THE JOBBING SYSTEM OF THE LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE: AN ORAL HISTORY

Interview No. 9: Brian Winterflood

Interviewer: Bernard Attard

Winterflood Securities, London  EC3: 25 January 1990, 5 February 1990, 13 February 1990

Tape 1, side 1, 25 January 1990 

BA: Could you first tell me, Mr Winterflood, where and when you were born?

BW: I was born in West Ham in 1937.

BA: What date?

BW: 31st January 1937.

BA: And what did your parents do?  What did your father do for a living?

BW: My father I think originally was a bus conductor. And then when I got to know what life was all about we had moved to Uxbridge in Middlesex, where my father ran two restaurants - and that's my earliest recollection really of what my father did.  I only know what he started at through my family.

BA: Where did he send you to school?

BW: I went to Frays College, which was a private school in Uxbridge, which I believe now is... Can't remember but anyway it's one of those funny new polys, I think, or something.

BA: Did you have any plans of what you would do when you finished school?

BW: No, I don't think I was terribly good at school, actually, and we did run into a bit of problem with, [in] the latter years, paying the school fees through upsets in the family, and so when I left school, I didn't know really what I was going to do and I left before I could complete my exams, but I spoke to the Latin master at Frays College who knew a gentleman on the Stock Exchange, by the name of A.K. Barr, who happened to be a partner with the firm called Greener Dreyfus.  And A.K. Barr was quite a well known member of the Stock Exchange who used to specialise in Kaffir shares - and Tanganyika concessions I remember was his pet stock.  He didn't interview me, but I wrote a letter to him and Greener Dreyfus very kindly offered to give me a job as a messenger.  

BA: Did you know anything about the Stock Exchange?

BW: Nothing at all, nothing at all.  I didn't know much about anything really, being straight from school. But I don't think jobs were terribly easy to get at that stage, so I opted to go to whatever was offered and it was quite fun running round the Stock Exchange.  It was very early morning stuff, getting the workmen's trains, you know, so you got the cheap ticket, and it was a long way from Uxbridge I remember to the City.  So it was an early start - I think somehow I've come full circle now, it's a very early start these days - but it was a case of getting in early and running round the City all day which got one to know what the City was all about. And that went on for a few years and then one got jobs in the office.  But after the initial getting into a firm, you then sorted out what you wanted to do. And there was no doubt that if you were in a stock-broking firm, what you eventually wanted to do, if you were that type of person, was to get down to the House.  There was a very big division between the office staff and the House staff.  And that was not from the point of view of anything other than you could seem to bring out your own talents if you were on the floor of the Stock Exchange much more than the sort of hum-drum jobs that you would get in the back office.  So I did that and I worked my way up, if you like, to becoming a blue button.  That was a thrill - I remember that that was a big thrill to be invited to go to the House.

And the partners, some of the partners, would be on the floor of the House as dealing partners; the main-stay of the business would be upstairs, which was rather hide-bound.  It was a bit off limits to fraternise with the partners - well they wouldn't speak to you, it wasn't a case of fraternising.  They were locked away in their sort of ivory towers and you knocked reverently on the doors if you wanted to see them and things like that.  And I do remember, it wasn't quite Dickensian, but it wasn't far off.  The ones on the floor of the House were much more liberal and reasonable, but nevertheless there was very much... you addressed people as 'sir', you had a lot of respect for them, and I think good manners were the order of the day.  

One was very grateful for any promotion you got, but you had to earn it.  Pay wasn't terribly good, although I'm not one of these people who say I earned 35s a week; I can't remember all that.  But all I know is that it wasn't very generous.  But what was generous was the thrill of getting that bonus at the year end, if we'd had a good year.  I suppose in today's terms it was quite a meagre amount, but in those days it was a lot of money; and of course it did fire your enthusiasm and you did work jolly hard because there was something at the end of the day, usually, and you could take fairly reasonable holidays and so on. What they didn't do in those days - they very rarely provided for your old age.  I mean one doesn't think of it when you are very young, but people weren't generous about pensions schemes and things like that.  They would carry out their responsibilities by probably putting in the Stock Exchange Clerks' Provident Fund, which didn't need much funding.  But I think people really took the view that it was a good business to be in and that you could make a lot of money if you were bright and that you would look after yourself.  All in all, as I remember, my days doing that were happy days.  They were long days because one didn't have the machinery you have today; and so everything was by long-hand and there was a lot of checking and cross-checking and agreeing positions in the evenings, getting the contracts out and delivering them, and getting the post out and so on, so it was a long, long day.  On top of that to forward one's career, a lot of us all went to night school for Stock Exchange practise and so on. I remember I didn't go to the City of London, I went to the Coleman Street Ward school, which was served very well by members of the Stock Exchange. But there again, it was a case of  you did that after hours.  You didn't do it as we do now where we give people time off to go and study.  We were expected to attend that from something like 6 till 9 o'clock at night and you'd get home at sort of 10.30.  And so it was a long day.  But nevertheless it was for yourself, you did it.  They were reasonably generous in as much as they would - or certainly with Greener Dreyfus - they provided the books for me.  And one of the things I always remember that I didn't get paid an awful lot of money to start with but they very generously gave me two new suits when I became a blue button.  I suppose one would look back now and think that was small beer but it wasn't at the time; I felt immensely grateful to them, because they didn't have to, I mean they paid me a wage, but it was very nice and I suppose it helped their image on the floor of the House when I was going in, smartly attired and so on.  I always remember on one occasion, my first occasion of going to the House - it was very wrong to wear anything other than the sort of standard gear -  and I remember marching in, full of myself in brown boots, as they call them, but they were just brown shoes. And of course the cat calls went up when I went onto the floor of the House and, really, one was terribly embarrassed, and I was asked to leave the floor of the House and go and get myself some respectable shoes.

BA: Who asked you?

BW: Oh members, you know the waiter took me off - the waiters had certain authority then, they would be instructed probably by a member to say, 'What's that chap doing over there in brown boots? Get him out of the House' - and it was just to get black shoes on really. And I remember that and, of course its all part of growing up, I was frightfully embarrassed at the time but you look back with a smile on your face.  I often wish it happened these days; now there doesn't seem to be any real rules of anything, of etiquette or standards and its a bit sad the passing of those ways I think in lots of ways.  

BA: What were you doing as a broker's blue button?  

BW: Well it wasn't much removed from what I started actually.  You became, yet again, a messenger for the dealers and so when the bargains originated from the office, we had a dealing box just across from the Stock Exchange with somebody who would write the orders down which could have been me at the time, or the telephonist if I wasn't there. But then I would have the responsibility of taking those to find a dealer, waiting with the dealer if he asked me to go with him, but more often than not, asked to wait at the stand, because unless you were a dealer you were not expected to roam around the Stock Exchange, you were expected to stand on the outside of the perimeter, because it was crowded; but if the dealer wanted you to go with him, I mean once you were with him it was perfectly alright, but if you were just strolling around they didn't have time for that. And then he would execute the bargain, give it to you, you would then rush it back to the box and report it and enter it probably onto a bargain slip and that would go up to the office to be processed and that's what it was about.  And of course the hours of business [in the House] then, I think were 9.30-3.30 and then you did the same sort of thing up in the office although you were helping the dealer on the telephone.  General dog's body really; early days of a blue button.  

BA: How did the the Stock Exchange strike you, as a young blue button?  Do you have any particular memories of that?

BW: I do actually, I mean some of the things - it's peculiar how things stick in your mind but when I think back to the Stock Exchange, I always remember the street.  I remember Throgmorton Street very well and what a wonderful street it was - the atmosphere of people rushing in and rushing out - and the steps going up to the Stock Exchange.  It was a rather ugly building from the outside, rather grand inside. And I remember sort of rushing across the road, and in those days they did have traffic; I mean people were sort of jumping in and out of things and there was lots of people standing on street corners. And just along from our box was a little chemist where, I suppose, the gay dogs of the day would be going in in the morning for a pick-me-up and they used to have this terrible concoction that was a bit like a dracula potion for a pick-me-up the next day; I mean not that I would, but you saw them going in and you looked at these chaps.  They were all nicely attired they'd been out for the night and so on and they had the pick-me-up. I remember particularly going onto the floor or going up the stairs to the entrance that I used to use, and they had great long trays for cigarette ends - eveybody smoked then, it was ridiculous - but you would come in and you weren't allowed to smoke on the floor so as you got in you would either put them on these ledges - there were all these cigarettes burning it was absolutely awful, although I smoked at the time actually - and lots would be thrown into the bin. And what I remember so well was you had these chaps - beggars or tramps, if you like - would come in and they would take these cigarettes out of the trays and roll their own. And sometimes they would pick out bundles that were still smouldering. I mean, it was quite extraordinary; but I do remember very well these chaps everyday coming and the waiter would put perhaps the tray downstairs to get ready to empty it and these chaps would take all these cigarettes out. Another sort of image I remember was the loos that we had in there.  I mean there were no women of course, so it was all male, but they were very grand loos, I always remember they were grand loos - great oak doors and it had Stock Exchange soap in the wash basins that had Stock Exchange on it, and brushes for your hair that were embossed with Stock Exchange things. And the chap in charge was really the sort of, I mean he was in charge, the man who ran the loos was there and you behaved yourself; there was no grafitti or anything like that, nobody stole anything, you know, and you respected the property and if you didn't he'd have given you a clip round the ear. But he was all important, this man; a lot of authority, although he ran the loo he was the man, and I remember that very well you know. And I think I do remember sort of being tempted - wouldn't be nice to have a momento. I don't suppose no-one would have cared even if you had a bar of soap - but you didn't do it.  They're sort of really vivid memories of just the entrance to the place, and I remember strolling off to the offices of the Council of the Stock Exchange, if you like.  And that was in the next door and it was all very proper and you made sure that you conducted yourself in the right way; there was never any of this casualness that we have today.  Perhaps it was slower, I don't know, but certainly, one had a pride in the place and your job and the people really.  One had sort of respect for them and my memories are all very good of my young days on the Stock Exchange.  There were nasty people of course. I remember various people who were intolerable, I mean absolutely awful, but they treated you as the dog's body and you had to earn their respect and to grow and find your way.  I mean there was one particular man called Percy Duke.  And Percy Duke was really the old school and he was a jobber, and he would stand in between the industrial market - and not far from the gilt market and the ships market - and he'd have this little pitch - a very small company.  But he always dressed in clerical trousers and wing collar.  He was a very tall man and a lot of bearing and he would never speak to blue buttons and I'm not sure that he really spoke to junior dealers, but certainly you almost had to get permission to speak to him. He had his dealers, but he was very much the king-pin of the firm.  He had - if I could tell you a little story about this man - he had this air about him that you really had to pluck up a lot of courage to go and speak to him.  When you were dealing the stocks and shares in the stock market, people would go round to various jobbers to get a price and Percy Duke was always credited with being the one chap that tried to find out what you were doing or had done or wanted to do, and what the other chap was making the price. Because it wasn't like today. You all made your own prices. They were very much in line but you made your own.  And so he was always the one that one would say, 'If you go to Percy Duke, he'll always try and open you for nothing',  which means that you tell him your business and he wouldn't be dealing.  And there was this classic story of the young fellow that went up to him, who had been authorised, and Percy Duke ignored him and the chap followed him around until he got his attention and finally he said to Mr Duke, 'Excuse me sir, can you tell me the time,' and he said, 'What do you find it elsewhere?'  And you know, that was the sort of stories that... they were real, they were real, I mean it did happen. I remember with him that he just ignored me completely when I went to speak to him and you just couldn't speak to him so you had to go and get the dealer, because sometimes if the dealers were busy they'd say go and get me a price in so and so or go and get me a price and opinion and blue buttons were allowed to do that. They weren't allowed to deal, but they were allowed to ask various things. They couldn't ask sizes or things like that, they could just ask about the price of the stock and what it did and if there was an opinion. They couldn't say. 'How many's that in?' They weren't allowed to do that.  And so most of the day was spent avoiding people like Mr Duke, staying on the outside in the very early days and just generally doing what was expected of you. But one of the other things I remember very vividly is that come three o' clock you were allowed to smoke. You couldn't smoke during the day, and that's consequently why everybody smoked in the corridors and at the entrances. But at three o'clock you were allowed to smoke. They used to have the waiters would walk round. And there were stands everywhere and jobbers pitches and the waiters would walk round with watercans at three o'clock and they would be watering the floor in between all the members. They rarely got water on anybody's shoes I can assure you. But they were just ordinary watering cans and that was to keep the dust down.  It was quite an extraordinary thing and every day this happened.  I mean, it was dusty, it was a wooden floor and every day, as I say, they came out with their water cans and damped the floor down - quite extraordinary, and they did without wetting anybody. 

BA: As a broker's blue button, did you have any contact with the jobbers?

BW: Well, as I say, you could ask them a price, you could ask them an opinion, but you couldn't ask them size. So yes, one knew them all and one knew who dealt in which markets, but you were only a messenger as a blue button, that's all you could do.  Obviously one got to know them as friends and one could ask those friends off the record things.  But if the senior partners saw you hanging around the pitch, they'd ask you to go.  They'd give their own chaps a rocket as well.  One of the other main jobs you had to do as a blue button is every morning you would go in and you'd see if there were any notes at your stand.  We all had a number, and the waiter would keep notes and they may be bids or offers or they may be messages to go and see somebody.  And then when the market opened - or just before it opened, actually - the blue buttons were in and they would go round to all of the jobbers, who in those days used to print daily lists - price lists - and particularly with some of the big boys in those day.  Francis & Praed was a very big firm of gilt-edged jobbers, and they used to do every day a beautiful list of prices, yields, yields to redemption, covers and so on and that was really necessary reading. And you got that and you sent that off either to some of your clients or you'd get on the telephone. But everyday these beautiful lists would come out and it was like collecting the sort of thing you'd collect at the Ideal Home Show; you know, you come home with a bag full of papers don't you and offers and things like that.  It was just like that. They were all colours.  For instance, Francis & Praed as I remember was a sort of green, Sambourne's was redish pink, some of the others were yellow, some were sort of blue. It was quite extraordinary, and in the end being very young you get them in the order you want and we had them of coloured order, if you like. And you'd come away with a pile like that every morning. It must have cost a fortune to produce them but of course it saved the brokers an immense amount of work and it bought those jobbers a certain amount of business because theirs was the information.  It was a service that cost nothing but proved very positive at the end of the day to the jobbers who provided it.

