The Bank That Lived A Little
Philip Augar
This appeared on the FT ‘Best Of’ list c.2018. I thought it was a good read. Particular things that grabbed me were the ‘revolving door’ nature of UK corporate board appointments and their seemingly limited appetite for holding chiefs to account.
The book opens with a quick history of the bank and Tom Camoys’ role in setting up the first iteration of the Barclays investment banking arm as a response to Thatcher’s Big Bang in the late 80’s. The bank was described as a mix of tradition and adventure, with roots in Quaker land owner families in the late 19th century. Board meetings were described as “high mass, without the vestments”. The headquarters reflected the traditional side, it contained a rifle range in the basement! Camoys’ ambition is viewed as hard-charging and he is told, “Tom, we’re slightly worried about you. You don’t seem to realise that you have joined a club. We are all very nice to each other here”. From this quote you get the sense of the cultural challenge of building an investment bank in Barclays.
We also get some interesting insights into the state of UK retail banking in the mid-20th Century:
“Opening hours were short and the same at every bank, none opened at the weekends and banks politely declined to compete too hard with each other or even to advertise on television”.
This is described as being born from the cosy relationship between the Bank of England and the banks, where “the BoE capped the amounts they could lend and made them hold capital, but in return the banks were allowed to collude over interest rates”. This changes in the 70’s with the arrival of Heath and banks begin to compete. We then get a bit of colour on the rampant inflation of the 70’s. Interesting that the BoE had no independence back then.