Me and the Bank of England

One of the interesting buttons on my desk was marked BofE. This was a direct line through to the dealing room of the Bank of England. In my early days, this wasn’t really used so I got used to it being there but of no real meaning. Then, one day, I got into work before John Botevyle to find the red light to them was lit. This meant that they had called and no one had answered. I rang them back to be greeted with a complaint that the room wasn’t manned when they wanted us. I explained that it was only 8.50 and we didn’t open until 9am, which didn’t impress the chap on the other end at all. He told me that, as we weren’t there when he wanted us, he had done a deal on our behalf. It turned out that the BofE had bought five million pounds from Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC) in Zurich but, as was usual at that time, she (the BofE was always referred to in the feminine – this coming from here sobriquet of ‘The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street’, or just ‘The Old Lady’) was putting the deal through us to avoid her name going on a deal in another jurisdiction. I accepted this – what else could I do – and processed the deal. 

I explained to John and his comment was that they hadn’t done this for some time so the pressure on the pound must be building up. “Expect more of these” was his comment.  It seems that the pound was slipping below the bank’s bottom limit of 2.7820 and she had to intervene. Putting it through us solved her problem. Over the coming weeks, this became a regular operation.  One day, I took a phone call at around 9.10 to find that I was talking to SBC Zurich directly. He told me that he had done a deal with “our mutual friend” for three million pounds and that we were to process it. It shows that even the Swiss banks took the anonymity of the BofE seriously such that he wouldn’t even speak the name over the telephone. Quite why the BofE didn’t tell us herself I never understood but it only happened on one occasion.

From then on things hotted up and we found ourselves fully engaged in the BofE support operations. It was very exciting to read in the paper that the BofE had done x millions in the market on a day only for me to know that we had done more than the stated amount along with two other banks being involved. As the BofE never disclosed or confirmed her involvement, it was always the Evening Standard’s guess that got published. We, once again, come back to the inflation multiplier to get a real idea of the amounts involved in this operation. I know that on some days, we traded fifty million pounds on the bank’s behalf. In today’s money this represents around £790,000,000 or £2,500,000,000 in salary adjusted pounds – yes, two and a half billion! On the one day in the month that the trade figures were announced, thing got even hotter. 

The balance of trade flows was a closely watched statistic at that time and the UK was consistently importing much more than it exported. It still does but, in those days, the financial standing of the UK was precarious and we relied totally on our ability to balance our books to maintain our foreign currency reserves. Nowadays, we have a similar trade problem but the UK has a great standing as a secure haven for funds and thus inward investment keeps this in some sort of kilter. During the depths of the crisis, the country was fast running out of money and had to negotiate a range of currency swaps whereby we loaned Sterling to, say, the Swiss central bank and they lent us Swiss Francs. This was fine provided that the BofE could maintain the value of the pound but if there should be a devaluation, then the country would lose a lot on the exchange rate when unwinding the swap.

This came to a head one glorious day when the BofE decided that there weren’t enough Dollars in the kitty to continue supporting the market. They came up with, what they saw, as a brilliant idea. Why not support the market by selling dollars for delivery in three months time. Normally, the liquidity in the money markets was much greater than the exchange market as it responded to investment, whereby the exchange market was all about day-to-day cash requirements. Because of the difference between dollar and sterling interest rates, buying pounds for future delivery was different from the spot rate. With interest rates as they stood at that time, the difference between the current spot price and the three months forward exchange rate was around one a one half cents. This meant that, if the BofE wanted to support the pound at 2.7820, then they would have to offer to buy pounds in 90 days at 2.7666. This was tantamount to a devaluation in all but name but only around 2 1/2 %. I am not sure just how much of this the government understood. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was Jim Callaghan, who was not a banker or a finance man, so relied on the BofE to advise him. The truth was that, should the pound stay at its current value then the BofE would make a profit when the time came to settle these trades. However, should the pound devalue by any more than 2 ½ % then there would be a nominal loss. It seemed likely, if the pound did ever devalue that it would be by around 15% or so which would result in the bank and therefore the country having a large exchange loss.

Well, it started at around 10 am. I took a call that told me to go into the market and buy up to 50 million pounds at the current three months outright price. After shaking my head in disbelief, I told John what we had been asked to do. We went to our main broker for Cable (USD/GBP), which was M.W. Marshall, and gave them the order to buy up to 5 million. We didn’t was to show our hand too quickly. We shortly received that amount. What was interesting was that the name on the trade was N.M. Rothschild. Now NMR (as they were known) was not a spot market trader except for their own customer requirements so this was unusual. What was happening, of course, is that the broker was getting a swap price from NMR; i.e. NMR was buying the pounds on the spot date and selling them back at a fixed price on the three months date. That left the broker to find a spot counterpart. Let’s say that this was SBC London. So SBC London sold the spot pounds to NMR. Then NMR sold the forward pounds to us, thus completing the deal and achieving the BofE’s requirement that their pounds only went out in the future. Fifty million pounds later, we advised the BofE that we were done. I assume that they had other clearing banks doing the same as us.