BA: Were there particular jobbing firms which Greener Dreyfus did a lot of business with, for example particular jobbers in the kaffirs?

BW: Well, yes, I think Lazarus was one, Law & Roos was another.  Lazarus I remember very well.  One was always over there. A.K. Barr was always there. Berger & Gosschalk was another one.  But George Lazarus was a big character, you know he would be the one that did open out-cry.  He would be shouting at the top of his head, 'Bid, so and so for tanks, offer for Ketang so and so';    very loud.  He sort of held the stage.  There were lots of jobbers.  We were very big in the kaffir market and the other market that A.K. Barr particularly liked was breweries. I always remember lots of business in Boddingtons, Whitbreads, Green and Whitley  lots of provincial breweries and things like that.  Fairly general business in industrials, tobacco shares was one that featured a lot and a certain amount of business in all the other markets.  They had a bit of business in gilts, they had a bit of business in the oils, a bit of business in shipping.  I don't remember particularly much in the insurance world, a lot in the industrial shares, some rubber business. There was still a reasonably amount of rubber business going on.  Fairly general business I think but kaffirs particularly, and breweries; they were two specialities.

BA: How did it rate as a broking house?  Was it medium size?

BW: It was quite small actually.  A very much specialised smaller company.  Quite a number of partners as I remember, but I mean they were a small company compared to others.  I suppose really it was only in later years that Greener Dreyfus started to grow.  It acquired other companies, and then strangely enough it went the full circle and disappeared.  People had a very nice living you know as brokers; they made vast amounts of money.  If they had some sort of connections through birth, it was like shelling peas really.  People just gave them their business; there was no capital gains tax, there was no surveillance, there was an enormous amount of inside trading, there was very much the old pals act: 'Would you like 50 [i.e. 50,000], of these John,' or 'We'll put you down for a tenner [i.e. 10,000].'  Jobbers and brokers used to tell each other things.  There were all these stories that one particular rubber jobber..., well there was 'one for the book and one for me' sort of thing.  And the rip-offs were really extraordinary, but everybody made a lot of money because there was no tax to be paid.  It was a different world, but it was a world apart.  It was the City and it was the people connected with the City and it was the families that had wealth.  There were no Sids then; that didn't come into the equation.  In fact the reason I changed over the fence was I tried awfully hard to get myself some clients, but actually I just wasn't born into the right family; I wasn't born into the right area.  It was an impossible task and the people I would speak to about stocks and shares would be people that would expect to make a lot of money, wouldn't expect to spend very much money, would expect to be on call all the time.  In fact there was just no turn in it and so finally that's why I changed over to jobbing, because you could work for yourself almost.

BA: Well how did your career with Greener Dreyfus unfold before you switched to jobbing?  Did you remain a blue button?

BW: I remained a blue button and then my career was interrupted by National Service.

BA: When was that?

BW: I'll give you those dates, I've got them in my diary.  But anyway it was when I became 18 and so I'd done just over sort of two years with Greeners.

BA: You started with them around...

BW: Whenever I was 15 - what am I now, 53!

BA: So it was about 1952?

BW: '53, I think it was.  And so that interrupted my career and went off to National Service and that was that.  I did my two years, and of course they were very nice. They said, ' When you have finished that do come back and see us.  No promises, but we'd like to see you and we would like you to do your job again, and so on'.  Well, of course things change a lot in two years.  I wanted to come back, I mean I'd got the feeling that this was the right job for me anyhow.  And I do remember just before I went, or was it when I returned? I think it was before I went in.  I remember speaking to a chap who was a little bit older than me, a rather dapper sort of bloke and had done rather well as a broker, although wasn't of any particular social status, but he'd done rather well. And I always remember him saying to me because I was a bit fed up not knowing what I wanted to do and not making up my mind. Because you worked long hours you know. It was pretty harrowing stuff.  Some days you'd think, 'Oh Christ this is terrible. I'm working all hours.  For God's sake, I've got no time for my girl friends,' and so on and so forth.  And I said to this chap, 'You know I'm not too sure about this, I'm not sure this is what I want to do with my life.'  And he said, 'You just look round, and I think you'll find that all the people you know here have a pretty good standard of living and all of the people down in the Stock Exchange, not many of them you will find over the years go away, and I can tell you that you will do better here in monetary terms than you will anywhere else.'  Well that was a pretty large order, but what I think he meant was, if you were working in the back office or if you were working in any other sort of jobs, locally - I don't think he meant Lloyds, I don't think he meant the Baltic and things like that - but in the context of the Stock Exchange, we were in the best place.  Anyhow that always stayed with me and I remember when I came out of the services that I was very happy to go back to the Stock Exchange.  Lots of people were going back to their old jobs, some people said they were fed up - these were mates of mine in the Air Force.  So I did go back to the old firm.  When I went in, to replace me they had brought in a chap called Charlie Wilson, and he was the honourable Charles Wilson, and when I came out Charlie became - I don't know whether he did National Service or what, but anyway he was a little bit older than me, not a great deal older than me but a little bit older than me - and when I came out Charlie was partner, and they expected me to be the blue button - well fair dues.  Charlie of course was my boss and I was a bit upset about that, I thought damn cheek really, but nevertheless he was in there and he was doing his job and so on.  I quite liked the bloke actually. But they wanted me to be blue button, general dog's body, this that and the other.  Well it was alright when you were 16 and 17, it wasn't quite the same thing when you were 20, 21.  And I sort of took umbrage to this and I said, 'Well I don't think I like this too much, but I'll give it a go, I don't mind being blue button for six months, but certainly I'm not going to spend my whole life being a blue button.'  And they said, 'It's entirely up to you.'  Jobs weren't terribly free at the time.  So I stood it for a while and then I said, 'Well I don't think this is going to suit me.'  And I remember Reggie Barratt who was... Reggie was a senior member, he finally became a partner, but he knew everything; he really was jack of all trades, master of none, because he was like the faithful retainer really and I know now that they exploited him, they abused his honesty and his integrity and his regard for them and he never got anywhere.  But he was their senior dealer, he was extremely good and he taught me everything I knew. He, I wouldn't say encouraged me to leave, but he said, 'You know you've got to spread your wings, there are other things.  I don't want to lose you but you know you may not get on too well here now, because everything's in place - you've been away for two years.'  So I stuck it for a while and then I decided that I wasn't going to get any clients and that's why I decided to go across to the other side of the business.  There was a job going and I got interviewed and that really was a bit of a shambles.  I always think people in life have a lucky break and mine was certainly that. Because the waiter - one of these waiters, a very friendly guy;  he always knew me as Peter, he never knew my name was Brian, and to the day he retired he called me Peter; one couldn't change it because no-one would know who he was talking to - but anyhow he put me on to Bisgood Bishop who were looking for people.  I said I'd like to do that. So he put me on and I got myself an interview and, I don't know, there were quite a lot of people there for the interview and I got onto the short list and I told Reggie Barratt and he was quite pleased for me. He said, 'You know it's a different way of life over there, it's not really what you're doing here.  You've got to stand there all day and you've got to book the bargains, you've got to do this, got to do this very fast, but you do have a chance of making your own way.'  So anyhow, I finally got the job.   Although I say it myself,  there were a lot of people on this list and I was very fortunate and I felt rather cock a hoop because I had actually got the job out of all these people.  So I joined them and I said my farewells to the old firm and thanked them for all they'd done for me and so on.  They didn't want to lose me as I remember but I said, 'Well I'm not going to make anything here. It's not going to be my future.'  So I went off to Bisgood and Harry Bishop was the senior partner and he was an old colonel. He was very military and one didn't actually spend much time speaking to him.  Anyhow, I joined and I was with a man called Howard Taylor who was the second partner.  And he was a tyrant. He was a most awful man. He had no patience, he was foul-mouthed, he was more interested in the races every day and he spent his lunch-hour in one of the telephone boxes on to his bookie.  He saw very little good in anything.  He'd had a very upsetting life himself.  His son got killed in a train crash, I think, and his wife ran off with somebody.  It was a rather nasty background, but it manifested itself in his behaviour towards other people. So I was with him and he really did kick you around; and I decided, I mean almost - talk about first impressions being wrong - after the first week that I couldn't stand this, that this was a nightmare.  I was getting in at sort of 7.30 in the morning.  We were working until sort of 8 o'clock at night trying to agree positions and then I had no time to myself at all. It really was a nightmare and I hated every minute of it.  I thought, 'God, this is terrible.'  Anyhow, after a week, I went back to my old firm to get my job back, you see.  I remember perspiring, I remember being, sort of sweaty, running from the Stock Exchange up to this office, negotiating with these people and saying a little bit of naughtiness about what I was going to get.  But they offered to give me my job back.  And they said, 'OK ,you can come back at the same salary,' and I was quite content with that.   And as time went on....

Tape 1, side 2

BW: Well to pick that up, as I say, I was very happy with going back to the old firm - slightly embarassed but happy - and then I remember very well, those intervening weeks between getting my job back, giving my notice in, and expecting to work out the month.  Suddenly I started to realise that I liked jobbing.  I mean the first impressions were horrid and I hated it, but two or three weeks later I was starting to like it and I thought, 'Oh, I've been a BF'.  I remember very well going home and actually crying to my mother and saying, 'What a damn fool I've been' I really was in a state and I said to my mother, 'You know I really have made a mess of things and it's not the sort of thing you can undo.'  Anyhow, having run round the City and got this job back, having done so myself, I then walked up to Harry Bishop one day in the house and plucked up enough courage and said, 'Excuse me Sir can I speak to you,' and he said 'What are you talking about boy, you're not allowed to speak to me here, see me in the office this evening.'  He just acknowledged me and [said] 'you're not allowed to speak to me.'  So I plucked up enough courage in the evening and I knocked at the door and he said, 'What is it?' And I walked in, and it was as though he never knew me, he never recognised me and so on.  And I told him of my misgivings and my upsets and that and he said, 'I haven't any time to listen to this sort of thing,' and that was that.  Anyhow, come to the end of my month he called me in and he said, 'Winterflood, you've been a damn fool, we don't mind giving you a second chance but we never want you to behave like this again.'  I was so grateful I can't tell you because it would have been the end of my life I felt at the time and I was so grateful I think I could have gone and kissed his boots or something.  Anyhow, I said, 'Well I'm very appreciative, its marvellous thank you very much, I do want to stay, I like the job,' and I remember yet again getting out of that office running like a madman, back to Greeners to say, 'Look, I'm awfully sorry but I really can't come'. I remember - isn't it funny how the feeling of perspiration, of being absolutely worn out, of being out of breath - that's the sort of thing you can remember.  I went to see a chap called Sexton who was, if you like, out of the partners he was probably the mildest and I put my case and he very kindly agreed to see the senior partner because I thought what would happen is that I'd get it and then they'd refuse to deal with this company because I'd mucked them up.  Anyhow it all got resolved and I stayed and I'm glad to say was happy ever after.  It didn't alter the fact that I was still working under Howard Taylor and he never got better.  What would happen was that you would do all the work and he'd expect you to do things and you'd do it and I mean things like getting the paper for his racing and making sure you sent notes to his bookie apart from business. And as things progressed you didn't really think too much about being authorised. I mean it was a big jump. It's not like today where they expect to be authorised in five minutes.  You were scared to be authorised - at least I was scared.  It was a big, big thing to be authorised - to be able to deal, to have that authority was really something.  I can't tell  you the feeling about it.  And the fear of actually getting it was just as extraodinary really.  Anyhow, came the day that I did get authorised, and what you had to do when you were put up for authorisation, you'd have to go upstairs to the committee and all sorts of things had to be sorted out. But the big fear of blokes like myself was that you had to understand rule 90, or was it rule 85?  Anyway, there was a specific rule and it was about your responsibilities and duties and so on.  We all learnt it by heart, you see, and you never knew whether you were going to be asked or not - they always asked somebody but you didn't know if it was you.  And there were the character backgrounds that people had to know and so on. Anyhow we did all that.  And the next day, once they posted it you then were given your badge and you were allowed to deal on behalf of that firm and you swapped your blue badge for a black badge and so on.  I don't usually use expletives and things like this but to tell you how evil this man was, I came onto the floor that morning, and I'd been round to various boxes and he was already on the pitch and he walked up to me and he said, 'Wrrrr', and he had his hand like this, held into his body, and he looked at me and he thrust his hand out and he said, ''ere you are Winterflood, mind your f-ing eye!' And that's all he said and you know, you thought, 'My God, I've just reached the pinacle of my career and this man has said this,' and he put the fear of God into me.  You know, you didn't want to pick up a book, you didn't want to deal, you didn't want to do anything.  And so he sort of knocked the wind out of my sails a bit and it took a little while to get into the swing of things. I remember once you got into the swing of things I felt I did have a natural grasp of the thing.  But he would come back from lunch where I would be looking after the book, and what he would do if he'd had a good day, he wasn't too bad, in other words if he'd won on the horses; if he'd had a bad day, or been to the club and somebody had upset him he'd come back and he would sit on the bench and he'd look through all the jobbing book pages and he'd look at say, I don't know, whatever we were dealing in, let's say it was Elswick Hopper, he'd look at the bargains and say 'Fucking, hell'.  And he'd go through this; all he kept grunting was 'f-ing this' and 'f-ing that'.  And I remember on one particular [occasion] I'd done such a fantastic bargain; I can't tell you, we'd made a lot of money on this bargain and I was waiting for him to get to this bargain and he was 'er that' and 'er that' and all nasty and he got  up to it and I thought this is going to be really my day.  And he went, didn't grunt, he didn't do anything, he went past it.

BA: He just turned the page?

BW: Yes, so I couldn't sort of contain myself.  I said, 'Excuse me sir, but did you see so and so?' He said, 'It only pays for the bad ones'.  I thought, 'God I don't know whether I can survive this,' and it never seemed... he wasn't a terribly nasty man, he didn't sort of hold grudges, it was just his attitude.  And I thought, 'I really can't go on, I'll go bonkers in the end.' And then finally there was a change round and I was taken off his book and was put on Jimmy Bisgood's.  And it was like, and I can't tell you, it was like going from Hell to Heaven.  And Jimmy was such a nice man, and is such a nice man.  And Jimmy allowed me to get on with it and encouraged me and he was a father figure, he was my champion really.  People had champions and certainly Jimmy was my champion.  He had another dealer on the book at the time who was more senior than I was but was very nice, very understanding - super man, really a super man.

