the world of private banking

HEREDItARy CALLING, INHERItED REFINEmENt 271
being by-passed by Slater Walker and its ilk; while later, one’s impression is of the
merchant banks mainly keeping their heads down, concentrating on their largely
international business, and hoping that the eventual fall of Labour would lead to
something better. Then in 1979 came Thatcher, the abolition of exchange controls,
and in due course, of particular importance to merchant banks, the privatization
phenomenon and a wave of ferociously contested takeovers. By the mid-1980s,
that time of ‘Big Bang’ and Serious Money, the City seemed to lie at the centre
of the national discourse, in a way that it had perhaps not done since the South
Sea Bubble. And undoubtedly, in the eyes of most people, the flagships of that
City were the merchant banks. Neither they nor those observing them could have
imagined the traumas that lay ahead.
Let me finish briefly with some thoughts arising out of reading another recently
published merchant banker’s autobiography, Peter Spira’s Ladders and Snakes. 26
The author, a doctor’s son, spent the best years of his working life, 1957 to 1974, as
a corporate financier at Warburgs. It was a bank that demanded total commitment
– at one point Spira describes a dramatic office encounter with Siegmund Warburg
at 7 p m. on Christmas Eve 1962, a Friday to boot – and there is barely a whiff of
the gentlemanly capitalist in these memoirs. Spira brings out very evocatively the
compelling, powerful but in some ways strangely twisted world of Warburgs in its
prime, and one acquires a sense of what made him and his colleagues run as hard
as they did. Yet in the end, Spira’s account is but one fragment of a much larger
mosaic that as yet no historian has come close to assembling. We are fortunate
to have had in the last ten years such a fruitful run of house histories, but we still
await a Chapman and a Cassis to give us the big but detailed picture of merchant
banks and merchant bankers since 1914. As most of those banks now fade from
the scene, or at best are reconstituted into something barely recognizable, the right
time for that task is surely at hand.
26
P. Spira, Ladders and Snakes (privately published by the author, 63 Bedford
Gardens, London W8 7EF, 1997).