the world of private banking

HEREDItARy CALLING, INHERItED REFINEmENt 265
at Rothschilds – here were three houses in which the concept of meritocracy could
hardly have been less on the agenda, certainly in terms of the very highest positions.
Almost as strong as the instinctive attachment to keeping things in the family was
the urge to recruit Old Etonians. ‘The O.E. tie was worth £200 a year in the City’,
the Master of Wellington College was informed in 1940, and that was probably
an underestimate. The future corporate financier Andrew Carnwath, for example,
could not have had a simpler route to 8 Bishopsgate, where he arrived in 1928
at the age of nineteen. ‘I had never heard of Barings’, he would dryly reminisce
about Eton recommending him to that bank, ‘but inquiries showed that I would
probably be wise to explore the matter further.’ Or take a rather more flamboyant
merchant banker, Michael Verey, three years younger than Carnwath. Born into
a family that invariably sent its sons to Eton, he came down from Cambridge in
1934 and began to consider the City:
I talked to my father [a solicitor] and he said, ‘I will speak to my friend, Alfred
Wagg.’ He and Alfred [chairman of Helbert Wagg] had been friends since they
were little boys at the same private school together and were very close friends
at Eton and Cambridge and thereafter. There was a, for me, ghastly, agonizing
dinner party which was held in Alfred’s very grand flat in Berkeley Square with
a butler and footman.... My father and I wore dinner jackets and I said to my
father, ‘I’ll just stay doggo so that he can’t take against me. You do the talking.’
So my father was frightfully good and swept Alfred along....
The wider point, with no disrespect to the individual ability of either Carnwath or
Verey, hardly needs labouring. ‘To the Old Etonians’, concluded the stockbroker
and financial journalist Nicholas Davenport in his memoirs, ‘every financial door
in the City was open.... It was a sort of Mafia in reverse – a gang based on honest
dealing instead of blackmail, on good “hard” money (lots of it) instead of easy loot
and on simplicity instead of cunning. The only rules were playing safe, resisting
change, opposing new ideas, upholding the Establishment and being willing to
dress up and go on the pompous dinner parade in the City halls....’ 10
How easy was it for outsiders up to the 1950s to break into this charmed circle?
Probably about the same as during the long nineteenth century: difficult, but not
impossible. Three obvious examples, all coming through soon after 1945 as
heavyweight merchant bankers, were Siegmund Warburg, Lionel Fraser of Helbert
Wagg, and Kenneth Keith of Philip Hill. Verey, in the City Lives anthology of oral
history, talks revealingly as well as entertainingly about the first two:
D. Newsome, A History of Wellington College, 1859–1959 (London, 1959), p. 361.
The Times, 5 Jan. 1996.
C. Courtney and P. Thompson, City Lives: the Changing Voices of British Finance
(London, 1996), p. 36.
10
N. Davenport, Memoirs of a City Radical (London, 1974), pp. 42–3.