BA: Which book had Howard Taylor been running?

BW: I think we were running things like - not rubber stocks in the sense of the commodity - but we were running things like Rubberex and BTRs - general industrials really.  And a sort of mixture of things.  Whereas with Jimmy we were on the motor book - very definitely a sector.  But Howard's was a mixture of things - it was components, it was industrials, not general dog's body but fairly leading stocks - all well known names, and then next to him were the Bishops and they had very unmarketable stocks, I suppose in lots of ways the odds and sods - much more negotiation - whereas Howard's were reasonably liquid and there was always a two-way price and so on.  Jimmy's were very liquid and we had things like BMC which was a gigantic stock at the time.  We dealt in Roots and things like that.  And I mean it really was a lovely job then and I enjoyed every day and I enjoyed coming up and I didn't mind staying and it was lovely.

BA: You said three of you were running the book?

BW: Well Tim Briars was a member, - I was the dealer; Tim Briars was the member, and Jimmy was the director partner.  

BA: How did that work - how did you function together as a unit?

BW: Well, Jimmy was in charge and he would make prices to people, and speak to people generally.  I suppose in a way we all did the same job, but if there was a big one, Jimmy would have to be consulted and he would probably do it.  The ordinary run of the mill stuff, Tim and I would do, although I would have to refer to Tim - sort of chain in command was you refer all the way up and you didn't take on a big proposition unless Jimmy OKed it.  There were lots of odd and ends - small dealers - around and I would be expected to do the hundreds and two-hundreds, Tim would probably do the bigger bargains and Jimmy would do the major bargains and Jimmy would do the negotiations with people.  He would look after, if you like, any deals off the market floor.  It is not dissimilar to what we do now.  I mean I have directors and senior members in charge of books now and if there is anything outside of the cash allocations we give, they come and refer to me.  After all it is the exposure of the company.  So not a lot has changed.  What I'm saying really is that what I learned there I've put in place here. And that has stood us in very good stead throughout the terrific changes that have gone over the last twenty years, thirty years.  So that old style of jobbing and of containing positions serves us well now.  

BA: Did you actually have your own books?

BW: Yes, I think on our sector we must have had a half a dozen books. We probably dealt in 60 or 70 stocks and so we always had sort of three dealers so that you didn't have to keep people waiting, we were trying to provide a service.  Bisgood you know were a very small firm and strangely enough, when I was broking it wasn't one of the firms that I would naturally go to - probably because your first impressions are that, 'Oh he's a likely lad, we'll go there, or this man's friendly'.  They were a little bit fringe when I was a broker and there were things wrong.  I mean, it was probably because Howard Taylor was such a bully.  Harry Bishop was a very autocratic senior partner. Ingram Capper was a marvellous man but there again he was not the friendliest of men. He was very much the huntin', shootin', and fishin' type and it was alright if he was talking about the guns to his mates.  He didn't have a lot of time for young people.  In the early days, I have to say that he was probably, apart from Jimmy, the only man that saw the future belonged to the young if you like.  And it was when he became senior partner he really gave us our heads and sort of retired from the day-to-day stuff.  So I have a great respect for him - he's past on now - but I've a great respect for him. But at the time he was very much, a bit cocky, you know, and he would say things like - a chap would come up and say, 'Price and Size,' and he might say 'Rolls Royce are 26s and 9d to 27s and 3d.' And the chap might say, 'Can I deal?' And he'd say 'Yes' and the chap would say, 'I'll sell you 250,000.'  He said, 'Yes, you can deal in 20,000'.  But of course you couldn't say that, I mean once you say 'yes' you were offering to deal. But he was such a bully that [if] he said, 'Well you did say sir',  he said 'I'm sorry you can deal in 25,000' and he'd get away with it.  There was a lot of bullying like that and of course he met his match when he did that with the senior partner who made him stick to it.  But they were the characters, you know, they really were the characters.  You have pictures in your mind of the man actually standing out there on this little bench that we had facing the main pitch.  He was a giant of a man, he was a huge tall man - probably magnified now in my eyes, but he was a tall man.  He was an aristocratic looking man.  Well, he was somebody that you thought twice about saying anything out of the ordinary.  A lot of the ordinary partners were very insignificant compared to him and to Jimmy and even Howard; even though he was nasty, he was quite a powerful figure - not a big man - but I suppose because some people are a bit nasty, you have a different regard for them.  Some of the others as I say were characters in their right but they weren't big. We had a fixed interest book which was run by a chap called Selly and - what was the other man's name? - gosh I can't remember his name.  Anyhow these two men had this fixed interest book absolutely tied up and they lived the life of Riley.  They were away from the main pitch. They didn't have to contend with the same sort of brokers. It was a much more gentlemanly affair and they got on with their job and I must say I think people generally in the firm were pretty happy.  They were happy because they made a lot of money.  They were self made men but they were taken into the partnership, and as usually happened in the Stock Exchange in those days, for years you were in the red but you were taken in to create cessations and actually people were taken in. They didn't know what they were getting into, they were just grateful to get in, I mean they could have sold you a real pup.  But they'd been going for many, many years and they had a certain reputation, and you left a lot to trust.  You really did.  And I did trust these people.  Anyhow, I was a junior partner at some later stage and it was a long time before I actually got into the red, but they still paid you a bonus - albeit small in some years, and reasonably generous in other years.  And, as I say, the tax structure was strange at the time, because they had you in when somebody was going out because of this business of cessation of partnerships and they clawed back the tax - they made vast amounts of money.  When it all happened for me I made a certain amount of capital as well, it wasn't big but it at least put me back into the black and allowed me to be a partner in my own right.  You cover the years too quickly when you are recalling things like this.  I'm just trying to think of some of the characters of the House at that time.  There was one chap that used to come in occasionally. We faced the war memorial and so we were at this end of the House under this biggish dome. There was a bigger dome down the other end.  People used to flick these paper aircraft up to see if they could get them stuck in the gallery and if things were slack they would make these sort of darts and they'd do this and then go like that and these things would whizz up, or they'd play football with a paper ball or they'd light people's papers. Lots of those things went on.  But this particular thing impressed me more than anything was this old man who would occasionally come into the gilt market and the whole House would sing 'Jerusalem'.  It was a most magnificent sound.  I mean it brought tears to your eyes.  It was unbelievable and I don't think I've ever been impressed with anything more than that.  They just all broke into song whenever he came into the House.

BA: Do you have any idea why that was the case?

BW: Jimmy would know, I'm sure Jimmy would know. I mean obviously it was ... there was a reason.  But it was incredible.  The business stopped, they just all sang to this man, it was quite extraordinary!

BA: You've described the partners in Bisgood at more or less time you joined, how would you describe Bisgood Bishop as a firm, when you joined?

BW: Well, as I say, they were a bit fringe in my reckoning of people when I was broker.  I didn't regard them a great deal, as I say, because of those various characters.  It was because they didn't treat juniors, blue buttons, they didn't treat them very well, they didn't have time for them whereas other jobbers did.  And that's another lesson, I suppose, that I took to Bisgood when I joined them was that today's blue buttons are tomorrow's dealers and let's get on the right track with them.  I think it was because they were in the main a lot older - there weren't too many young people at Bisgoods. And actually, although they dealt in lots of industrials and aircraft and motors, they didn't cover other markets - they were a little separate firm that dealt in smaller companies, rather what we're doing now.  But other firms, I mean firms like Blackwell, would have a textile pitch, they'd have an oil pitch, they'd probably have a mining pitch.  Lots of firms had lots of pitches in different industries and it was easier of course as a blue button to go to one firm that covered a lot of things.  You would go to Bisgood either because one particular chap was good in the market or they dealt in out of the way things.  So they were rather fringe.

BA: How did they compare in size with other firms?

BW: They were small.  In fact I think there were a lot more jobbers then but in the final analysis Bisgood, prior to deregulation, finished up the smallest of the five main jobbers.  Lots and lots of jobbers went out before them - much bigger firms than them, I hasten to add.  But we did have a reasonable business in motors.  We did have good contango business. We had a good solid background of business.  We were never going to set the world on fire, we weren't ever going to make the really big money but it was good steady progress.  As I say, the things that motivated people then were that they were all pretty wealthy in their own right, having built up their positions.  But people like Harry was an extremely wealthy man.  Ingram - they had personal wealth. Jimmy Bisgood, the Bisgood family [were] a wealthy family.  Dickie Bisgood was a partner as well.  Howard Taylor - vast amounts of money he'd made over the years. And so that they had a nice life style anyway, they weren't out to build empires I don't think, they were just there to enjoy it.  I never remember them really taking any huge strategic decisions to make their company big.  In fact the only real big thing that happened - and it's rather blowing my own trumpet I think - was that the only grow-on, the only add-on we had was the USM market.  

BA: We'll come to that at a later point.  Could you explain what the contango business was?

BW: Yes, it was a form of carrying over stock.  What you do now is if you want to run a stock over an account, you pay a premium to the market-maker for the privilege of not paying for that stock. So come the end of the account if you've got 500 Rolls Royce running, and say they were #5 a go, you would sell them to the jobber and buy them back for new time.  You didn't actually take them up in your name, you didn't pay stamp, and you had the right to pay for the next account.  You paid a rate. You did the same thing with a contango, but you did it by the jobber taking on the responsibility for that stock, and looking after it for you and its the same sort of thing it just rolled over the accounts all the time.  And Vic Pagram was our contango man - did he not go over that with you?

BA: Yes, he did, but it's nice to get a version from different people.

BW: Yes, it was a form of carrying over business and it became too expensive in the end and so it just faded away really. But Vic was the man that took care of contangos.  He made quite a lot of money for us out of it, but as I say, it just got too expensive in the end, people couldn't afford to use it. That's why 'cash and new' came in.  Cash and new was always about but that was dearer than the other one at one stage and so on. But there were various firms that did contangos but I just remember that Vic did ours and he sort of looked after everything and I suppose we knew he was making a good job of it so we didn't take too much interest in it really.

BA: What were the firm's offices like at the time that you joined?  Were they fairly small?

BW: Yes, I joined them when they were in Pinners' Hall.  And it was at the far end of Pinners' Hall - it was a very dark building.  I remember the day I got there I walked in, I was a bit cocky and I remember this girl, Rene, who was on the telephone - in fact Rene only retired, I think, a couple of years ago - and I think she thought I was a bit brash at the time because I sort of bounced in and said, 'Oh, I'm the new boy', and so on and so forth.  I think they were a bit more subdued than that, you know.  And it was a sort of open plan with Harry Bishop's office being the best one with frosted glass windows and a frosted glass door.  You didn't, unless you had very good reason, you didn't go and trouble him and he sat there behind this great desk.  Most of the other stuff was open plan.  I think Vic Pagram had an office because he was a partner and the manager and Ernie Coombs who was our stats department man - he was rather [an] important character - far inflated as a character to the importance he was really.  He made

himself important.  He had a stats department which was a very small office with a junior. A lot of the other things were open plan and of course there was a lot of space up there for us to go to with banks of telehones not dissimilar to this in the evening when we came from the floor of the House.  It was a dull, slightly dingy office I always felt, with the old-fashioned switchboard as you came in and - like something out of the Boulting Brothers films you know. There was nothing I remember particularly enthralling about it.  

BA: Did you have much in the way of office equipment?

BW: No, in fact you think back and there was the old - what do you call them? - comptometers.  Yes, there were a few of those about but I remember very well people using slide rules.  And of course everything was manual.  I mean we had these green sheets to agree our positions. We dealt in hundreds of stocks and so it was my responsibility in the evening to get all the bargains out of the book, which you wrote long hand; and then they had to go and be typed, put through and agreed and sent down to the Stock Exchange.  Then we had these green slips where you would have your bull and bear.  You'd work out your profit and loss and you'd work out your exposures and so on.  But the real killer was to agree those positions.  So you added up the bought and you added up the sold and you came to a position that had to agree with the master, and at the end of the account to agree the jobbing books to the accounts in the office.  Some of the stocks might have been out 500 shares, through a checking query or through a mistake or whatever.  And Dickie Bisgood, I always remember Dickie, he was the world's worst.  Some people would say, 'Oh, God this thing's been out for three months or two weeks, 252 shares.' They'd say, 'Well, we'll write that off'.  Nothing dishonest about it, but if it came up again they would take it back in, but they would actually write it off and say, 'We'll lose that'.  Dickie was a stickler. We would stay sometimes until ten o'clock at night to find 85 shares. We'd go back through all these blooming lists. We had machines that punched them but our computers at those times were rooms like this full of gear.  And they typed out these lists and we would check off hundreds and hundreds of bargains - all for nothing virtually.  But he was so meticulous.  It was just a nightmare, frankly.  And so that rather got us down. We knew our positions, we knew what we'd made but he was a stickler for getting it really right to the last penny.  At the end of the year, if these things went into the errors account the firm would have to pay for those errors, but so long as the clients and the brokers didn't suffer, it didn't matter too much.  But it was account to error.  As I say, most people were sensible about it but Dickie never was and it did create heartache for me at times doing those things, but he was a very nice chap, don't get me wrong - he was a very nice man, I liked him enormously.  Even now I mean one sees him - he went off to Ireland, but he's been up here three times, I've missed him every time, and I went to Ireland and I missed him out there as well, quite extraordinary.

BA: Thinking about this time when you were still a dealer and you hadn't become a member.  What could you say about the jobbing system in general terms?  Were there many jobbers? Was there a league table of jobbers?

