FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 2 A Change of Guard

‘OK. How much do you want?’ I’d never had an overdraft before, but I’d rehearsed this bit with Jack before the meeting. So, I took a deep breath, and said, ‘Thirty grand?’

the insurance ‘performance bond’. And if we couldn’t get the bond, we wouldn’t get the contract. The problem was that the bank we were with at that time wouldn’t give us any credit at all. The manager at Lloyds Bank in Sydenham was a most unhelpful and disagreeable man – the kind of man who wouldn’t speak to you when you met him in the street: no conversation without a prior appointment was the way he liked to work. Every time we wanted to write a cheque, we had to run it by him first. John Corcoran had to go into the bank every afternoon at 3.00 to show this man what cheques we wanted to issue, and to get his approval to issue any more. So, I set up a meeting with the bank manager and asked for an overdraft. He said he needed time to think about it; he wasn’t going to be hurried. Finally, after a couple of weeks, he called me in, sat me down, and told me he couldn’t do it. I was too young, he said. He couldn’t trust me. Where was my father? He would be happy to lend to him, but not to me. We were desperate. In the end, we raised the bond with our insurance broker, Fenchurch Construction; but having a distrustful bank manager was becoming a real obstacle to our ability to grow the business. However, I was lucky that we had recently appointed a new accountant, Jack Basch, who worked with Gold Raymond. Jack was a breath of fresh air, and had immediately become not only an asset to the business but also a good family friend. Jack’s answer to my problem was simple, effective, and brief: ‘Get a new bank’. He got on the phone to Geoff Wright at Williams & Glyn and set up a meeting. When we sat down with him, Geoff looked at the figures we had sent him, and said, ‘OK. How much do you want?’ I’d never had an overdraft before, but

Geoff Wright, the new bank manager at Williams & Glyn, was so much more helpful than the man at Lloyds.

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