatable by constant banter. The manager was Claude (can't remember his surname) and his number 2 was Major Selwood – ex Indian Army, and couldn't you tell! Great fun to work with. I was tasked with taking over from the clerk on the desk who's job was to process the outward bills by collating all of the shipping documents, confirming their completeness and then stamping the name of the receiving bank on the back. Very boring and similar in scope to what I was doing some time before, one floor up in the Credit Clearing dept.

Now we get to the Bacon Index. The person that I took over from was one John Major – eventually to be Prime Minister of the UK. Hence, I have a separation index of 2 with Mrs. Thatcher, Gorbachev, Reagan – and so on. Impressive – well maybe not.

The reason that I could put up with this was that my current 'girl friend' - to be my eventual partner for life,  worked one floor up in the cheque clearing department. Over the following 5 months I dutifully worked away at stamping the backs of bills of exchange. The job was so exciting that I can remember nothing more about it than that.

One of the things that I was till very keen on in my private life was Scouting and I found out that one of the guys that worked in that closed office over the way – the Dealing Room – was an active Scoutmaster. I started spending part of my lunch hour in there talking to him about Scouting and all that we were both doing in our outside lives.

Now the dealing room was unlike any other office in the bank. It had a central table that held 3 units of lights and buttons, five office telephones (where all the other departments on had a single phone), a large 'electronic calculator' on a turntable and a direct door into the Assistant Manager's office. As a young, enthusiastic chap, I started to enquire quite what this was all about and was very excited to hear how large financial transactions took place in this room, the like of which I hadn't imagined.

At the Wimbledon branch, we were a very small part of the bank but had a single customer that was borrowing ￡1,000,000. Now this was in a time when you could buy a nice 3 bedroomed house for around ￡4,500, so this was a huge amount. I was standing in a room where transactions of this size took place routinely and were actioned by the younger person as well as the manager.

Barry Halliwell, for that was the name of the younger person (younger – in banking terms that meant under 35!) was a northerner and was making plans to be married and move back north. This mean that there would be a vacancy in the room. I couldn't even dream. I was 20 years old and they had never had a dealer under 28 before so I would have been way down the list. There was much speculation as to who the next dealer was to be, because they always recruited internally and went by seniority. To everyone's amazement, and to the total horror of those who considered themselves in direct line for the job, they gave it to me. On asking why, my competitors were told that they had shown no interest in the job but that I had spent every lunchtime in there learning what I could without any prospects!
Five months of boredom was to be followed by 20 years of roller coaster times that could be called anything but boring!