BW: Well, yes, certainly there was a league table.  I mean the big boys were Wedd Durlacher.  And strangely enough my early recollections of the stock market didn't involve, although it was probably the most important, the gilt market.  We had very little to do with the gilt market and they were very powerful people, the gilt dealers.  But it wasn't our business you know.  It was the Bank's business, it was the big institutions' business, it was the business. And so we didn't have a lot to do with them. But the big names were Francis & Praed at that time.  They've gone, actually, but the other big ones were, as I say: it was Akroyd, it was Atkin, it was Wedd Durlacher, it was C.D. Clark who were a big firm.  C.D. Clark was quite interesting.  They were along one wall at the Stock Exchange and every morning two waiters would go to the Threadneedle Street entrance, and they would pick up this paraplegic who was one of the senior partners, one of the Clark brothers; and they would put him in this seat - a sort of open Sedan chair - and they would march in with this guy in this Sedan chair, and plonk him on his pitch, because he was a paraplegic, [with] things all over his legs.  And he was sitting there all day and he was a nasty man.  He was a really nasty man.  Probably because he was a cripple and so on but he was a nasty man.  And one of the funny stories - well not funny - funny-tragic stories about that was a fellow called Keith Knowles.  And I suppose he was a mate of mine, although he was a greater mate of mine in later years, but I knew him as a blue button.  He was a blue button with that firm.  He worked his way up and became a dealer.  He was a ruddy-faced bloke, quite small, and very nice and a lot of fun. He got married quite early in life and he landed up with quite a lot of children, a lot of responsibilities and so on.   And I remember he went on holiday this poor bloke and he came back, and the day he came back he walked in - just to his usual pitch - and they weren't there. They had actually gone bust and they'd never told him.  It was quite extraordinary and poor old Keith, literally he didn't know - he came back to the Stock Exchange and they said, 'Well, they're bust mate, they've gone.' Nobody had told him.

BA: What did he do? 

BW: Well, I mean, he went to find out what was going on, and I dare say it was all being wound up by the official receiver and then he went off strangely enough and became a member of the staff of the Union Discount, which actually happens to be our main shareholder.  He became their gilt dealer and did extremely well and is highly regarded in memory there because he died.  But it was always a sort of classic, the guy who went on holiday never to return.  That literally finished his career on the Stock Exchange.  But he did extremely well as a dealer, a gilt dealer.  But it was a change, because he wasn't a gilt dealer at C.D. Clark, they dealt in generally industrials.  But the other big firms - Bone Oldham of course - when I said Wedd Durlacher, it wasn't Wedd Durlacher, it was Durlacher and it was Bone Oldham and they were one of the major mergers later on as firms got together.  I find it a little bit hard to recall all the names of those companies.  I suppose one could look back and find out who they were and it would all come back to you, but certainly Bone Oldham, certainly Smith Brothers - going back a long way - certainly Wedd Durlacher.  Kitchin Baker Mason, was another very big firm which has gone, went quite earlier on. Moy & Shand was a reasonable sized firm....

Tape 2, side 1 (5 February 1990)

BA: We've come to the point now where you were a dealer on Jimmy Bisgood's book in the motors market.  Can I ask you to describe what a typical day would have been like for you at this time?

BW: Yes, I suppose a typical day was a pretty early start.  Then up to the office to make sure there was nothing left out from the overnight positions - just to confirm that we had got those right.  Then we'd get our books and we'd go to the Stock Exchange.  Jimmy might, as the partner in charge, be down there - he may be in the office - but generally speaking we picked up the books and there were quite a lot of books and all the blue buttons and dealers would go down to the market and set ourselves up on the pitch, get ourselves sort of ship-shape and wait for the people to come in.  At that stage we had a senior member as well as Jimmy Bisgood on the book, and so I was the junior.  We sort of shared a blue button at that stage because I was the junior and so I did most of the donkey work and the other two did most of the dealing.  But as I gradually got into the thing, I started to look after some of the stocks myself, then gradually got to know the stocks and then once I knew them, Jimmy Bisgood seemed to take less of a role and let us get on with it, and Tim Briars was very much the same.  And eventually, after a period of time, Tim Briars actually went off to do something else, I think he went onto fixed interests or something, which left just Jimmy and I and a blue button.  Then as things progressed after that the two of us ran that book. And finally, after two or three years, Jimmy finally said, 'Well, you know, I think you'd better get on with it now'.  It was very much a case of handing on to younger people all the time, which I think is what our company [did] throughout the firm.  So I was left with it and then I had a dealer with me and then we acquired another blue button and we increased the stocks on that book from just the motors to components.  Jimmy was the sort of father figure overlooking everything, and it just sort of traded on day by day.

BA: Would you stop for lunch at some point during the day?

BW:  We had lunch but we never stopped trading.  I mean, unlike say the Irish Exchange, where they all went off for their guiness and you couldn't get them from say 12.00 till 2.00.  No, nothing stopped at the London Stock Exchange, it all went on and if we were too busy for lunch we wouldn't go to lunch, and you'd snatch a half an hour now and again, but when things were slack, one always took an hour and a bit, you know, so, no, we never closed.

BA: Was the routine each day more or less the same?

BW: Yes, yes very much the same.  Some days, of course, with international news or company news generally, there was a lot more running around and so on but basically.... Every day in the Stock Exchange is different - I have to tell you that - every day is different, because you're seeing people in different moods and there's always some excitement - there's a buzz in the market - or there was a buzz in the market and so it was never boring. It wasn't like being a bank clerk; you were physically there on the exchange, you were speaking to people.  It was all quite exciting, it made the adrenalin flow.  

BA: What time would you leave the House at the end of the day?

BW: 3.30.  Cigarettes were allowed at three o'clock, so everybody lit up then, and for my sins I used to smoke as well.  But you could only stand it for half an hour, I mean it was in closed space.  So we smoked from 3.00 to 3.30 and then we left the House about twenty to four, dealing on the phones, and then we'd go upstairs. The books would be sent up first and then, you know, we'd have a sort of standby in the house and a chap in the office so there was no breakdown of communication.  Then we would go on dealing at our desks as we were dealing in the House, but obviously on telephones.

BA: Why was it necessary to keep dealing after hours?

BW: Well, I don't think it was necessary.  But the fact of the matter was people wanted to deal and so we would deal.  I mean in theory, one could deal all weekend if you wanted.  On some Saturdays, I had dealt with people; there were international stocks that people dealt in.  No, I mean, you could deal any time.  The only restriction which is still in force today, is that you can't deal in a new issue until the day of that issue.  And it used to be the off was nine o'clock, I think the off still is - no 9.30.  Now the off is nine o'clock.  Now of course there is a grey market that you can officially deal in but if those stocks are actually officially quoted on the Stock Exchange, you as members cannot deal until that day.

BA: And about what time would you head home at the end of the day?

BW: I suppose we used to... of course, it was all pen and booking, physical, then; there was no technology as such as so we were pretty late actually trying to agree our positions every night, and I suppose on quiet days you might get away about 6.00, 6.30, but in busier times when you had big runs on the motor book, we could be there until eight, nine o'clock at night.  And we did have one particular partner who was an absolute stickler for finding the last share.  I mean he would never write anything off.  And I know I've been there until ten o'clock one night trying to find 500 shares, absolutely daft.

BA: What was exactly involved in agreeing your positions?

BW: Well, we had a thing called the green sheets, which would be now the equivalent of my daily run off, and those green sheets we had to work out the bull and bear positions of every stock throughout our books.  We had to make sure that we had our cash worked out so we knew what the exposure was.  We had to make sure that all the checking queries for that day had been closed and there was nothing outstanding, at least nothing outstanding we could put right.  But it was mostly reconciling the positions.  When I say there was no technology,  obviously we had a back office that had comptometers and some form of technology, but that was mechanised book-keeping as opposed to our real-time accounting that we have now.  And so yes, there was a master copy which was a series of printed bargain records and consequently at times you had to add up pages of these things, and pages of the jobbing books; and actually as everybody was writing things in jobbing books during the day, and it was fairly hectic, some of the writing could be very difficult to decipher.  I suppose if you were asking somebody else in my company they would have said mine was the worst.  It still is I'm afraid.  But it just took a long time.  It was real donkey work, you know. 

BA: Would you have other people - outsiders - coming into the office after hours?

BW: What, brokers, well, no.  The people that used to come out, certainly not brokers, although if friends came in that was one thing.  But what we used to have was the newspapers and there was a chap called Shillady who we all remember with much affection.  He was the Financial Times market reporter. He would come up and he would walk round all the desks, asking if there were any features during the day, and turnovers and things like that, and swap stories. He came up every day.  Then other people might pop in from the newspapers, but a lot of those newspapers captured some of the market people on the curb as we left the market.  And they had sort of ten minute, quarter of hour run down with them before we got to the office. But Shillady was the one that really mattered.  The newspapers weren't quite as sophisticated as they are now.  Now everybody has an absolute marvellous daily column - a market report.  Then it was only the FT that really had anything.  There was a mention, but it was nothing like today's stuff.

BA: Would you find yourself physically tired at the end of the day?

BW: Oh, yes, yes.  It was a long journey and there was a lot of rushing about during the day; I think particularly at our end of it where you were the junior for most of that time because you were dealing and you were also running, then you were working and so you had physical exertion and certainly mental exertion.  Yes, it was pretty tough going.  There were some boom periods when I was at Bisgood in the very early days, and yes, it was  a long day.

BA: Could you refer to some of those boom periods?

BW: Well there was the Ford takeover that was on and off for many, many months and probably years, and lots of speculation arose in that one; and there was a lot of business in the British Motor Corporation, that is to say Roots Motors, before they were all merged: a lot of business in Leyland, a lot of business in Guy Motors - these are names that have probably gone for ever.  But lots of speculation in some of those things and consequently very great increase in bargains booked.  And we also had a reasonable amount of new issue business.  I can't actually think of the new issues at the time; that would be easy to look back on. But on a new issue day it was very hectic.  I mean they would come, a horde of people would just converge on the pitch, and although there were competing jobbers you all had a big, big crowd around you and people expected you to deal very fast, I mean, half a dozen bargains at a time, somebody else booking them, you doing them.  It was an exhausting day, yes, but fun.  I don't think one felt over tired but at that time you did have your girl friends to go out with after hours and you did have a social life, or you tried to, and it wasn't easy to get away even on special occasions.  It was a long day, it was a very long day, but as I say terribly rewarding in satisfaction terms and pretty rewarding at the end of the year when it is good.  I think bonuses then meant a lot more than they mean now.  People take everything as a right now, that you should get a bonus; but one didn't know until the year end.  You know, jobbers could lose a million pounds as well as make a million pounds - so you might have had a jolly good run and in the last month you might lose the lot.  Of course you were on tenterhooks as to know what you would get.   Bonuses were a big occasion and it was a lot of money.  It was a lot of money.  If one was getting, I can't even remember the figures now, but if one was getting say, #2,000 a year, to get a bonus of three or four hundred pounds was a hell of a big boost.  You really felt that you were top of the world.  It was marvellous, absolutely marvellous.

BA: How did your career progress?  You'd got to the point where you were an authorised clerk and you could deal.

BW:  I became a member in '66, and then I became a partner in '67.

BA: Now what did becoming a member entail?

BW: Well, you do your trial period on a book and people assess you to see if you're what they want, and whether you know what you're doing. Then you aspire to becoming a member.  I have to say that to become a member then was quite something.  It wasn't easy to become a member, certainly without any particular background.  You had reached a rung on the ladder.  Well, I don't know if everybody felt that way but I must say I felt very cock-a-hoop.  It was a terrific achievement. Though I say it myself, I felt very proud of myself when I'd done it and I went around in a sort of daze for a while, thinking this is marvellous.  Anyhow you get that and whereas as an authorised clerk you could do most things, you were restricted in the amount of shares you could deal in, size and lots of other things. Although you were authorised to deal, you weren't really authorised to make major decisions, whereas when you became a member, one below the partnership, you had a lot more authority.  You weren't allowed to commit the company to outrageous exposures and anyway good manners dictated that you would speak to the guy in charge of the book.  We weren't so plucky, we weren't so cocky as people are today.  I think we feared for our jobs really.  We were employees.  Most people today feel that you couldn't do without them.  It's a much different attitude to everything, I think, but anyhow, that was no bad thing, it was a good discipline. So one jobbed along as you did before but you were a little bit more senior, you got a little bit more respect from people, and then the next step was to become a partner.  

BA: How did that come about?

BW: Well, it usually came about in jobbing, and broking firms, in those days because the present partnership would want to create probably a cessation for tax purposes which allowed a partner to go out and one to come and you could claw back a lot of tax.  The detrimental affect on that on the individual coming in was usually you came in and you were in the red.  The guy going out did very nicely thank you very much and fair dues that was the price for getting in. But you were in the red and probably for some years, and although the firms by and large would allow you to have... well you would have your salary and they would allow you to draw some bonus, most of the bonus was ploughed back in to get you into the black.  The fact of the matter was that you were delighted to be aboard - you really were on the ladder then.  And it was just dedication and hard work after that to work yourself up to the partnership and higher and higher and so on.  

BA: Were there others who had started with you in the firm at more or less the same time who didn't make it through to being a member or a partner?  

BW: Well there were one or two other people.  Certainly I remember a chap that came in after me became a partner before me. He was older, he hadn't done as much as myself, but he was brought in on a different basis.  He was brought in as true management potential if you like, whereas I was working my way up from zero to something. This fellow had been in industry.  Although I felt a little bit annoyed that somebody had overtaken me, the fact of the matter he was older than me, the fact of the matter he had experience, one couldn't be silly about it.  But for my contemporaries, when I got authorised, he and I, this other man who shall be nameless, got taken into the partnership virtually at the same time, slightly different levels, but my contemporaries, didn't come along for two or three years afterwards.  I mean what they didn't do in those days, they didn't create partnerships en masse.  The people in it were not reluctant to go but they could bide their time, they could go when they wanted to go.  It was a very relaxed sort of partnership for most people and it wasn't terribly hard.  A lot of those chaps in those days I wouldn't have them working for me because it's much more professional these days, but it was very much like being a member of the club and you just bade your time and you went when you felt like going, really.

BA: Did your daily routine change in any way?

BW: I don't think it did to be perfectly honest.  I mean obviously I didn't carry books any more and I could get straight to the House instead of going to the office, and one had delegated those things down the line.  I think the way it changed was that you had more responsibility.  You had to show that you were more responsible and there were things that you could opt out of as an authorised clerk which you couldn't do as a partner.

BA: What kind of things?

BW: Well, unlike stock broking, we still all mixed as a family, there was no them and us.  We were all on the floor together - we weren't like stock brokers.  Stock brokers, they had their own office and they didn't speak to the oiks and so on and it was never like that with jobbers.  Even in the evenings, I mean, we still had open plan desks.  The senior partner had his office, but even the senior partners were always on their desks, so very little had changed.  But the other things were that you would expect to speak to other stock brokers, you would probably go out to lunches with institutions and you were representing the firm.  I have always been a great believer that whoever works for whichever firm, they're wearing their badge morning, noon and night, and it didn't matter whether you were round the pub or on the floor of the house.  You were wearing that badge and you had to react responsibly.  No, nothing had changed.  One became a bit more adult, a bit more senior and tried to enhance the business really.  