Shortly after we had completed, I had to go to another department for something and, on getting in the lift, found that the Head Office General Manager; i.e. the overall boss of all the foreign activity in the bank – was also in that lift. “Hello Pennington (no Christian names in those days). What’s happening in the markets?” I was particularly proud that, as a mere 22 year old, I was on talking terms to the big boss. “Oh, we are supporting the pound by buying three months outright.” “That’s surprising. Whom are we dealing with?” “Oh, N.M. Rothschild on every trade.” Said I without too much thought. “How much have we done?” he asked. “Around 50 million.” Says I. “Hmmm. What is our trading limit for Rothschild?” he asked. I had to admit that it was only 5 million but explained that it would not have been possible to turn down any trade as the market was too volatile and if we had stopped then we would get it thick in the ear from the Old Lady. Fortunately, he realised that firstly, it was John Botevyle’s decision, not mine, and that I was probably right. On telling John of the exchange, we both felt that, although we had broken the bank’s rules, we couldn’t have done anything else. Oh what fun we had!

I remember one other incident with the BofE. One day, they told me to do ‘a bit’. After 20 million, I reported back to be blasted out of my chair because they thought that ‘a bit’ was a lot less than that amount. Two hours later, they told me, again, to ‘do a bit’. I reported back on 5 million and got blasted for not doing enough. The only answer possible in all of this to the chief dealer of the BofE was ‘Yes sir.’!

Appendix

A worked example of a three months forward price.

Exchange Rate	GBP	USD
2.7820	6.9	4.55
Spot	£1,000,000.00	$2,782,000.00
Interest 90 days	£17,013.70	$31,645.25
2.7666	£1,017,013.70	$2,813,645.25
Forward Swap	0.0154

So, in the above example, you could obtain 6.9% interest on the pounds but only 4.55% on the USD. For someone to take your dollars and to give you pounds, they would lose 1.35% on the deal. Therefore, the exchange rate on the forward end had to vary from the spot by that amount for anyone to do the exchange deal. The outright exchange price is calculated by dividing the sterling amount into the dollar amount. The spot rate is subtracted from this rate to give the “swap” price of -154 premium as it would be quoted in the markets. Clear? I thought not!

Having the time of my life - Canadian Dollars

When you see the real story of 1967 to 1968, you will see why I spent so much time discussing inflation. The numbers involved look quite small now but, unless you have lived through the ensuing period, you won't appreciate just how much the prices in the UK have changed. As explained, everything in 1967 has to be multiplied by 1,575%. Yes, that is right. Everything is nearly 16 times dearer now than it was then.

A good example is a car. The Ford Anglia (as we rented for our honeymoon) was a popular car in 1967 and the deluxe version - lots of chrome but with a heater as an optional extra and no radio - was £596. Using our inflation multiplier, this makes the car cost £9,387 in current terms. This is for a basic car - hand wind windows, no heater or radio, top speed around 73mph and a 0-60mph of 30 seconds - yes, thirty seconds - and 39mpg! You can see the full details - HERE. The list price for a current Ford Fiesta is £9,995 but this is an immeasurably superior car. 0–60mph is 16.9 secs, top speed is 94 mph and average mpg is 54.3 and with all the amenities that we expect.

OK, back to life. District Bank was a small clearing bank with around 570 branches. It was purchased by the National Provincial Bank in 1962 - with 1,500 branches - and ran as a separate entity until the big National Westminster Bank merger in 1970. We had some fairly large clients, however, due to the bank's large number of branches in the north of England. Customers included Radio Rentals, Leek & Moorlands Building Society and Unilever. Unilever had a Deutsche Mark account with us in London and would quite regularly call us to top up the account. On most occasion, this was for DM1,000,000 (around 6.5 million pounds at todays exchange rate). The big one was Turner Brothers (TB) - latterly Turner Newall. This company was a customer of our head office in Manchester. They imported much of their raw materials from Canada. As Manchester had no ability to fix exchange rates above a fairly small amount, they always had to contact us in London for the current Canadian Dollar/ Pound exchange rates on the transactions. As TB took constant deliveries of material, they had a wide spread of maturities that they needed prices for. These prices were for them to buy forward Canadian Dollars over around 10 - 15 maturity dates running out for about 3 - 4 months. They needed these prices as they were contracting to buy regular shipments and the dates chosen for the exchange deals matched the major dates. The process would go as follows:

"Can we have outright prices for Turners for..." with a list of dates. The trades would have been simple but the total amount that they were requesting was normally around Can$ 15,000,000. Although they were buying for future dates, we had to buy the total amount on the current spot (2 day delivery) market and then cover the forward dates by doing what were known as forward swaps. The forward market was tied to interest rate movements so was relatively stable over a couple of days whilst the spot market moved all the time based on current supply and demand.  This is where the inflation calculator comes into play. In the current environment, fifteen million doesn't sound too large amount when you think about some London house prices but... at current inflation levels, we are talking about two hundred and thirty six million dollars! Now the spot market in London was good for about two million at that time, if you were lucky. The Canadian banks in London had a bit of a stranglehold on the market. Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Bank of Montreal (BOM) were the two main supporters of the market but there was another couple of problems. Firstly, there were only two brokers in London allowed to quote Can$ - M.W. Marshall and Godsells. Both of these would normally have a firm price (i.e. one that could be traded on rather than a guess) but only in one million dollars. We had fifteen million to buy! The main banks in Canada would probably deal for two million at a time. Both RBC and BOM were good traders in Montreal (Montreal was the main trading centre then - Toronto nowadays) with Mercantile Bank of Canada (25% owned by Citibank NY) a bit behind. This meant that, if we were quick, we could get two million done in London; another six million in Montreal and hope to clear the rest in New York. There were two problems. Firstly, we had to give Turner Brothers a set of fixed prices and secondly, given the state of international telephone calls at that time (our two telephone lines ran through the bank's switchboard!) we would have to use our one telex machine to contact any overseas bank. The manager, John Botevyle, would take the London brokers and my job was to get on the telex. We would try and time it so that I had at least got one bank on the line when John hit London so that we could do as much as we could simultaneously. Having dealt with one bank, I would quickly dial another. Two was about as much as we could manage before the news got out in Montreal that there was a big buyer. My job then was to switch to New York and try and get the balance done. It was VERY exciting.

