Almost exactly 100 years ago today or so it seems, I started work in a small non-descript Office in a grimy side street of the City of London for a financial broking house that owed almost as much to it’s Victorian history as it did to its Landlord and Creditors.
It seems like only yesterday I was thumping around the blue Bri-Nylon carpets, beneath tobacco stained, peeling walls, in platform shoes and a brown nearly wool suit, dropping files of ancient lineage in the wrong tin drawers, generating terminal levels of static electricity and failing to get to grips with the ‘key and lamp’ office phone system installed by Graham Bell himself not 20 years previously.
Those were the days when we served a proper apprenticeship. Collecting 8 scolding brews and a Custard Tart from the Italian coffee bar across the street in the pouring rain. Buying the OM’s Porn magazines from the Newsagents on the corner and smuggling them back to the office under plain wrapper and out of sight of the typing pool supervisor. Forging receipts for the Sales Manager’s dodgy expenses claims and collecting the distressed Senior Broker in a taxi from Albertini’s or Simpson’s after an extended lunch the client had long since abandoned.
And on Friday nights, after we had received what passed for our weekly salary, huddling in a decrepit, ancient, badly lit City boozer somewhere beneath the square mile, among the stale smells of beer, babycham and old shag, with a group of ‘young Ladies’ from the typing pool and their mates, hoping for a kiss and maybe something more in return for a Campari and Soda and even a Cinzano if I’d got my overtime…
Back then my romantic stirrings were all in vain as invariably they would one-by-one or two-by-two pair off with the flashier, richer lounge lizards who wandered in and out drinking light and bitters and promising exotic evenings of dancing and partying and gigs and there afters that I could only read about in dodgy novels and badly printed music press hand-outs.
I found out later that with my unfashionably wide lapelled suits and waistcoats, out dated pre-glam shoes and public school accent all the girls in the typing pool and most of the blokes on the trading floor called me ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ behind my back. Hardly an epithet to set an evening of sexual frisson on fire with a girl in a see-through plastic mac who could type 80 words a minute.
It wasn’t from these pallid evenings that I eventually launched my sexual adventures but I still remember them fondly as a time when hope sprang eternal in my loins and the glimmer of a professional career ushered me towards the halls of the financially mighty!
The senior men (and it was an exclusively male club back then) all of an age, had mostly served in WW2 as Officers and possibly Gentlemen and then drifted into the City where a sense of duty and a basic grasp of lower finance had left them comfortably marooned at large oak desks where they made sufficient incomes to own a house in the suburbs, send their offspring to minor public schools in search of proper qualifications and retire on a decent pension before an age of professionalism and technocracy could wash them away on a rising tide of incompetence.
The City was a club back then where members didn’t ask awkward questions about where all the money came from, who benefited from it and whether the customers actually received any value for their investments. The wheels were oiled, lunches taken, money quietly removed from Balance Sheets and company bank accounts and small dividends sometimes paid out all in the name of utmost good faith and a ‘Gentlemen’s word…’ If there was a gap in the accounts – discovered by accident of course – a recipient’s assurance was good enough to cover the matter and no one else need be informed.
I very quickly discovered the whole financial edifice ran on mass delusion, unenlightened self-interest, greed, stupidity, incompetence and the occasional flash of brilliance. Raising the point only upset everyone and I soon decided if you can’t tell them there’s a conman operating the Wizard behind the curtain, I might as well join them, enjoy the show and all it’s many benefits!
And the rest is my history…
Bulk and The Devil 