BA: Were you still working on the same book - the Motor book.

BW: Yes, I was actually, yes I was still working on the same book.  That went on for a long, long time and in fact, the trouble was all those other partners on the other books, they never wanted to move, they knew every day their routine, they knew what time their coffee was, they knew what time their lunch was, they were all fairly senior and if anybody was away, one would have to double up on the jobs, they were never worried about them being away, but you had to be a bit careful about when you were away.  You took your holidays and you attended when you had to attend.  Yes, I always felt that, it's a bit daft really but I suppose I've always felt, when you are the junior you want to be there all the time to make sure you are there and do the job, and when you are in a responsible position you say, 'Well, you're so important, you've got to be there,' and so it goes on.  It's only in later years that I realised that the graveyards are full of indispensable people. But I suppose if you're keen on a job, you give it your all and I still do, I'm glad to say.  

BA: Now what I want to do is to try and take you back to the floor of the House, as it were, and ask you if any particular events in the late sixties, early seventies figure in your memory in any way.  The first is the  devaluation in 1967. You might remember the pound fell from £2.80 to £2.40 and I believe the Stock Exchange was closed for the day after.  Does that feature in your memory in any way?

BW: To be perfectly honest, no it doesn't.  I mean I vaguely remember it and certainly I remember the Stock Exchange closing but lots of those things, they're really newspaper reports.  You read what everybody has to say and you read all the comments and you come in and the next day, the basis of shares have changed but you're still trading as you was trading - not like a stock broker that had to advise his clients, to speak to his clients.  The jobber was the man that lived by his wits and it wouldn't matter, if you like, that the pound was halved.  The fact of the matter was that he had to do something about getting his positions right.  And so it doesn't really feature in a big way.  Something that featured more than that was decimalisation.  And I remember decimalisation - the run up to that.  You can't believe it now because it's just extraordinary how we were all very worried that we'd never get use to tens.   I mean it seems crackers now but there were people who said, 'Oh, my God, this is going to be difficult', but of course it was the easiest thing in the world and the

effect that it had certainly on the jobbers was that overnight we increased our turns enormously.  It all seemed to fit in.  The only way I can ever think of how that added to our P and L was the fact that now, the other day, I went to buy a packet of sweets and I said to the woman, 'Do you realise that's five bob?'  That's here and now, but you couldn't have believed all those years ago that a small packet of sweets could ever cost five bob.  But the devaluation of money allowed us to make much bigger turns on our business and that was a big, big boost to us.  We probably took advantage of it because people probably didn't quite understand. I think we'd been practising what would happen for some weeks before.  We found it very easy to go into that mode and it caught on very quickly.  And then of course, although people think they can't get used to it, very quickly, you got used to decimilisation, you wonder how anybody knew pounds, shillings and pence.  Far too complicated!  But it's like everything, isn't.  You would think that computers were too complicated but even the dimest people can use computers in the end.  It really is quite a simple thing.  It's the fear of everything that is the worry.  But certainly I remember that as a very big change in what we were doing. And the other thing, perhaps this is not what you are looking for, but I do remember this - the earlier days, the atmosphere of the House.  I remember this business of this man coming into the gilt market occasionally and the whole House erupting into the 'Halleluiah Chorus' and 'Jerusalem' - fantastic,  like a choir filling a cathedral.  Everybody sang 'Jerusalem', you know.  And this man, he only had to appear and they burst into song.  There were other occasions like that where, I mean people would muck about and shout out 1400 if a member had come they hadn't seen in years.  That was always the call, '1400, stranger in the House'.  And even in those silly days people would walk through the Stock Exchange and waiters would grab hold of them and march them out and everybody would crowd round and hiss and boo them.  Oh, lots of fun. And lots of characters in the way of waiters that used to be at the stands that would call; that was the sort of inter-com system if you like.  If you wanted somebody you go over to a particular stand which was nominated as his stand, there was this great long board of numbers. You'd say 'I wanted,' say, let's see, 'Laing and Cruickshank' and he would put up number 32 - whatever Laing's number was - and then he'd shout out over the market 'Laing & Cruickshank' and a chap would put his hand up and come over to the stand and that how he did it.  And if he was speaking to another stand he would blow down one of these blow pipes that they used to have in the navy.  And this blow pipe would come off at the other end of the house and he'd say 'Is there a Laing down there?'  They'd shout down that end  - it was quite extraordinary.  As I say the other thing was these people walking around with the watering cans, keeping the dust down.  There was a lot of hi-jinks with people lighting tapers in people's collars, and the other one was when we were bored somebody would get these little paper figures which they'd cut out and put on somebody's head and the whole market would start hissing and booing and they'd be doing it to somebody else other than the fellow that had it on and of course he never knew and they'd follow the other chap and this fellow would walk out on the street, and they'd really give a laugh as he went out of the door, you know.  It was all nonsense really but it did fill up the days.  The flicking of aeroplanes - it all sounds a bit childish really.  We got slightly worried about that when they opened the public galleries, thinking we'd better behave ourselves, but it didn't really make much difference, you didn't really worry about the galleries after a while - it's all part of the atmosphere.

BA: Does the move from the old House to the new Stock Exchange feature in any way?

BW: Well, we remember it. What I particularly remember about that was the day we all packed up and we saw all the scavengers came in to collect their momentos and we virtually pulled the place to bits.  I suppose really, if anything I was a little bit naive or perhaps too junior - no, that's not fair - not too junior, perhaps I was a little reluctant to pull the place to bits but people did.  And I suppose for that reason I don't have any momentos that a lot of other people got hold of.  But certainly there was a lot of that went on and it was a sad day, and we all finished the day by all banging like mad on the desks and the seats. It was a sad day really, but a memorable day, I mean it really was a memorable day and we were sad to lose the old House.  Then of course we got all these very cramped conditions in the temporary House, but very quickly, I mean you get used to it.  But it was a sort of cut off from the old to the new.  And whatever sort of walk of life you're in, when things do change their environment, they naturally change the people, the habits, what you did before you didn't do because you were constricted by space or people felt they would turn over a new leaf.  Even the surroundings were modern and didn't lend themselves to the sort of atmosphere we had before.  It was a nasty shock to the system, I think.

BA: One other sort of nitty-gritty question, Rolls Royce - the collapse of Rolls Royce in early '71.  You were on the motor book - does that figure in anyway?

BW: Well it's like a lot of other falls from grace if you like - Guy Motors and Atkinson Lorries and things like that - the same sort of pattern emerged.  But with Rolls Royce you had this enormous amount of business where everybody was a seller certainly, but when they got down to virtually nothing, all the Americans were buying - there was always this business of picking up option money stock.  Huge turnovers of those.  The absolute disbelief that something like Rolls Royce could go bust - it just didn't make sense; and in point of fact, Rolls Royce is still there as you know and it was resurrected and it was a lame duck and it was this that and the other.  And of course the Americans made a vast amount of money.  They were buying hundreds and millions of shares for three farthings for a bunch of shares and in the end there was something to be got out of the receivership of that company.  I remember very well thinking, 'God, this is the end of the world!'.  And that's happened twice in my career actually.  The other time was when, and I remember this very painfully in '74, that I had been investing some money personally and we were all thinking well this is armageddon up the road here, it really was beginning to look bad. And I started to buy ICI, only small amounts. And I bought sort of 500 shares every time they dropped something like 20p.  And I had a few thousand and I remember that Christmas that I came in and the big story in the papers and round the market was that Burmah was going to go bust.  I couldn't believe it, it was like Rolls Royce again and I thought, 'My God, if they go bust we really are going to topple over the top'.  I sold all my shares and that really was the bottom of that slump, it really was the moment you should have hung on and I sold everything personally and it was a disaster. But it was just like Rolls Royce, it really was, and I thought 'My God, I must salvage something' and that was the bottom of the market.  But still you learn these things don't you.  It's part of growing up I suppose.  

BA: What were these conditions like for jobbing and for jobbers, say in the '70s when values were just simply falling away?

BW: Bad, very difficult.  I mean it really was; some days were interminably long.  You couldn't believe that you weren't dealing.  There were very few bargains and obviously we didn't want positions.  It was tough, it really was tough.  It was so tough that I actually started up a little business outside.  Fortunately, I think, people were very good, mostly because we were locked in as partners if you like, and you sank or swam together; but firms by and large - it wasn't a massive across the board cutting of jobs, although a lot of people did go.  Natural wastage came in, lots of people in the Stock Exchange went out to banks.  We lost a lot of people in the industry.  But I don't remember wholesale sackings, just people going.  And no bonuses of course but lots of my contemporaries had become partners in the previous few years and so what could they do?  They were locked in and they had a little bit of capital by that time and really one had to have belief in the fact that there was a future otherwise you just eroded your capital completely.  I think we were pretty good at keeping our expenses down, but that was because there were no bonuses and because - I mean apart from luncheon vouchers there weren't any real niceties.  So I think we kept the expenses down. But the fact of the matter was that things were tough and I did actually go out and I used to go up to the Caledonian market. I used to deal in bric-a-brac and things like that.  We bought a little shop, my wife and myself, in the New King's Road and we turned that into a little antique shop.  I remember very well getting up before coming to the City and going to Portabello at sort of 5.00 in the morning and going around to buy stock in the evening.  What was particularly significant then was I remember going down to the Valence Road which was a road that, if you like, totters used, and it was behind Petticoat Lane. We used to go down there at 5 o'clock on a Sunday morning and you'd start at one end of this road and it was pitch dark and you'd have torches, and you'd be buying all your bits and pieces and take them back to your car; and I very well remember seeing lots of my contemporaries coming the other way - you know they were doing the same thing -  and one particular chap called Patrick Quirk who I've known all my life I suppose and he's only just recently left the Stock Exchange.  But I remember very well that we were going up from the far end and as dawn broke, and we'd been buying some bits and pieces and tables and chairs and so forth, coming the other way  was this guy Patrick Quirk, and he was selling carpet squares.  I really remember that so well.  When we see each other now he is always pulling my leg, because he said, 'You promised me that six chairs and two carvers all that time ago, Brian; you never delivered you know.'  But he literally was selling carpet squares and he was making a living that way.  He was still on the Stock Exchange but things were grim, you just had to supplement your income.  I ran that for a few years, that little shop, and rather strange, my first customer when I was running that now owns it and it's still going in the New King's Road; he's a great pal of ours, actually.  

BA: Now what was it like trading when every one must have seemed to be a seller, how did you go about...?

Tape 2, side 2

BW: Well, the fact was that most people were sellers but the institutions - the pension funds - they still had money coming in.  And we tried, I mean being jobbers, you tried to stay on the bear tack as much as possible and in lots of cases we managed to get our book fairly square.  You avoided the sellers by depressing the prices day in day out.  But there were stop loss limits that people had left with you and you could usually get rid of some of your stocks. So although it was almost a one way market, there was a little bit of buying day in day out. And some days you'd have a technical rally where all of a sudden the papers got hold of something good and everybody would turn to be a buyer; because the whole world was trying to be a bear - we were selling short, the brokers were selling short, the institutions were trying to sell short and of course once it turned very quickly everybody wanted to jump on the band wagon.  But it was very, very thin and very difficult.  I remember one of the things at that stage was that they were talking about the whole of BMC being worth something like a hundred cars - it was that daft - the car was standing at how many thousands I don't know, perhaps it was two hundred cars but you could evaluate what the whole of that industry was worth on the price of a car.  I mean it was daft.  And other silly stories came up that a building was worth three lorries or something - absolutely crazy.  But those were the daft things that were happening and although we thought well we're going to go over the top, people were rushing out buying - it may seem absolutely crazy to you now - people were buying dehydrated foods, people were buying kruger rands and burying them in their garden.  There was a very great fear that this massive recession was going to swallow us all up - that there would be, well, anarchy almost, I suppose.  I mean I can tell you we bought baked beans and I bought kruger rands and it was all a case of people saying, 'Well see you at the Dock' and silly stories like 'Last man out put the lights off' and things like that.  It was real, not panicky stuff, but people were very apprehensive about it and it was only when the institutions decided to get together under, is it Ross Goobey? -  but anyway some great giant of the pension-fund industry - that they said 'Now look we've got to something about this, got to stop the rot.'  And those institutions got together and they actually stopped the rot and said 'We will buy'.  I think it was Ross Goobey, but anyway you can check that up - but it was a momentous thing, and they did stop, and they did buy and the index had a flip.  And as I say as I remember that, Burmah seemed to be the bottom of the market - that's when it all turned round.  And of course Burmah is still in existence today, it didn't go under, it had huge cross holdings in BP and I think it's always been one of those silly things with Burmah, that the value of the BP is virtually the value of Burmah, throwing in its own business for nothing.  But there was some panicky stuff. 

BA: Did you have jobbers going out of the industry?

BW: Yes, I mean, there were lots of jobbers when I first started and over the years a lot of jobbers... It wasn't so much jobbers packing up, although some of the boys in say the rubber market packed up because those commodities had gone out of demand - they were replaced by synthetics. But what was happening, more and more, was Wedd Durlacher was taking over all the jobbers.  As the jobbers became perhaps over geared and under capitalised they needed a father figure and Wedd Durlacher [took them over]. One argument was that they were protecting their own books. Certainly they were but at the same time they were helping a lot of people to stay in business and the worry was that in the end this huge conglomerate - Wedd Durlacher Bone Oldham - would have virtual monopoly.  That never happened but they saved a lot of people from going out - a huge amount.

BA: Well I'd like to ask you now about some of the aspects of the jobbing system that began to appear as the number of firms contracted and the institutions really became a force in the market.  We hear for example about firms running joint books with each other to cope with the size of bargains - is this something that figured in Bisgood Bishop's activities?