Once the spot price was fixed, we could relax a little. We still had to move the maturity of the trades from two days ahead up to at or around the trading dates for Turner Brothers. This was John's main task. He used to spread the trades in the market so that we took on about 6 or 7 standard trading dates to make the initial task easy. Over the next few weeks, we became a mainstay in the Canadian Dollar 'cock' date market. 'Cock' dates were any date that didn't correspond to a standard date. The market traded one week, 1, 2, 3 and 6 months on a standard basis. However, like us, all banks needed explicit cover for dates that were off that schedule. Also, apart from the Canadians, most banks didn't have an underlying interest in Can$ so wanted to cover any commitment that they had. Our constant developing of non-standard dated transactions in the size that we had enabled us to quote into that market very competitively so John developed us into a fairly important part of the Canadian Dollar forward market.

Next time, I will discuss our other regular involvement in the Canadian Dollar and also how we got caught up in the Greek Drachma market!

Note: What was a Telex machine?

Inflation Indices and Billions!

To understand the forthcoming blog post, you need a minimal understanding of inflation mathematics.

The world I traded in back in the mid-1960s was a world  miles away from where we are now. Firstly, I will show you how the exchange rates have changed over those  47 years.

		31/03/67	18/11/14
German Mark	DEM	11.11	2.4477	22%
Norwegian Kronor	NOK	19.91	10.54	53%
Swiss Franc	CHF	12.10	1.5030	12%
Canadian $	CAD	3.01	1.7670	52%
US $	GBP	2.7932	1.5656	56%

As you can see, the pound has suffered quite substantially against all of these currencies - not too bad against the Norwegian Kronor and the US$  but terribly against the Swiss Franc and the Deutsche Mark. The rot started back in the early 1960s and built to a peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s until inflation was got "sort of" under control.

It is difficult to understand the prices of things in those days. Houses sold for £5,000 to £6,000, cigarettes were 20p - 30p a packet and petrol was around 6/- (30p a gallon  - yes gallon - not litre - we didn't understand litres in those days). To understand them, you must know the inflation multiplier for use between 1967 and now. According to my information this number is 15.78. This means that all the above prices have to be multiplied by that to get a 2014 equivalent. This results in the following:

1967	2014
£5,000.00	£78,900.00
£6,000.00	£94,680.00
£0.30	£4.73
£12,624.00	£40,000.00

 This makes houses and petrol look cheap but allowance needs to be made for salaries at the time.  As a 7 year experience bank clerk working in the dealing room, I was earning £800p.a.. This equates to £12,650. I would guess that someone with 2 years trading experience now would be earning at least £40,000p.a. Using this as a multiplier the numbers come out like this:

1967 2014 Salary Adjusted £5,000.00 £78,900.00 £250,000.00 £6,000.00 £94,680.00 £300,000.00 £0.30 £4.73 £15.00 £12,624.00 £40,000.00 317%

As you can see, this makes house prices look almost normal. £15.00 per gallon equates to £3.34 per litre as against the current pump price of £1.24 so petrol and cigarettes look cheap at current prices.

I will now look at the type of trading amounts that were usual in the City at that time. 

1967	2014
£5,000.00	£78,900.00
£100,000.00	£1,578,000.00
£1,000,000.00	£15,780,000.00
£50,000,000.00	£789,000,000.00

The £5,000 figure represents the type of amount that we would trade against the smaller currencies, so we would keep NOK100,000 in our account at Den Norske Bank Oslo. Normal trades in GBP/USD would be for £358,000 (USD$1,000,000 as we always trading in foreign currency amount in the London broking market - never is Sterling) which is the equivalent now of £5.6 million. I will discuss in the next article about our trading in Canadian Dollars but suffice it to say for now that our regular trading amount was CAD 15,000,000 which, nowadays, equates to around £78,000,000! Wow, we knew it was big but not that big!

Next time, I will talk about how all of this is relevant to our trading on behalf of one major customer and the Bank of England.

One of the most exciting years of my life! Part 1.

The year that lasted from June 1967 to June 1968 was a very exciting one for me. It was a year of extreme financial turmoil that left a newly married 22 year old in the middle with a small role to play.

