From Other People’s Money, by John Kay, loc 244:
I was a schoolboy in Edinburgh in the 1960s. The capital of Scotland is Britain’s second financial centre and was the headquarters of two major banks, the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Banking was then a career for boys whose grades were not good enough to win them admission to a good university. The aspiration of many of my contemporaries was to join either ‘the Bank’ or ‘the Royal Bank’. With appropriate diligence, they might, after twenty years or so, become branch managers. The branch manager was a respected figure in the local community, and social interaction at the golf club or Rotary lunch was part of his job. He would know personally the local professionals – the accountant, the lawyer, the doctor, the minister and the more prosperous tradesmen. The bank manager would receive their savings and occasionally make loans. The regional office might review his figures, but would rely heavily on the manager’s assessment of character. He – there were no female managers – expected to spend his career with the bank, and to retire with a pension. It never crossed his mind, or the minds of his customers, that the institution he had joined at the age of seventeen would not continue for ever, in broadly its existing form.
Mark Carrigan 