BW: Well, it did a little bit but we were the smallest of the jobbers and we would have loved to have been closer to the big boys for obvious reasons - we weren't.  But in things where we were perhaps the market leaders, such as garages and such as motors, there were occasions when we did go joint with other major jobbers.  Really from the point of view of financing.  We didn't have as much capital as the others and so we would do joint books, which I suppose in hindsight would now be frowned on completely; you couldn't do that, because it had the effect of if you were three people jobbing in a stock and two of you were joint there was only one, stroke, a half price [i.e. price in size and a small price with the other jobber].  But it was the way to get things done because the risk/reward/loss ratio was too big on our own.  So there were that. And the other thing that came in was price agreements.  The jobbers had a virtual... it wasn't a cartel; but you did have price agreements and that was only really broken by the fact that... We had a jobbers' committee - this is quite late actually - we had a jobbers' committee.  All the major jobbers were on that committee and we chaired it variously amongst ourselves. And it was a case of saying, 'Right we need a price agreement in the five leaders,' whatever.  And the only chap that really stopped the thing being a cartel was Smith Brothers.  Because Smith Brothers would always insist (and they were the main exponents of having price agreements, they loved all that) but what they did insist on that they would never subscribe to having a set size.  So although they would always come and say, 'Well, let's make xyz a 5p spread, instead of a 3p spread', but they would never say 'but it's only in 25,000.'  They'd say, 'We must have the right to make it in any size we want.'  So if you think back on that what you were saying to your opposition was 'we all make the same price but we're bigger than you mate and we'll see you off', and so they were very smart in the way they did that.  I think it was up to us to say if we didn't want it but most people wanted some price agreements because it was cut-throat. I mean the brokers were [not completely honest], lots of times they'd say they'd done one thing - and all this business 'dictum meum pactum' - we found people fibbing all the time about what they'd done elsewhere.  We found institutions coming through five or six brokers trying to do the same thing with the same two or three jobbers that had already been committed.  And it was very unfair.  I mean it's the easiest thing in the world to be hoisted by these institutions like that. The fact of the matter is that we thought we were playing fair but they weren't playing fair with us.  Then of course Ariel was introduced and that was another thorn in our side where they were doing the bigger business on the machines between themselves.  

BA: Joint books, price agreements, minimum spreads, problems with institutions.  Can you remember any concrete examples, without necessarily going into names and dates and so on?  For example how one went about organising a joint book?  What actually happened on the floor when you ran it, did problems arise, did it creak a bit?

BW: Well, I think the way a joint book originated was that a chap would come in with a massive order, and that he'd want to start a fairly big part of that order and there may have been no liquidity in that market and there may have been only two jobbers actually.  So effectively what you're saying was 'Let's go joint on this and see if we can't create some business for him.'  And so you had the effect that everything was channelled in; instead of the competitive edge where you reflected the supply and demand, you got together so that everything came in at one price and you could satisfy that buyer or seller as the case may be much more easily.  I suppose the OFT would say you can't do that any more but that is the way it worked, and people did get their business done.  I think the very fact that we were joint stopped anybody who knew there was a big order about trying to catch out the jobbers amongst themselves.  So I don't think one can really condone it.  But certainly it did have the effect of getting bargains done that may not ordinarily have been done.  That happened a lot you know with takeovers and things like that.  I mean after all the takeover [news] came out, the broker would come to the market, saying 'He's bidding xyz' and although we weren't joint in those things every body knew the price that the bidder was giving so we all made the same price. So in some ways it was not dissimilar to that.  You tended to be joint books on the way up when the bid was being, if you like, put together in some cases.  And then when they had got a commanding stake, they would then open to the whole market or to the world if you like and then we would probably go our own ways, but it was the way stakes were built up.  

BA: Are there any particular episodes you remember in connection with takeovers, any big takeovers?

BW: The bigger takeovers weren't done by us I must admit.  We were never in that league.  We participated along the way but if it was a case of real clout it would have been Wedd Durlacher, and Akroyd and perhaps Berger in the properties, certainly Smith Brothers in electricals and leaders; we were never that size, no.  I mean before my time, the BMC days, yes we would have been but that was before my time, I wouldn't know that.

BA: Were you, as a firm, ever involved in underwriting?

BW: Yes, we were underwriters, subunderwriters that is, and I think that was one of those things where perhaps I made my mark a little bit with the partnerships because I rather thought that underwriting - in some ways I still do now - I think underwriting is wrong for a market maker or a jobber to have, because it has a far too big an influence on what he does.  It was a fact with us that we would make a reasonable amount of money during the year and then at the end of every year, or at least during that year, there was always one bad one that took away all your profit and when it was a bad one it had a very detrimental effect on the market anyway, because if you got stuck with subunderwriting and the thing's a flop the only thing you want to do as a jobber was to get out, it didn't matter about the price, so you actually depressed the price more than you probably would have done if all the underwriting had been in the hands of institutions.  I mean, rightly or wrongly we are considered weak holders, because the nature of the animal is that you are there to trade it and to turn it over.  So I was always against underwriting but we did participate.  

BA: Again, how did it work in practise, how was it set up?   

BW: Well the broker, if it was going to be a new issue or a rights issue or whatever... Well let's take a new issue first of all. A new issue would come out and you would do your homework and you'd work out whether you thought it was a fair and reasonable price, whether it would go to premium and so on.  Then you might be offered underwriting and of course the fact of the matter was you were only offered little bits if it was a foregone conclusion that it was going to be such as success.  You were offered lots when it wasn't such as good one.  I always took the view that we would take everything on its merit and in some ways I think I fell out with some brokers because we stuck to that. Whereas most of the jobbers, there was this business of... you know they were all very powerful and big and they were expected to take everything, so they took the good with the bad.  And that was fine as well - and I'm not against that in principle - but the fact of the matter was that they all suffered when it was a really good one.  The brokers became very greedy and didn't give them very much.  And I said, no we were doing everything on principle.  But of course, there was a lot of bad feeling with that kind of approach because they said, 'Right well I'm afraid we won't be doing much dealing with you if you don't do it the way we're suggesting it'.  	And I did have lots of argy-bargy with that and gradually, I think, it changed my way.  But it was a case of breaking down the old ways of doing business.  If you had a rights issue, you probably had a position when those rights were announced, you may have been long or short and that had a very great bearing on what you were doing.  It may be that the amount of stock coming out would have been sufficient to get a new market going, it may be that it was too small in which case because you were a bear and because of the scarcity they had probably gone up in value, you'd want more of the issue to underwrite.  I always felt it was an unsatisfactory thing to have jobbers as subunderwriters.  In lots of cases, I think it was fairly unsatisfactory, if something was so good that it was almost a forgone conclusion, that you had underwriters, I mean, if you are going to price the thing at a sensible price. Apart from the day to day influences, I think an awful lot of money has been wasted by underwriting issues, I really do.

BA: Were put throughs beginning to feature in a big way?

BW: Well, put throughs of course was a very big feature of those markets in as much as there was a special rule -rule 90 - which obliged brokers to put stocks through the market, make the market aware of what you were doing and satisfy those limits or positions and that rule was abused by a great many people, because of the power they held.  They didn't always go to every jobber in a stock.  They may go to the weak jobber because they knew the weak jobber wouldn't put up a fight as to what he could take in the way of an amount of stock or a turn.  But rule 90 has featured a hell of a lot, but you found that you were excluded from those a great deal as well.  They had to do it through the market but one of the rules or guide to dealing was that you mustn't knowingly spoil the business either side.  You could participate.  And sometimes a broker would ask a jobber to participate in a bigger way, because he could do more than half the order, but less than all of the order and he would expect you to take the balance; otherwise, some people would say, 'Well if you can't do it all, don't do any'.  But rule 90 is a thing that had it been really sensibly carried out, the liquidity of the markets would have been better because everything would have been channelled through those.  But lots of times it wasn't.

BA: Again are there any particular examples that you can mention that either came up through your own dealing experience or through the Jobbers' Committee without necessarily going into the details of names and so on, just to get some idea of how it was done.

BW: Well, there were lots and lots of takeovers but I mean for instance, if something was on the boil and there were stories in the paper and it was a fair bet something was going to be taken over, you would suddenly find that after a reasonable amount of activity, a leading broker would come in and say, 'Right, I want to put through,' I don't know, 'a million shares,' but a percentage and you would agree that and in fairness, if it was something that was potentially dangerous to those jobbers, they would give you the wink and say, 'I wouldn't be short on something like that,' without telling you anything. But once that put-through was done - and we might get a turn on it, although we might not get any stock; but if it was going to be taken over they usually allowed you to satisfy your book, your bear or book position - then you'd find the next day, that so and so had sold two percent and they were bidding for the rest.  That's what happened, and you said, 'Blimey we knew something was going on'.  Of course there was always something going on with a big amount of stock. And of course the other thing was with put throughs is that stock brokers would send out circulars.  They rarely sent out sell circulars but occasionally they did, and you may have found that with bad news there was a preponderance of sellers in a particular stock, and certain brokers if they were the shop to those companies might get all those people together and then they'd go to one institution and say, 'Right, we've got two per cent of this to go.' And institutions do like to get hold of big lines of stock. And so he would put all the sellers together and put them out again and put the stocks through the market.  That's the sort of scenario it was.  But mostly preludes to takeovers or to stake building.  I mean something that goes back a long way was the Carreras take over.  The bigger brokers there were putting through great chunks of stock, I remember.  I mean the person to get all that sort of thing was Cazenove really, they were the Cat's Whiskers in that they used to have terrific call on things, massive;  Grieveson Grant and Cazenove.  Of course Grieveson Grant are not really there any more but Cazenove's the man that would really put you there.  

BA: If we can switch focus a bit to the actual running of your book on a day to day basis.  At what point did you become in charge of a book yourself?

BW: Sometime after becoming a member.  I would get the P and L and that would be my P and L.  That's really when you felt that you were going to be the make or break really, because then it was all down to you to see just how much money you could make. Although it was all put together at the year end it had a great influence if you'd been the big profit earner.  The way we ran it then and the way we run it now is that we were allowed a certain amount of cash and you had certain perameters that you could deal within but not outside of; that is to say, perhaps, you might have been allowed to use two or three million pounds, and you would be allowed to be a bull of a certain amount of stock - assuming we are in bull markets - you might well be allowed to be a bull of say three million and a bear of one million.  And as you became more senior so your cash allocations were raised.  If you were particularly bearish... I remember we had one particular bloke with us that was the bear of the firm. He was always a bear. In fact he might be a chap for you to interview. He's got a good memory and he was there before me - Peter Ramsay.  He was always known by everyone in the firm as the bear of the firm.  He would always run a book, probably he was shorter than his bull positions, you know, so his balance was the other way round.  Most people are bull jobbers, I mean, even in these bear markets.

BA: Can you explain precisely what that means, for the benefit of the tape?

BW: Yes, well most people are bullish. Most people want to own something. They think right as long as they own it it's worth something.  People are instinctively against being short, because all they can see is that it could go to the stratosphere.  They don't think... If something is standing at a pound they know they can only lose a pound if you've got them.  If it's standing at a pound, and you're short up to the eyeballs, you think it could be ten pounds, twenty pounds, fifty pounds, it's daft really because it could never be that.  It is quite expensive on some occasions now to be a bear because there's a lot of takeovers so if you'd have been a bear of say BATs industries late last year when they were standing at £4.50, overnight they went to £8, so it does become very expensive. But people by and large they'd rather be bulls than bears.  But this particular fellow Ramsay never felt that way.  He always said it doesn't cost anything to finance a bear. He always ran on the bear tack - it didn't mean to say he didn't have any bull positions of course he did - but he was a great bear jobber and he could run markets and scare people. And what you did know as a jobber was you knew the technical background of the market, you knew all the punters whether they were in on a weekend tip, you knew that they couldn't afford to take it up.  You could see the way they kept coming to check it every ten minutes and Pete Ramsay was a great one of knocking the board as a bear.  He'd mark everything down as fast as he could in red and it scared a lot of people and he closed his position.  But most of the other jobbers they weren't like that they were bull jobbers hoping that things would go up.  And actually the individual that is flexible... you know it's like a footballer if you kick with both feet you're a good footballer, if you only kick with one foot you're sort of half good and that's what happens to a lot of jobbers, they're only half good.  They're bull market jobbers.  And so I think we as a company, we were pretty flexible and we didn't deal in the big things you see.  We didn't have huge exposures so on one day, you may have cut £50,000; some of these other fellows were dealing in millions, hundreds of millions in the gilts.  So ours was much, much easier going than theirs, although it's all comparable, isn't it, the size. You could still go bust.  But the way we ran it was that you were allowed so much cash and you had to stick with the cash and come the end of the account. It cost money to finance these things and so your P and L wasn't purely and simply the profit or loss you were showing in the book, it's what it amounted to for the firm after expenses.  And so one became very well aware of what it cost to run the organisation.  

BA: About how much did you need to run a book did you feel?

BW: Well, on the motors it was fairly liquid market and we had lots of stocks.  I think Bisgood, one thing I remember, we dealt more stocks per dealer than any other firm in the exchange.  But we always had smaller positions than most other people in the exchange and that's why we didn't feature in the takeovers, we didn't feature in the big put throughs.  But it's difficult to remember now, but I mean our total exposure was only a few millions.  And the books, well if you had a hundred stocks, you had a position in everything and so I suppose it's not unusual to be a bull of two million pounds worth of stock, you might have been a bear of a million pounds.  But that was only one book and you had to multiply that by how many sectors you had.  We probably had 2, 3, 4, we may have had 8 sectors, something like that.  But of course the way you geared up as a jobber was you didn't need vast amounts of capital.  The stock-in-trade was good collateral as well and during the fortnightly account, in most cases, you weren't financing anything until we actually closed the books at the end of the account, and then you had to pay the piper. By which time you'd got your books down to much more sensible levels.

BA: Did you stay on the motor book now for the rest of your jobbing career?