Firstly, a reminder of the background. I was the number two in the District Bank's dealing room. District Bank was one of the smaller UK clearing banks with around 570 branches. It was wholy owned by the National Provincial Bank. For more details check out either Wikipedia or the RBS heritage site (RBS being the eventual owner). The head office was in Manchester but all of the FX trading was carried out in the London Office. Sometime during this year we had an extra team member join - Peter Johnston (maybe wrong spelling - sorry Peter). Peter joined the bank in the same week as me in the Walks Department (see earlier blog entry) and at that time was Assistant Foreign Cashier. On being asked to suggest a new member of the team, I was pleased to recommend him. As a member of the Clearing House, we had a direct line through to the Bank of England which enable them to place orders with us to be executed on their behalf in the markets. At that time, it was unheard of for central banks to intervene in the markets in their own name. They also would never confirm intervention nor would they discuss the amounts involved.

1967-68 was 12 months that encompassed a huge Sterling currency crisis, a Sterling devaluation, an international gold crisis and riots in the streets of Paris that shut the banks for a while. Through all of this, I was to play a small and, but not to me, insignificant part.

Let us start with the latter part. For a quick run down, check out the Wikipedia entry. The main effect on me was that the banks in Paris all closed down meaning that the turnover in the French Franc currency market trickled to a halt because no payments could be executed. We had some discussions with a couple of banks in Paris and it turned out that they were perfectly willing to quote us prices in French Francs with the understanding that the normal 2 day delivery of funds would have to be suspended - funds would transfer to settle all outstanding deals when the banks in Paris were working normally again. This gave us the opportunity to enter the London French Franc market as a market maker - something that was normally done by the likes of Credit Lyonnais and Banque National de Paris. We had a very successful run at this and made quite a lot of money as none of the London based French banks seemed to want to get involved - at least we didn't see them.

Now, we come to the gold crisis of March/April 1968. From 1961, the major central banks had agreed to hold the price of gold at $35 per ounce. This had suffered some strains but had generally held in place. However, stresses in the market from the devaluation of Sterling in late 1967 (see later) caused a huge run on gold. Eventually, President de Gaulle decided that France would no longer participate in the "Gold Pool" as it was called. This had become a heavy net provider of gold to the market due to the fixed price in a crises. De Gaulle decided that he wanted to hold gold, not sell it so the French central bank (The Banque de France) started repatriating all of its US Dollar trade receipts to New York for payment in Gold. Eventually, the Gold Pool couldn't hold. On March 8th, 100 tons was sold by the pool - against only 5 tons on the previous day. the following Wednesday it was 175 tons and on the Thursday 225 tons! Needless to say, this could not go on. The Queen declared Friday that week a bank holiday and the gold market was closed for two weeks. It finally opened with a two tier market of official sales between central banks at $35.20 but all other trades at a market price.

Aside: The change from $35 to $35.20 is interesting. Up until then all supply had come from London but the swing from then was to a New York delivery - the 20 cents represented the cost of transporting the gold!

All of this made the exchange markets extremely volatile and I was pretty much rooted to my desk for the period. In fact I was due to visit our Manchester Head Office during this time. The idea was that I would spend a few days up there to see what they did and explain to them what we did. Their exchange desk was purely a reporting desk to us and they had no role in fixing rates for customers over and above a small amount, which they would do at rates updated by me during the day. This means that they had to request rates from us for any large transactions - again, more of this later. I was delayed in going up to Manchester. I was quite proud when I did finally check into my hotel. I was greeted with the expression - "oh, you were the one delayed by the gold crisis". I never felt more important!

All, in all, both of these events were headline news in the newspapers and I was really proud to read about the day's events in the Evening Standard on the train ride home and think that I had been in the middle of it all. However, the best bit was yet to come!

Watford

Well, here we are, living in a flat in Watford. Never been to Watford until we checked out the flat and we knew nothing about the area whatsoever. The flat was a bit - well - it needed quite a bit of work. We found insects crawling around the kitchen sink and all the rooms needed some redecoration. So, the first thing that we did was - get two cats! Well, this is obviously a first step in married life. One was a kitten and the other was a grown cat with problems.

Given my interest in American railways, the obvious choice of name for the kitten was Tweetsie. Tweetsie is the pet name for the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad. This was a narrow gauge railroad and one of my favourite topics in Lucius Beebe's book Mixed Train Daily. The other cat, a solid black coated one, Valerie decided to call after the only cat she had had before - Tinker. Tinker had a terrible case of nervousness which we never really got out of her.

On the first Saturday of us returning from our honeymoon, we went shopping in the town. As our flat was over the bank branch, we were right in the middle of town anyway so it was no great journey. I have tried to look it up on the map but Watford has changed so much in the intervening years that the old centre of town seems to be unrecognisable. Wandering round the corner, we saw that there was a large department store named Trewins. This turned out to be a branch of John Lewis and caused us to take a step that stayed with us until very recently. We opened an account with them. We recently closed the account because they were discontinuing it. The account we had was a John Lewis only account which limited our purchases but the new John Lewis card is a Visa so it can be used like any other credit card. We wanted to get rid of all our credit cards when I retired so, sadly, we closed the account after 45 years!

