What a Carve Up! (36 page)

Thomas

Few people remember anything about the first domestic VCR, launched by Philips as long ago as 1972. The price was high, the recording time was limited to one hour, and it ended up selling mainly to commercial and institutional buyers. Thomas Winshaw bought one, all the same, and had it built into a cupboard behind one of the oak-pannelled walls of his office at Stewards. But he decided not to invest at this stage. Although he was both privately excited by the invention and keenly aware of its commercial possibilities, he sensed that its time had not yet come. Almost, but not quite.

1978 saw the first real flurry of activity. In April JVC introduced its Video Home System, retailing at £750, and only three months later Sony launched the rival Betamax machine. Over the next few years these two systems were to slug it out in the marketplace, with VHS finally proving itself the clear winner. In the autumn of 1978, when Thomas Winshaw announced that the bank would be involving itself heavily in the burgeoning industry, his fellow board members’ initial reaction was one of dismay. They reminded him that Stewards’ flirtation with the film industry in the early 1960s had not been successful, and even invoked the crisis at Morgan Grenfell ten years ago, when a major commitment to film financing had ended in a potential disaster only warded off at the last minute by intervention from the Bank of England. Thomas dismissed these precedents. He was not suggesting anything as risky as investment in film production. He simply proposed taking a modest stake in one of the leading hardware manufacturers; the software market being, as he would be the first to admit, at this stage too new, too unstable and, frankly, too sleazy. As usual, his instincts were right. Over the next five years, imports of video recorders multiplied ten times over, and by 1984 there was a machine in 35.74 per cent of British homes, as opposed to 0.8 per cent in 1979. The bank profited handsomely. Then in 1981 they became advisers and fund managers to a firm which was rapidly building up a strong market share in post-production, distribution and film-to-video transfers. With Stewards’ help, this company went on to merge with an independent video duplication house and within a few years more than three quarters of its income was coming from duplication services. Once again, the bank reaped substantial dividends. Thomas slipped up on one occasion, however: he was an enthusiastic proponent of Philips’s videodisc system, LaserVision, which was put on the market in May 1982 but after more than a year had only collected sales figures of around 8,000. The obvious explanation was that it did not offer a recording facility, and when, a few months later, JVC abruptly cancelled their own disc system, and RCA decided to halt all player production in 1984, it was clear even to the least sophisticated industry analyst that the new technology had failed to catch on. Yet Thomas maintained his commitment to a £10-million disc-pressing plant in Essex, which was running at a huge loss.

Among themselves, his colleagues would puzzle over this curious blind spot. The amount of money involved was negligible, in Stewards’ terms: but it was still the only time in Thomas’s fifteen-odd years of chairmanship that he had persisted in offering uncritical support to a palpably loss-making enterprise. And they never did guess the real reason, which was that he was enraptured with the sharp picture quality and perfect still frames offered by the video disc, which suited his own needs so admirably and took him back to the heady, exhilarating days when he used to hang around the film studios and collect discarded footage of beautiful young actresses in various stages of
déshabillé.
The freeze frame, for Thomas, was the very
raison d’être
of video: he was convinced that it would turn Britain into a nation of voyeurs, and sometimes, as he sat spellbound in the dark with the television on, his fly buttons undone and the door to his office securely locked, he would imagine identical scenes being played out in curtained rooms up and down the country, and would feel a strange solidarity with the great mass of ordinary men from whose pitiful lives he normally took such care to insulate himself.

Only once, incidentally, did he forget to lock the office door. It was about seven o’clock in the evening and as luck would have it his secretary, who was also working late, made the mistake of entering without knocking. She was sacked on the spot; but the story still managed to make its way into a few of the City wine bars, and some people maintain that the phrase ‘merchant banker’ was introduced into the currency of rhyming slang at precisely this time.

∗

Thomas loved screens of every description. He loved the lie they sustained: that the world could be given shape by the four sides of a rectangle, and that he, the spectator, was in a position to sit back and watch, untouched and unobserved. In his professional life (not that he had any personal life to speak of) he was at constant pains to screen himself off from the world, which he watched as if it were a silent film from behind the protecting glass of many different screens: the window of a first-class railway carriage, for instance, or of Bob Maxwell’s helicopter (which he was occasionally allowed to borrow), or the smoke-tinted, one-way glass of his private limousine. The computerization of the foreign exchange markets, which alarmed some of the older bankers, seemed to him an entirely logical development. So did the abandonment of the stock exchange floor in 1986. At last, to his delight, there was no longer any need for dealers ever to come into contact with one another, and every transaction was reduced to the flicker of electric pulses on a video screen. He had a camera installed in Stewards’ own foreign trading room, connected to a monitor in his office, and here, staring at a screen which all day showed nothing but row upon row of his traders, themselves staring at screens, he would swell with quasi-sexual sensations of pride and power. It seemed, at such moments, that there was no end to the glassy barriers which he could put up between himself and the people (did they really exist?) whose money formed the basis of each day’s intoxicating speculations. Banking, as he once told a television interviewer, had become the most spiritual of all professions. He would quote his favourite statistic: one thousand billion dollars of trading took place on the world’s financial markets every day. Since every transaction involved a two-way deal, this meant that five hundred billion dollars would be changing hands. Did the interviewer know how much of that money derived from real, tangible trade in goods and services? A fraction: 10 per cent, maybe less. The rest was all commissions, interest, fees, swaps, futures, options: it was no longer even paper money. It could scarcely be said to exist. In that case (countered the interviewer) surely the whole system was nothing but a castle built on sand. Perhaps, agreed Thomas, smiling: but what a glorious castle it was …

Watching his foreign exchange dealers as they stared feverishly at their flickering screens, Thomas came as close as he would ever come to feeling paternal love. They were the sons he had never had. This was during the happiest time of his life, the early to mid 1980s, when Mrs Thatcher had transformed the image of the City and turned the currency speculators into national heroes by describing them as ‘wealth creators’, alchemists who could conjure unimaginable fortunes out of thin air. The fact that these fortunes went straight into their own pockets, or those of their employers, was quietly overlooked. The nation, for a brief, heady period, was in awe of them.