BW: I stayed on the motor book and then we added on to it the components and I suppose that's really where I became my own boss.  I ran the components and garages.  Garages was a particular thing I specialised in.  The motors became smaller you see, they all amalgamated so there were lots of motor companies originally. There was Roots, and Hillman, and things like that, BMC, Leylands and Guy Motors and so on.  But then as they amalgamated or went bust, there were fewer, but what came on was a great amount of garages.  Bristol Streets and Caffyns, and Lex oh, it was a big, big sector and I sort of made my name on that really.  Then I went round to various other books because, I suppose, I was poking my nose in and trying to be a bit more sort of senior, and trying to help out.  I always felt that you should be able to run any book.  To me, in very crude terms, I've always said that stocks and shares so far as the market maker's concerned they're apples and pears - you know that's what they should be.  It wasn't for us to say what a company was worth.  We were merely reflecting supply and demand - a bit like a bookie.  If all the weight's on one horse, then you lay it off on something else.  And so that's the science of it.  It's not being clever and saying, 'You're an economist and you can tell what a company's worth' - that's not our job.  It never has been. You can have an opinion, certainly, but our job was knowing the technical background, it was knowing the people who dealt, you knew the industry, you knew the parts of the daily news that influenced those things.  That's what a jobber did.  He wasn't expected to...  You'll meet a lot of chaps who'll say, 'Oh, I used to get these things down', [i.e. the price of the shares]. You didn't really, I mean you were reflecting supply and demand.  You might go out on a limb and say we think these are cheap and keep buying them.  And if that was right, jolly good, you were clever.  But more often than not the market knew more than you did.  The market knows what the price is, not the individual, unless he's an insider.

BA: Now you were particularly associated with the USM. How did that come about?

BW: Well we as a company were very much [a] smaller business.  Apart from our history of being leaders in the motors, when there were some fairly big stocks.  We got to a stage where we couldn't possibly go into the [big league]. We did have a leader book, but I remember very well we did a survey, all the major jobbers did a survey on our leading stocks and out of the top ten this Price Waterhouse survey showed us that they were loss leaders, frankly.  We might have one winner out of the ten one year and nine losers, and you found the same thing happened with Wedd, and you'd find the same thing at Akroyd.  They had a few winners but overall you didn't make any money.  It was far too competitive, so we didn't become too big in the leaders.  Our business was basically smaller companies, it covered the whole range of industrial companies and then when the Wilson Committee came about for smaller companies and the pressure from the outside houses, the bucket shops, we thought well they're taking our business away - these things should be dealt through the Stock Exchange. So this smaller company thing - this USM - started to rear its head and people wanted to come to the Exchange.  And I said, 'Right we would deal in all USM companies,' and the other jobbers said, 'Well good luck to you.  You do that, we don't want all this old rubbish - it's too small for us.'  We discussed it many times at the Jobbers' Committee.  And they said, 'Alright Brian, well you get on with it, we're not too interested.'  But you had to have two competing market makers or probably three and so if a company came up that was in the insurance field, probably the insurance jobbers would take that up, in isolation, and put it on its insurance company [pitch].  What we did, or what I did was to say, we will deal in the whole lot and we will create a USM market.  And so it was very easy for the brokers to identify with us as a market maker because anything that was mentioned, smaller company or USM, they would naturally come to us, whereas if they wanted to go to the opposition they had to find out 'is it an insurance company, is it this, is it that?', and go to those particular sectors.  And in the early days it was a market that was only handled by smaller brokers.  Those smaller brokers probably didn't have quite so much to do with the big boys.  It was only when the Cazenoves of this world and the Touche Rosses of this world started to become interested in those companies and put the seal of approval on them if you like, that the other major jobbers wanted to do more of them.  Having said that, they were always very good to me and said, 'Well we don't want to carve it up Brian because you did pin your colours to the mast.'  As it got more and more popular in the heady days of the first few years, there was a lot of business, it was very frothy and big premiums, there were four or five competing market makers. But as it went on its way a lot of them fell by the wayside, didn't really want to do it and we had the major stake in that market right from the word go, which we have today actually.

BA: How did your own position in the company change,  looking right up to the point in which you became taken over as it were by NatWest?  At some point you became incorporated?

BW: Yes, we got incorporated in 1971 and that was brought about because, well we didn't have enough money, we had to raise some money and as I remember there was a lot going on about whether the tax structure would change and they would do away with cessations. It was a very great fear. In fact it didn't happen. But we couldn't afford [the gample]. Most of our senior partners were going by then, they were getting ancient, they wanted to keep their money, they didn't like what was happening in the way of technology and things weren't going to come up.  They'd had enough and they'd made a great deal of money. Capital gains tax was not a feature in their lives. It was easy.  Then the law started to change and it became more difficult and we said, 'Right we'll have to go and raise some more capital.'  We didn't have any money, none of us really were wealthy at all.  And so we incorporated and we got Cazenove as our broker and they raised money without any trouble at all.  But we were so hard up we couldn't even apply for our own shares.  We had a certain amount each, but we couldn't apply for the extras....

Tape 3, side 1 (13 February 1990)

BW: We were talking about incorporation and raising more capital which Cazenove very kindly took care of for us.  Well we did raise that money and it did put us on a better footing.  I suppose really we just went on jobbing on from there.  I'm trying to remember the year of that, I can't really remember which year that was, I can get that for you. But anyhow, having raised the money it did give us a new lease of life. Really I don't think at that stage we increased our business at all.  It just allowed us to go on because of this capital going out and the next thing we did I suppose of any real size was when we came in to doing USM business; so that would have been 1980 we started.  That was our next sort of break through if you like.  It was based on the fact that we dealt in smaller companies and as we did that I thought well we can't break into the big league, because although we had raised some capital we weren't in that league; and so I latched onto these smaller companies and said we would deal in them all at a very early stage, which gave us the whip hand with the other jobbers and they were very nice, they didn't want to deal in them.  We had jobbers' committees in those days and it rotated between all the firms - the five main firms - who was chairman. And it wasn't as some people think a sort of jobbers cartel, these meetings, to decide how we carved things up.  There were lots of discussions about the markets and what we could do to make markets better and so on.  But at those particular meetings, I made very clear to everybody that we would be dealing in these smaller companies, the USM, and we went out of our way to acquire as much knowledge and information as we could.  We very quickly established ourselves as the lead dealer in that and the way we did it was from the word go we decided to use the USM as a separate market, so we put it all under one umbrella and everytime a new issue came it would go on our USM book.  The other people - the other jobbers - though they said they wouldn't deal in all of those companies, they did take up the occasional company, and if it was for instance an insurance company it would go into that jobber's insurance book, if it was an engineering company and so on and so forth.  What they did was rather piecemeal - they put it on different books. What we did was to keep it under one umbrella so that we formed the USM market and we channelled the business our way.  

BA:  Did you stand on that pitch?

BW: Yes, I did.  I ran that book, because we started off with 11 stocks and then as we grew it, suddenly there was lots and lots of issues and then we decided to knock it into alphabetical order, and so after book one we then went from the A to B, C to Ds and so on and as it got bigger so we incorporated and had A to G and so on and so forth.  And in the end we had I think six books.

BA:  Did the market work differently to the markets that you had been involved in previously - like garages and motors?

BW: Well, actually what I did was I took it away from the main pitch and gave it really it's own wall if you like - it's own market.  So we concentrated away from the main pitch.  But really I suppose jobbing was jobbing.  I don't think it made that much difference. What we did is that we played up to what the people wanted - i.e. the public and the press.  And it was a new market and it was easy to write stories about it - it was rags to riches for entrepreneurs and after sort of 700 issues somebody pointed out that 700 millionaires had been created, albeit paper millionaires.  But it was a high profile market in as much that if we had new issues that had a topical theme about it we would go along with that topical theme.  If it was brewery we would have a barrel of beer on the pitch and perhaps some of the props from a pub; if it were an engineering concern we might have some of their pieces of machinery on the pitch.  And it was good to write about things like that.  I suppose really the height or at least one of the highlights of that market was when Debbie Moore came onto the floor of the House to launch, what was the darn thing called? 

BA: Don't worry we can check that up.

BW: Anyway, Debbie Moore, she'd got this business of exercise places in Covent Garden - Pineapple, it was called Pineapple.  She came on [to the Exchange] on day one.  We used to invite the chairman and managing directors or whoever wanted to come along.  We'd take them onto the floor of the House and we would show them what we were doing. We would give them a copy of our first day of the dealings in our book and we'd put it in a little presentation plaque for them.  We'd take them onto the floor of the House.  Well Debbie Moore really took the place by storm because she turned up with some of her girls in their tu-tu skirts and their leotards and of course there was a public gallery and she brought the place to a standstill.  I mean it was quite extraordinary.  And there were pictures in the Evening Standard that night of her giving me a hug and things like that.  So we had one or two things like that and the Stock Exchange were very good about allowing us to take people onto the floor of the House.  We had to get permission, but by and large they were very good and I think it did the Exchange a lot of good.  I mean it was for the man in the street, it was smaller companies, it was at the same time a sort of protective environment.  It wasn't like people going to the OTC markets; they did have at least the protection of the Stock Exchange.  And I felt that that was the sort of thing that really brought people to identify with the Stock Exchange as investors.  We needed more of that I think.  So that was a good thing - it was good PR - the only decent PR exercise I think we ever did [i.e. on the Stock Exchange].  There were lots of occasions like that and there were lots of issues and it grew like Topsy.  I mean it was the most incredible innovation the Stock Exchange had adopted for twenty years, I should think.  And it's rather sad now that it's in its demise a bit less than a decade later because of EEC regulations, and of course a lot of changes are going on now, but it had a jolly good 8-year run.  It grew up things like the USM magazine, it grew up things like the USM annual awards dinner, it's a little history in itself really, albeit a short run one, less than a decade.  But a very, very significant new market for the Stock Exchange.  

BA: In the old House markets were quite central, so you had all the motor pitches close to each other and so on.  Had that changed in the new House?

BW: No, there were still sort of areas - I mean, for instance, looking out from our pitch on the left hand side was the gilt market, on the right hand side was I suppose, down that end were industrials and stores and then way, way across the other market was engineering, although it was more where firms were grouped rather than industries, I felt in the new House.  In the old, old House there was the Kaffir market, there was the gilt market, there was the industrial market, there was the rubber market.  They were much more specified places much more, you knew exactly in that area who was who and what was what.  In the new House it was much more of a mixture: it was where Wedd Durlacher was, it was where Akroyd was, it was where Bisgood was.  So it had changed from markets to firms I think really.  Within those firms we tried to separate as much as we could but for instance in our small firm, being number five of the main jobbers, the whole of Bisgood was on one pitch, so whether you were dealing in USM or fixed interest or industrials, they were all on one hexagon, whereas Wedd had many hexagons and we tried to keep markets as near as we could.  For instance our fixed interest, although it was in the same area, it backed onto the gilt market.  But it had changed from very definitive markets to firms I think.  That was the change.

BA: It's also been said that in the old House there was an atmosphere, that an old jobber could go into the House and just by his feel of things, the feel of the market, he could get a sense of the way things were running.  Was that still the case?

BW: Yes, although I think one had to walk round more to identify those areas, but certainly the original House you could walk through and you would just get the feel, that's quite right and you'd get the buzz and the atmosphere; and if you walked in the old House you walked through those markets to get to your own pitch - at least I did.  You'd go through the Kaffir market and you'd hear very quickly what was going on there and then you'd go through the gilt market and you'd hear there.  And you got a whole picture built up whereas in the new House I found that I had to walk round; having got to my pitch, I would have to walk round to see what they were doing elsewhere.  And of course with this new system we have now, there is no atmosphere, there's no feel, but what you've got with the screen-driven prices is immediately you know whether the market is up or down because it's blue or red throughout the list.  Anyway, that's another discussion, but the difference is incredible. 

BA: There was one comment that came up in the interview that we did last week which I just wanted to ask you to follow up on.  You said that the market always knew more about a security than you did as a jobber, they knew more about how the company was doing and so on unless you are an insider, that is unless you as a jobber are an insider,  were there cases of that happening?

BW: Well, I'm a great believer in [that] the market tells you something all the time.  And when I said that, what it meant was that the daily interpretation of prices was that jobbers were reflecting supply and demand.  That supply and demand would go out of the window if suddenly, a specific broker came in that we would regard as hot.  You would find all of a sudden that it had changed from two-way business to very much one direction.  The nature of the animal being that one didn't want to get left behind if this chap that was nearly always right 8 times out of 10 [came in] you'd all go with him and so the market looked as though it had changed direction, and it must have been very worrying for the man outside because all of a sudden something had changed and a lot of that must have been connected with insider trading - it just didn't happen that way.  I mean markets can build up over a period because they sense that the economy is changing or they sense that the product has changed or something like that, but that is a general build-up.  These things happened almost instantaneously Mr X would come in the door and you would think 'What's he up to?' Then you'd try and hedge your bets by perhaps widening the price or, as he was usually a buyer, you'd probably slant it that you would be a buyer rather than a seller and then depending what he did, sort of triggered off the whole reaction in that market or at least in that stock.  There was a lot of insider trading, yes.  I mean you can see now that some of those firms that prospered are going or gone, and that's because without that sort of insider trading the ordinary investment business doesn't go their way. No, it was rife, it was definitely rife.  The point I think I was making was that jobbers..., I mean people would give you the wink if you like - they'd say 'Mind your eye', they wouldn't say anything more specific than that and you would gauge which way you wanted to be because of the animal that was going to deal with you.  But if you, as a jobber, had believed everything you heard, you would have been a bull of everything.  I mean, eight times out of ten these stories fizzled out.  The chap who started them didn't care because he'd made a lot of commission, but a lot of them were made up, I mean rumours, but a jobber had to be careful that he wasn't so gullible he believed everything, and that's why jobbers could not be accused of insider trading.  After all, you could actually rig a jobber quite easily by fear, and scaring him into a position.  So I think we were a bit wiser than that - I don't think we were actually that gullible.

BA: Was the Stock Exchange a place where rumours did fly around?

BW: Oh, yes, oh yes, the easiest place in the world. I mean there were people in there where if you wanted to get a rumour, you'd go and tell a chap in absolute confidence, and you knew it would be round in five minutes.  Oh it's human nature isn't it, they can't wait to tell somebody else, and of course in that sort of community it spreads like wild fire.  One or two of the boys start to get in and have a punt, a little bit of blue appears on the screen and that sort of starts the fire and they all pile in and then suddenly something denies it and of course they all pile out and that's what makes a market really, it is these ideas and rumours and so on.  I mean they happen now.  You see every day a stock will take off for one reason or another and there's a lot of inquiry going on. But they are not just informed guesses, even now there must be people in the know - stocks don't just take off for no apparent reason.

BA: Looking at the whole period of your career in the Stock Exchange, did you have cases of jobbers becoming too close to brokers?