The flat had two bedrooms so the second one promptly got a model railway installed although this wasn't very successful. I brought the basic part of the railway with me - Roger and I had built the baseboard in his back garden when we knew we had some decent space. However, I didn't really have any spare money at that time so it did what a few of my railways have done. It languished and the room turned into a dump room. By the time we moved out it was even difficult to open the door, so bad was the stuff piled in there. We decided that we had to completely refurbish the kitchen so, with the help of my best man Roger, we stripped all the paint off the built in dresser and ripped out all the plasterwork around the sink. One of our wedding presents was a refrigerator which we installed too soon as we managed to drop some paint stripper down the front of it. From then on the fridge had some very nice stick-on flowers decorating it. Valerie was sure that it looked better for this enhancement. We made quite a good job of the kitchen. We also redecorated the living room using, what became, Valerie's regular wallpaper as it seem to follow us around!

We had bought ourselves a bed and a mattress and my Mum and Dad gave us a new table, two chairs and a bench as a wedding present. To show how trendy we were, these all came from Habitat in the Fulham Road - a shop only opened by Terence Conran in 1964, since when we had been regular browsers. It also introduced us to paper lampshades, which I think will always be associated with us as they also followed us from house to house. Valerie's mother and father gave us the fridge. My brother gave us his old bed settee, which was a bit battered but did for us and enabled Roger and Valerie's sister Marian to stay over sometimes (not together of course :-)

It wasn't a bad place to live but it was 32 miles to Romford for Valerie's parents and 25 miles to Streatham for mine. As we didn't have a car, this made visiting fairly expensive. At the time, we were  extremely stretched for money as we had taken out a little bit of finance for the bed plus we had my train ticket to the City and Valerie's to Wembley, where she now worked. I can't remember the journey to Streatham particularly because, I would think, that it was my normal journey to work and then my old journey home. However, getting to Valerie's parents was a problem. There was no direct train route and we would have had to travel up to Euston, across London to Liverpool Street and then out to Romford. Not an easy, or cheap, journey. What we did find out was that there was a Green Line bus route that went directly.

This was quite a long drive but it was cheap and just involved sitting on one bus.

Although my trip to work was different - I had to walk to Watford Junction station, take a train to Euston and then take the Northern Line Underground to the Bank station - Valerie's was all new. Her job had moved to the Wembley branch of the bank and that was completely new. I don't even think that she had had an interview. Moving branches wasn't like that. You just got allocated to a new one and off you went to find out what you found out! The work would have been familiar as she had worked at the bank's Oxford Street and Regent Street branches in the West end for the latter part of her time before she was married. Her job was to enter cheques, credits, etc. into the bank's accounting machines. Mind you, I think that her biggest attribute was to push the work through to get out quickly. In those days a bank branch's hours were 10am to 3pm and as soon as the day's work was cleared everyone went home. Oh, was she good at that! She doesn't remember much about the work there (she doesn't remember much about anything in the past so it is no good asking her) but one of the other members of staff was a boy called Dave Foreman. I mention him because he turned up many years latter as a dealer at National & Grindlays bank - which eventually became part of the Australia and New Zealand Bank.

What do I remember most about living in Watford? Hearing there Salvation Army play on a Sunday underneath our living room window; watching Doris Day in Midnight Lace on the TV and seeing a news flash of Harold Wilson announcing the 1967 devaluation of the pound, of which more later; going to an evening party in the City, getting on the stopping trains that finished at Watford, rather than the fast which went to Bletchley and then sleeping on for 30 minutes at Watford Junction station ever grateful that I did get the stopper; Valerie pouring boiling water all over her hand when straining the potatoes and spending Christmas Eve at the hospital rather than travelling to her mothers. That doesn't seem much for our first year together but actually, we slipped into married life very easily. We were very hard up at the end of every month and the one big memory is of us during that first winter playing cards (rummy is the only game that Valerie has ever mastered) at the kitchen table keeping warm by opening the door of the gas oven and lighting it after a meal of bread and jam. I think that it was this that prompted me eventually to look at my position in the bank. Firstly, I went looking for a better paid job - I know that I had an interview at Burroughs in Dunstable regarding becoming an accounting machine rep but it was obvious that that wouldn't suit my style. Eventually, I left the bank and went out into the big wide world of international banking to make my fortune.

We stayed at Watford for just 14 months. It was tied to the job and when I decided to leave the bank and take that important first step into the dark, we lost the flat and had to find another place to live...

Honeymoon

I told you about the trip to Heathrow. What I didn't tell you was that my wife (oh how she loved that title) had forgotten her hair dryer and it wasn't possible to go on holiday without it. You will see later why that was ironic. So, we ended up back at Mother's house on Sunday morning before starting out for real. I would like to say that we had pre-booked a wonderful holiday in the sun but if you knew my wife... We started out with cash in our pockets - no credit cards in those days - a hired car and enough luggage for 5 - 7 days.

Which way to go? Well, neither of us really knew so we headed off to Wales. After a long journey, we ended up on the North Wales coast at Llandudno booking into the Hydro Hotel. Nowadays it is a multi-starred place with good Trip Advisor ratings. I am sorry to say that this did not apply to us. Remember that I was 22 and Valerie was 20. We were world wise - Not! Having booked a room, we were shown up and found that it was the pokiest room you can imaging with outdated furniture and a view of the dustbins out the back. Fortunately, we hadn't paid a deposit or anything so we turned round and walked out. It was just as well we did because we headed out on the A5 which drives right across north Wales to Oswestry. On the way, we came to a small village called Bethesda and came across a small motel out in the country. The difference was chalk and cheese. We had a view up the mountainside and could see sheep grazing. From a small room with no facilities, we had a lovely room with an en-suite shower. It being our second day of marriage and a shower cubicle... Well, that was a first and last!

