the world of private banking

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THE WORLD OF PRIVAtE BANKING
Lionel Fraser was the son of a butler and a housemaid and in the end he became
chairman of Helbert Wagg. He had left school at eighteen and had been a clerk
in a little merchant bank which Alfred Wagg bought, and just through sheer hard
work he became an absolutely leading merchant banker. He was straight as a die.
He took night classes to teach himself French. He was driven by ambition to make
money, to live in Cadogan Square, to be a member of White’s and the St James’s
Club. Very few people knew that he was a butler’s son, most people thought he was
an Old Etonian. He was distinguished looking, beautifully dressed – not overdone
– and excellent manners. Most people regarded him as the crème de la crème....
I wouldn’t have worked for Siggy Warburg. At Helbert Wagg we were
mixed in our views. We knew he was tenacious and cautious and all the rest of
it but I don’t think he regarded there being any other life but business and we
regarded business as a means to an end. We wanted to have fun and crack some
jokes. Jokes were not cracked at Warburgs – not more than once, anyhow. He
was frightfully concerned about change and getting things properly organized,
and most of us didn’t give a damn about that. We took a bit of change in our
stride but we certainly didn’t want too much. He was an upsetter of the existing
Establishment. He wasn’t a member of it and he didn’t like it and was trying to
get rid of it. At the start, the Establishment was dismissive and he was regarded
as a squirt, an upstart. Very few people would have regarded him as a personal
friend. People took off his foreign accent.... 11
As for Keith, the driving force behind what ultimately became Hill Samuel, he
may have been disconcertingly brusque in manner and aggressive in business,
but his background was acceptably public school (Rugby), he was a good shot
and possessed a tall, military bearing, and above all – like Fraser, like Warburg
– he was manifestly top-notch at his job. Back in the 1930s, Montagu Norman
had tried to circumscribe the City ambitions of Philip Hill himself, whom Norman
regarded as an out-and-out bounder; but a generation later Kim Cobbold, whose
approach to the City was quite as papal as Norman’s, could do little to stem Keith’s
ambitions. There was a telling episode early in 1955 when Churchill’s private
secretary, Jock Colville, used a mutual friend, the politician and press magnate
Brendan Bracken, to sound out the governor of the Bank about a possible berth
at Philip Hill once Churchill had left office. ‘I said that from the City point of
view’, noted Cobbold after his conversation with Bracken, ‘I was in favour of
Philip Hill being “respectabilized” and I should be quite glad to see somebody like
Colville there. I was bound to say that if I were advising my own brother I would
still raise an eyebrow and, as Lord Bracken knows, there are people in Philip Hill
who are not generally liked.’ Cobbold’s warning – quite literally, the raising of
the gubernatorial eyebrow – proved futile, for Colville soon afterwards took the
shilling. 12
11
Courtney et al., City Lives, pp. 8–9.
12
Bank of England Archives, G 3/113, 27 Jan. 1955.