Things were very different when Thomas had first come to work for Stewards: the City was still recovering from the ordeal of the Bank Rate Tribunal which, for two weeks in December 1957, had exposed some of its dealings for the first time to public view. Labour MPs and the popular newspapers had been raising scandalized eyebrows over revelations of multi-million-pound deals being passed through on a nod and a wink in the comfort of gentlemen’s clubs, on Saturday morning golf courses and weekend grouse-shooting parties. Although all of the merchant banks involved had been cleared of the charge of acting upon ‘improperly disclosed’ information about the raising of the Bank Rate, a distinct whiff of scandal lingered in the air, and it remained true that hefty amounts of gilt-edged stock had been unloaded on to the market in the days (and hours) before the Chancellor’s announcement. For Thomas, who had become a director of Stewards in the spring of that year, it had been a bruising initiation: Macmillan may have been proclaiming in Bedford that the economy was strong and the country had ‘never had it so good’, but the foreign speculators thought differently, and embarked upon a fierce campaign of selling sterling short, wiping millions of dollars off the gold reserves and forcing an eventual 2 per cent rise in the Bank Rate (up to 7 per cent, its highest for more than a century).

‘It was what you might call a baptism by fire,’ Thomas had explained to his young cousin Mark, who was employed in a junior capacity at the bank in the summer of 1961. ‘We cleaned up, of course, but to be frank I don’t expect to see another sterling crisis like it during my time at Stewards.’

And yet something similar did take place, on September 16th 1992 (Black Wednesday, as it came to be called), when the currency dealers once again managed to raid the country’s gold reserves to the tune of billions of dollars, and this time force a devaluation of sterling into the bargain. Thomas was right in one respect, however: he never did see it happen. He had lost the use of his eyes by then.

∗

Thomas’s world had always been apprehended entirely through the eyes: this was why (among other things) he never felt any desire to touch or to be touched by women. All great men have their idiosyncracies, and his, unsurprisingly, was a neurotic preoccupation with the quality of his eyesight. A private medicine cabinet in his office contained a vast array of eyewashes, moisturizers, baths and drops, and for thirty years the only fixed item in his timetable was a weekly visit to his ophthalmologist, at nine-thirty every Monday morning. The doctor in question might have found this arrangement trying had not Thomas’s obsession been earning him a ludicrous amount in consultation fees. There wasn’t a single ailment in the textbook which he did not believe to have contracted at some time or another. He fancied that he had arc eye, cat’s eye, pink eye and cystic eye; gas eye, hare eye, hot eye and lazy eye; ox eye, Klieg eye, reduced eye, schematic eye, scotopic eye, aphacic eye, squinting eye and cross eye. Once, after a fact-finding visit to some hop fields, he became convinced that he had hop eye (acute conjunctivitis found in hop-pickers, caused by irritation from the spinal hairs of the hop plant); after a visit to a shipyard, that he had shipyard eye (epidemic keratoconjunctivitis, an infection spread by contaminated fluids in the busy eye casualty stations found at shipyards); and after a visit to Nairobi, that he had Nairobi eye (a severe ocular lesion caused by the secretions of certain vesicating beetles common in Nairobi). On another occasion, when his mother made the mistake of telling him that his grandfather Matthew Winshaw had suffered from a congenital form of glaucoma, he had cancelled all his banking engagements for three days and booked himself a succession of round-the-clock specialist appointments. In turn he was tested for absolute glaucoma, capsular glaucoma, compensated glaucoma, congestive glaucoma, haemorrhagic glaucoma, inflammatory glaucoma, inverse glaucoma, obverse glaucoma, malignant glaucoma, benign glaucoma, open-angle glaucoma, closed-angle glaucoma, postinflammatory glaucoma, preinflammatory glaucoma, infantile glaucoma and myxomatosis. Thomas Winshaw’s eyes were insured (with Stewards’ own insurance company) for a sum variously rumoured to be between £100,000 and £1 million. There was no organ, in other words, which he valued more highly; and that includes the one towards which his right hand could sometimes scarcely stop itself from wandering – most memorably, perhaps, on the day he entertained a surprised but politely speechless Queen and Prince Charles to sherry in his freshly red-carpeted office.

∗

When the Conservative government announced that they were abolishing free eye tests on the NHS in April 1988, Thomas phoned his brother Henry to tell him that they were making a big mistake: there would be a public outcry. Henry told him that he was overreacting. There would be a whimper of protest from the usual quarters, he said, and then it would all quietly die down.

‘And I was right, wasn’t I?’

‘I should have bowed to your political judgment, as always.’

‘Well, it’s quite simple, really.’ Henry leaned forward and threw another log on the fire. It was a cold, dark afternoon in early October 1989, and they were enjoying tea and muffins in one of the Heartland Club’s private rooms. ‘The trick is to
keep
doing outrageous things. There’s no point in passing some scandalous piece of legislation and then giving everyone time to get worked up about it. You have to get right in there and top it with something even worse, before the public have had a chance to work out what’s hit them. The thing about the British conscience, you see, is that it really has no more capacity than … a primitive home computer, if you like. It can only hold two or three things in its memory at a time.’