We had a nice two days there. We had a trip up to Rhyl to see a film - A Countess from Hong Kong starring Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando and a hit song for Petula Clark - This is my song.  Two days - time to move on. My wife has a wanderlust at times like this. Where next then? Oh, the Lake District sounds nice, says she. Off we go and somehow find an extremely nice hotel that is all pine cladding. The significance of this will be obvious to those who know Valerie. For the rest of you, it will emerge in later life. Not only was it all pine clad but - and this was a first for us - had duvets on the beds. We had never seen such things at that time. Again, a lovely couple of days but where next. "Oh, I know", says Valerie, "why don't we go down to Chippenham". We can stay at the Angel Motel and go and see my grandparents. Now, Valerie's grandfather was not a bundle of fun. In fact he was the most hidebound misery that I think I have ever met. Every meal and tea break had to be to exact time and I never heard him crack a smile, let alone laugh. Grandmother was alright but very staid. What did I say? "Oh, alright".

Distances: Romford to Llandudno = 268 miles. Llandudno to The Lake District = 161 miles. The Lakes to Chippenham, Wilts = 252. Not bad for little old England and a guy who hadn't driven for a few years. Fortunately, the M5 motorway was substantially complete at this time and took us south of Birmingham. Someway on the journey, whilst on the motorway the clutch started to slip and going up one long steep hill, it finally lost all contact with the engine. Remember that this was a brand new Ford Anglia so this should not have happened. We pulled onto the hard shoulder and I walked to the nearest telephone to call the RAC (Royal Automobile Club) as their service was included in the hire. Whilst we were waiting, an extremely smart AA (Automobile Association) man turned up. He tried the clutch and announced that we would need a tow to a garage. We thanked him and, sitting there worried, waited for the RAC man. A scruffy RAC van with an even scruffier driver turned up.  Ten minutes later we were on our way, him having adjust the clutch cable which had slipped. Good man!

Somewhere out there on these trips Valerie took a liking to a set of Carmen Heated Hair Rollers. Remember that we had to go back for a hair dryer? I can't remember how it came up or why they became so important but I do remember that the whole time we were at the Angel Motel we were driving throughout that part of Wiltshire looking for the rollers. Not any old Carmen rollers but a specific set! It seems that everyone stocked the make but almost never this special set. Eventually, in Cirencester, we found this exact set and we were able to do something that I wanted. A trip to the Royal Tank Corps museum at Bovington seemed a great idea, but we had run out of time so we went home. It was to be many a long year before I got to see the tanks.

We came back to Watford to open up our new home for Valerie to start her new position at the bank's Wembley branch on the Monday morning. I was to try the new commute from Watford to London, Euston and a Northern Line Underground train to the Bank Station and get back into the hurly burly of the bank's dealing room at a time of huge balance of payments crisis for the UK.My days were to get even more interesting.

The bouncing ball

I have managed to find the video of our wedding. I have cropped it to show the bouncing ball incident. If you look carefully under the car at around the 27 second mark, you will see the ball bouncing. The red mini following is that of my best man - Roger Whittle who chased us up the road flashing his headlights!


I have also uploaded the complete wedding video, just in case you want to see the whole thing. There are many people in the video that, sadly, are no longer with us so it brings back many memories.

Oh, what wonderful memories. We have been married for 47 years now and I have known and loved Valerie for 51 years.

Marriage - Part 2

We have got to that day - 22nd April 1967. It started out a fine day. I drove up from Streatham and the rest of my friends all got together and travelled out to Romford. There was me, Roger Whittle (my best man), Alan Jones, Andy Parker and Dave Russell. (I can't remember but I think that I probably brought my Mum and Dad with me). We arrived at the church in plenty of time so did the only decent thing - went across the road for a pint! Here are Roger and me as we prepared for the big day.

We were to be married in St. Edwards church right in the middle of Romford Market Place. At that time, the market place was a busy road with all the market stalls clustered around. The road was the continuation of Main Road up through Gidea Park. Nowadays the road stops at the top of the market and joins the ring road with the market being a pedestrian precinct. One of the "joys" of being married at St. Edwards was that, when you left the church, you had to run the gauntlet of all the shoppers in the market "rubber necking".

As usual, I expect, the service flew by and before we knew what was happening, we were out of the church and having the photos taken. First off, we have Valerie and the bridesmaids.

Left to right they are Doreen Lacy - friend, Allison Dunklin (as was) - Valerie's cousin, Katherine De'Ath (with the basket) - daughter of family friend, Sandra Pennington - David's niece, Marian Carter - Valerie's sister and Heather Dunklin (as was) - Valerie's cousin

Next up, we had the family. Again, left to right we have Pat and Charlie (brother and sister-in-law); my Mum, Ivy, and Dad, Charlie; Me and Valerie; Valerie's Dad, Lionel; Valerie's brother, Terry; Valerie's Mum, Jessie and Valerie's sister Marian.

We now left. You can see what I meant about the rubber neckers!

The wedding breakfast was to be held at Tweed Way Hall. The local community centre up in Rise Park, where, until then, Valerie had lived. It was a very nice hall and beautifully done out for the meal, etc. There were quite a lot of people at the "do". You can see them all in the group photo from the church.

All of the members of both families were there with a lot of friends as well. All in all, it was a wonderful day. Valerie and I stayed for the meal and a couple of hours afterwards. I had hired a car for the honeymoon. It was a Ford Anglia Estate that I had picked up in Watford the night before. 

We were going to live in Watford so that was a sensible move. Mind you, I hadn't driven a car since passing my test when I was 18 (now 22), so the 27 mile drive from Watford to Streatham was a bit fraught. Still I had got back into it by the time I was married! During the afternoon, we prepared to leave. When we got outside with everyone there to wave us off, we found that the car had been well and truly decorated. However, we didn't know the worst of it. We were driving out to Heathrow for the first night. We were to stay at the Ariel Hotel. The only image I can find of this hotel is a modern one but you can see that it is a circular hotel. It was quite a landmark then on the edges of the airport.

I am not going to go into the first night except to repeat a conversation that I had with Roger sometime after. It went "Bet you can't guess what I was doing at 1am?". Needless to say, Roger was too polite to comment. "Well, I was looking out the window watching the activity on the airport!" Somethings never change and my interest in aircraft always comes to the fore :-(

I do need to clarify on the worst of the car decoration. We got about 2 miles down the Eastern Avenue on our way into London when we both became aware of a banging noise coming from under the car. There was a touch of panic when we pulled over as we had a long way to go on our honeymoon and we were both scared that a problem with the car so close to home could ruin it. What we found, when we stopped, was that some of my so called friends had tied a rubber ball underneath the car on a long string. It was bouncing up and down giving the dreadful "bonk". Dressed in my new honeymoon suit, I didn't much care to crawl under the car but it had to be done. Much later, we found that Valerie's Uncle Les had taken a video of us leaving. If you look carefully, you can see the ball bouncing up and down in that. One day I will have that video dubbed to DVD!

So - life to date - a summary

I thought that it was probably best to gain an overview of my first 22 years before, I tackle the wedding and the rest of my life. So, I will have a go at setting some categories.

Home Life
My Mum and Dad never had much money. Dad had to change jobs when he was around 53 due to being pushed out for a younger man from his job at the Castle Equipment Company in Newington Causeway, Elephant and Castle. I think that he enjoyed the job because it seemed to suit him. He was left to his own devices and could do the work easily. He also enjoyed the fact that many famous cricketers of the time came to use the cricket nets that the company had on its top floor. His final job was as a bus conductor, which I think that he put up with. I know that, when there was a long bus strike, he really hated not being at work.Mum always had some kind of work. Sometimes it was part-time so she managed two in one day. Her last job at Mullards in Mitcham was a the hardest that she had, I think. She worked a machine that cut wires to length for making electrical equipment. I know that she found the reels of wire very heavy to lift but she really enjoyed the company.

Neither of them earned what would be seen as a decent living nowadays but I never knew anything about that. There was always food on the table, Christmas and Birthday presents and they stumped up for my Scout uniforms with no complaint. I also got a decent amount of pocket money - 15/- (75p) was my top whack and I was never expected to find a job such as doing a paper round or any such. I can't say that they were a demonstrative pair towards me in the sense that I didn't get a lot of hugs and kisses but in those days, I think, this was the norm. I do know that they supported me in everything that I did and supported me enthusiastically. However, being effectively an only child I learned to amuse myself and buried myself into lots of hobbies - most of which I still do.

School
Ah, now we have a different story. I was good at Maths. I managed to make a good fist of Latin (I was in the top set out of 100 boys for all of the four years that I studied it). Overall, though, I think that  I put the minimum effort into everything and managed to scrape along. I even had the same attitude towards the Combined Cadet Force. Remembering my love of aircraft, it would have seemed to be easy for me to pass the Part 1 exam which would have got me out of the Army Cadets into the RAF Cadets but... In spite of me being a Patrol leader in the Air Scouts and being an expert camper, etc. I managed to fail the exam every time. I think that I have a problem with things that don't interest me! I scraped out of school with the bare minimum of qualifications. Given my later ability with the Open University, I think that the problem of interest is obvious. So, I left school at 16 with just enough.

Work
Amazingly, my four GCE passes would have got me into the RAF for pilot training at 18, if I had wanted to progress that path. In the meantime, I entered the Banking profession. One of my problems is that I always want to run things so the slow slog through the lower orders at the bank really didn't suit me. I did keep at it though and even studied for my professional qualifications. The Institute of Bankers exams were an expected path for anyone with ambition, so I signed up for the Rapid Results College and studied hard at the required correspondence course. I passed Part 1 with no problems and made a good start on Part 2, which would have given me an AIB (Associate of the Institute of Bankers) after my name. Foreign Exchange Dealing put paid to that. I just couldn't face taking the Part 2 exam on "The Finance of Foreign Trade and Foreign Exchange" in case I failed! What would that have made a young dealer look like. As it happens, the last thing I needed for my career from then on was exams. In Dealing/Trading you are as good as your last deal and no one asks about qualifications.

Friends
Ah, well. Getting married was a watershed for me when it comes to friends. Up to the wedding day, I can honestly say that I had a good number of friends:
Roger Whittle (my Best Man, of course), Alan Jones, Dave Russell, Andy Parker all from Scouts - Stan Hunt (soon then to move to Australia) and Peter Johnson from work and so on.
Once married, everyone except Roger sort of dropped away. I did play Badminton once a week with Roger, Andy and Alan but even that stopped when we moved to Billericay.
Since that move I can't really think of any friends outside of work although, as I say, Roger and I kept  in good contact for many years. It seems that once married, I had lots of friends at work during the day but came home to the family at nights and weekends. I must say that this has suited me and has never been a bother. I didn't really make another outside work friend for many years until David Lincoln came along.

How did I see myself
Well, I was pretty aggressive in my desire to get on, pretty useless at managing money and savings and extremely keen on all kinds of hobbies and pastimes - but never really sport! Did I like myself?  Sometimes. Did I have any plans? Loads. I wanted to join the Airforce - changed my mind, join the Army Air Corps flying helicopters - changed my mind, join the Navy flying helicopters - persuaded that it wasn't a good idea. Stay as a dealer - well, no, I thought that there might be better things to do, until I found out what salaries were being paid by Overseas Banks in London rather than my "paltry" clearing bank salary.

Marriage - and all that! Part 1.

It was decided - well "she" decided - that we were to get married in April 1967. We had some planning to do. Furniture, bedding etc. all had to be decided upon. We put together a book where we could list all the things we needed. We could then start picking designs etc. As part of our wanders around the West End, we had quite often ended up in the King's Road. At that time, the King's Road area in Chelsea was THE place to go. One of the places we liked there was the new Habitat shop. Now, no-one had ever seen anything quite like Habitat before. It was a centre of the best in 1960s design at reasonable prices. This made it easier to decide on stuff because it had most things under it's roof.

The real problem was that we spent a lot of money in going backwards and forwards between Romford and Streatham and neither of us was earning a lot of money. Although I was in the FX dealing room of the bank, clearing banks at that time didn't pay any premium to staff working there. Eventually, I got a few merit rises over the posted salary grades (which were based solely on age - oh and there were different salaries for men and women!) but not at this time. Remember that, at that time, the top of the salary table was a 30 year old man where it was at £1,000p.a. (which when adjusted for inflation was a mighty £15,500 in today's money). So, banking wasn't the best paid job around at that time. This meant that we were never able to save too much for the great day. I think that, at that time, we were earning that much between us, given our ages. Mind you, we didn't have computers, big screen TVs, etc. available. Still, I was smoking a pipe at that time, which cost some money.

One of the main things that everyone needs when getting married is somewhere to live. We were, obviously, only able to rent at that time so we had to start looking for somewhere. We started looking at what were then called "digs" in the Streatham area. Digs involved someone letting out a couple of rooms in their house - nothing self contained of course. Those that we saw were, frankly, appalling. I mentioned this one lunchtime in the bank rest room. One of my friends at that time - Tony Saville (who worked in the Securities department) mentioned that he was moving out of his flat as he had managed to get a mortgage from the bank. He was living in the Kennington Road which was about 2 miles or so from the City.  We went and had a look and found that it was a nice flat situated above a line of shops with a handy bus route outside. It was some way from Streatham and a long way from Romford but we wanted to fly the nest and this looked a likely spot to end up. Unfortunately, my boss had other ideas!

My immediate boss was John Botevyle, who was Treasury Manager but his boss was Mr. Robinson - the Assistant Manager of the Foreign Department (I would never have known his first name!). I had to get an employer's reference for the landlord and it was Mr. Robinson's job to do that. The rent on the flat was £30.00 per month (about £450 nowadays) so it was a reasonable rent for a two bedroom flat in a nice area. Hmmm, I hadn't reckoned on 1960's banking strictures on staff commitments. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that the bank didn't consider that we could afford this. I pointed out to him that we didn't have much choice because if it wasn't this one, it would be something and anything decent was around this price. He came back to me after a few days with a new plan. It seems that the bank branch in Watford had a self contained flat over it and the staff member living there was moving on to another posting so this would become available. It even tied in with our wedding date.

Bank flats were subsidised at that time and it was a very good thing to get hold of one. However, Watford was 16 miles from Euston which was 2 1/2 miles from the bank and needed an underground ride. We costed this up and, although I can't remember the breakdown, the total cost of the rent and the fares for us to commute came to - wait for it - £30.00. No amount of pleading made any difference so, that's how it was left. We agreed to take the flat. However, having made the point, the bank did think about this and came up with a slight adaption to the plan.

Valerie had started work in the Cheque Clearing department and had done rather well there. She was one of the first to be trained on the new-fangled automated cheque sorting machines so she had stood out a little. From here, she had been "promoted" to working in various branches around the central London area. She started off at the new Regent Street branch and had then moved to the Oxford Street branch - someway down near Bond Street. One of her big assets was that she had a built in desire to get out of the branch at the earliest time possible. In those days work in the branch finished when all the day's work was complete. With Valerie's urging, they quite often got done around 4.30!  She had even been on a course up in Manchester Head Office (well Lloyd Entwistle branch actually) where, she will tell you, she shared a hotel with the Kinks - then a famous pop group! As she was now adept at branch work, they came up with a plan for her to move to the Wembley Branch of the bank. This was situated between Watford and Euston so she would save money by having a much reduced travel cost.

So that was how it was left as we prepared to get married and move away from both of our families.