BW: I think, yes.  Some jobbers were very close, perhaps because of their size and the power they exerted.  I mean there were many takeover situations where you needed the help of a major jobber to be able to say that you'd acquired the right amount of stock to force that thing through. You would need perhaps a jobber to start you off an enormous order and that was what the risk/reward ratio was all about.  Yes, some of the major firms were very close to major jobbers.  There were only fifteen or so jobbers at the end and there were only five major jobbers, so most of them were fairly close.  I would think that we dealing in smaller companies were not so close.  There were occasions when we were if you like in the parlour with somebody about a particular takeover, but we weren't that powerful, I'm afraid. In hindsight I suppose that wasn't a bad thing.  But yes, some people were very close, very close indeed.  Whereas perhaps we would only know members of the Stock Exchange and people outside, the huge companies, the Wedd Durlachers of those years, I mean they were known in the corridors of power.  They were huge influential firms that had very big people running them that knew people in the City. They were always in the banking parlours, they knew everybody, they were all powerful.  I don't think that my partners - with the exception of perhaps Harry Bishop, who was the original senior partner when I got there - most of the others were fairly light-weight in the City in [that] they didn't go out and mix with people.  They didn't know the bankers as they should have done in my opinion, but then it was a much, much smaller firm.  But the big boys were very powerful.

BA: Going on to the 1980s, we are told that one of the things that was putting pressure on single capacity was the internationalisation of the Stock market and the number of particularly American Houses setting up in London, and themselves by-passing the Stock Exchange completely, and brokers wanting to get into that business and the fear of jobbers that they were not seeing as much of the business as they might otherwise.  Is that something that you were conscious of?

BW: Well, I think jobbers were always feared that they were missing something - it's the nature of the animal again. I think we were more likely to miss business since deregulation than we were before deregulation.  And that was because by and large most things did come through the Exchange because of the rule 90 which obliged people to show that to the market.  I suppose huge bargains were done for miniscule turns, which is what upset a lot of the market makers - jobbers - but equally the brokers became all powerful because there were huge bargains going on.  The Americans, well, it wasn't so much that they were..., I don't want to interfere with international relations, but they were power houses and huge capital bases that could force things through for no sensible reason.  I think a lot of things did go on outside of the market that annoyed us, but I don't think we could identify particularly what they were.  As I say, I think it is fear of missing the business that in lots of cases probably wasn't there you know.  There was a lot of talk and perhaps I wouldn't be the right person to answer that because we weren't so influential but you might get an answer from Akroyd, or from Wedd Durlacher, on that but we wouldn't have been in those areas really.

BA: Well, now let's start concluding, and talk about jobbing in general terms.  What would you say were the strengths of the jobbing system?

BW: Well, the capacities, the separation of capacities has always struck me as the most sensible thing; in a way that was the policeman of the Exchange - the fact that jobbers only dealt with members and that the brokers were agency brokers, they dealt with everybody - but that separation I think afforded us a lot of protection.  We couldn't be accused of lots of things that we are accused of now.  And it just seemed to me that that was the way that business should be conducted.  I think you will see now, with the demise of quite a few market-making outfits, that what people have become now, because of the pushing together of capacities, is that those people that have gone out they became in a sense inventory jobbers, and so when they packed up their business you found that when they were liquidating their books, they were perhaps a bull of one per cent of this, a half a million of that, 200,000 of this, they were short of 300,000 of that.  And what they weren't reflecting, or they are not reflecting, is ordinary supply and demand.  What they're reflecting is that because of this putting together of the capacities the salesmen are forcing market-making arms of integrated houses to take on positions that they ordinarily wouldn't have done had they been jobbers.  We don't come up against that - we reflect supply and demand.  They reflect the pressures put on them by the other parts of their firms.  And that does seem to me a  great fear that markets can dictate not just basically supply and demand, and equally that you don't get best execution in that environment.  Perhaps we're going full circle, perhaps we're turning the clock back, I don't know, it [i.e. the present system] seems unsatisfactory to me, I must say.

BA:  Did the jobbing system have any weaknesses?

BW: Well, of course in the very early days, I always remember somebody saying when there was no capital gains tax that there was a jobber there that as he dealt he would say, 'Right that's one for me, one for the book', and I think that a lot of those people in the very early days, they milked the books; there was no doubt in my mind, they milked the books. And of course the other thing was that there was enough unscrupulous people in there who tried, and it happened to me on many occasions, and perhaps moral attitudes were different in those days, but there were many people who tried to get me to milk my book.  Because really it was all about trust and it was dictum meum pactum and you did have that jobbing book and you recorded bargains in that jobbing book but it was the easiest thing in the world to book false bargains.

BA: Without mentioning names could you give an example?

BW: Well, I mean, there was a young broker friend of mine very early on when I was authorised, he said that he'd just got a marvellous client in his firm - a young chap with an institution - and he said, 'It's extraordinary,' he said, 'but this chap sees all the takeovers.' And he said, 'You know I think if there is something on your book that we could trade in he would know very early on and we could...' and I said, 'It does seem to be that that is wrong' - I'm not holier than thou but nevertheless it did seem to me that it was very wrong and we talked about it and I think he was as scared of it as I was.  In the end he refused to deal with the chap and so we lived happily ever after. But I do remember that very well. He was a good pal of mine and I said, 'But you know this is very dangerous because you could do this and do that,' and in the end he actually didn't deal with this man.  I suppose in turn, you see, that fellow was much more experienced and he was trying to get the young fellow to do his dirty work and that young fellow had a friend in me who had a book, and all I can say is that thank God I didn't go over that thin dividing line because it was one of the easiest things in the world.  Of course it happened with other half-commission men who said, 'If you'd like to help us out on some of our bargains, we would make it up to you at the end of the period.'  I mean there was a lot of that went on and I dare say a lot of people fell for it.  It does make me sound a bit too nice for words, but I didn't fall for it and I think that's purely and simply because I wouldn't have slept nights, frankly.  I mean, I'm a rotten liar at the best of times and you've only got to ask my wife, she can see on my face if I lie, and that's why I always pay going through the customs; I'm just no good at fibbing I'm afraid. But a lot of it went on, a great deal of it went on yes, and I'm sure that people did make a very nice sideline, and actually something that would have made that work was a lot of the people were very poorly paid, you know.  Clerks with Stock Exchange firms were badly paid.  There was a promise at the end of the road for some of them but I mean those people didn't even get pensions.  I know contemporaries of mine that are now out if you like but they're not living on anything other than perhaps the goodwill of the Clerks' Provident Fund and perhaps the old age pension - well not the old age pension - but certainly where people have had to go out of the business because they've lost their jobs at an early age, perhaps fifty, they've got very little in the bank. They weren't good savers and as I say they didn't really have pensions, it was pretty awful. Although, you know you had very good times, and I suppose like everybody when you are young, you don't really worry about when you're getting old and hopefully nowadays, most firms do take care of that, without people having to worry but in those days they didn't get pensions. It was pretty awful I thought.  

BA: The Stock Exchange being a place where there was a lot of turnover of stocks, and transactions were being done for large sums of money; being in that environment, even if the money wasn't for you, do you think that ever encouraged greed?

BW: Well, I think it did but there's a difference between seeing pieces of paper change hands and, if you like, pound notes changing hands, and it's just as well really, because it's rather funny I as a jobber say to my boys, now as far as I'm concerned they're all apples and pears and you just remember how much money's involved.  But I think when I was a jobber it was different.  You were dealing in stocks and shares and pieces of paper and it really wasn't your responsibility to think of the money involved somehow.  Although, one was always under the rule of somebody else and you weren't allowed to get outrageous positions, but it is rather funny that the attitude was different then.  And I suppose if somebody came and had a bet with you on a horse and they gave you ten pounds it really was a lot of money, but you were dealing in hundreds and thousands of pounds and not thinking twice about it.  I mean, that's a bit simplistic and obviously there were people there who were unscrupulous and I suppose as a broker you actually saw money, whereas as a jobber you tended not to.  I mean you didn't pay anybody, you never saw anything.  Everything was paid by cheque, whereas as a broker, if you were a half-con man some of your clients might ask for £500 in cash and it's funny how you know just seeing money might make you more aware of what it was personally - yes, it's funny that isn't it?

BA: Did you feel that you were at the risky end of the industry as a jobber?

BW: Well, of course I crossed over the bridge because I started originally as a broker, and as I think I said earlier, it was very difficult to break in to make any real money because I didn't have any contacts and so one felt that through your own ability you might get somewhere and that suited me very nicely.  I suppose we always felt, as one got older, that perhaps your firm's days were numbered because if your senior partners had left as they did eventually - and we managed to raise capital - but without rich people coming through in the old partnership days you could have seen that if a few of those guys had died and the rest wanted to pack up that your firm would go out.  I suppose one always hoped that you were able enough to go and get a job with another jobber.  But then of course you became a small cog in a very big wheel and what was so lovely about Bisgood was that you had a chance of really going up the ladder.  I suppose yes, one did fear it a bit although there were long, long runs of bull markets and honestly it all disappears in a bull market, you know, nobody's thinking of packing up. It's only when things get really rough and tough and I suppose really one must be grateful that people stuck together in '74, because the easiest thing to have done then was to split the companies in half and got rid of the staff. But people were pretty good I thought.  I mean they stood by their responsibilities remarkably well in those days.  Had that happened a bit earlier in my career I think I would have had a great fear, but they were very good.  I was amazed how good  people were actually, it was more natural wastage than sacking people.  

BA: A final question, what do you think it took to be a successful jobber?

BW: Well, hopefully, I'm a successful jobber, maybe I'm not, but I think so far as I was concerned, you've got to have a good friendly approach to people, after all if they don't speak to you, you'll never do their business. There are two ways at looking at it I think - you can be affable and get people to deal with you because they like you, and then you have to be pretty sharp at what you do; equally you can be the nastiest so and so in town in a different market which is sort of jobbing like in say the Options market where you are as good as your price and people have to deal with you. But for myself as a jobber, I think having the strength of a family firm around you gave you the confidence that what you were doing was worth while and our firm in particular, it was quite rewarding at the end of the day.  The actual mechanics of why you are successful I don't know.  I lived, breathed, and slept Stock Exchange.  I mean having the Financial Times was like reading your Bible really - you couldn't be without it.  I really was completely involved in it.  I mean it was like being married to a job really.  And I always said to my wife strangely enough, I said, 'You know the three most important things in my life,' this was in the very early days, 'was my job, my wife and whatever else came along.' And it was many years later, and she knows this perfectly well, but I said to her at one stage where I think that I'd got my partnership and I was reasonably established,  I said, 'Darling, everything's changed the most important things in my life are you, my children and the job.'  But at the beginning of my career it was very much my job was more important than anything else. I really mean that.  I felt that very stongly.  But I think it's all to do with the people you're surrounded by, I think it's to do with your own ability, you've got to be fair and reasonably minded, a little bit sharp, a little bit streetwise I think ....

Tape 3, side 2

BW: I think you get so far up the ladder and you start to think about your own importance and I think so many people who believe their own myth, in the end it's to the detriment of everything else.  I hope I've never believed my own myth.  And I'm a great believer that you can go so far and then you have to be careful you don't step over the cliff.  So a bit of humility as well I think, comes into it.

BA: Were there jobbers who believed their own myth?

BW: Yes, I mean one's seen in one's career people come and go, people who you thought, 'My God he's going to go to the top.'  And suddenly he's disappeared from the face of the earth; some of them fell by the wayside through drink, some of them fell by the wayside through gambling on horses as well as stocks and shares, some of them became a little bit big for their boots in as much that they thought they were more powereful than the firms they worked for.  And actually I mean people would walk round the exchange with an order in say half a million ICI and in the end they considered they were more important than the captains of industry because they had an order.  But in fact, certainly they had a bit of expertise there and they had to do they best they could for their client but they were given those orders and they were doing their job but unfortunately they started to think they were so important that the world would not go on without them and a lot of those were chopped down to size.  I mean there are people now in the news even today that were not so important in the jobs that they were doing, and they're far more infamous today because they are now in court and they weren't very clever they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Most of these things are sub judice so I can't say anything, but there are people you can see that became important beyond their wildest dreams, beyond anything that anybody would have warranted for them.  As to characters in the Stock Exchange, well, with fear of repeating myself, there were lots of people, and you've got lots of names that I've suggested you might like [to speak to]. But some of the old ones..., I don't know if I said it about the man before, but Percy Duke in the really early days, I may have mentioned that one. It's difficult to remember people. There was a rather perhaps risque remembrance I have of somebody and that was an old man called Rogers. He was a partner, in my very early days, with Greener Dreyfus.  This little old man wore pince-nez and he always wore very dark suits and he always wore his homburg; people did wear hats in the Exchange in those days.  We were at stand 14 as I remember, which was the stand just as you came across Throgmorton Street where we had our box, and I would have to stand by the stand.  Rogers was our dealer, [he was a partner, a dealer partner] particularly in the Kaffir market. He would go and do bargains - he was a bit dodery even then, he was quite an old man - and he would shout out at the top of his voice whenever he'd done a bargain, 'Winterflood', which doesn't sound very nice anyway. I would have to run and jump to attention and right at the top of his voice he would shout out, 'Winterflood give me a piece of paper, I've done something!'  And I was always terribly embarrassed and a chorus of laughter went up. You'd think after a week or so or a month or so [he'd realise], but he always said it, it was quite extraordinary.  And it became one of those silly nonsenses of growing up if you like.  As things went on, there were lots of characters. One bloke I remember I used to go and see him everyday, chap called Bill Smith, very ordinary name, but he was with Ricardo and he would stand on his pitch all day and he'd keep flicking his foot.  It was like an affliction.  And he'd keep flicking as he put his leg round the leg he was standing on, he'd flick it as though he was flicking a ball.  And then he'd swap legs and it was sometime before I got to know him, and I said, 'Why do you do this every day?'  And what he was [doing], he was a karate expert and every spare moment he'd just sort of practise his feet movements.  It was quite extraordinary and you got used to seeing this bloke doing it every day, and he more or less dedicated his whole life to karate,  I mean it was the way he lived.  Some of the others, I think I mentioned the Clark brother who was brought in every morning on the Sedan Chair and the man that they all sang to.  There's a lovely character who's still about it would probably be rude if I said that, no he wouldn't forgive me.  There was George Lazarus who was in the Kaffir market and he was a great man for making the most noise as I remember in the Stock Exchange.  He was always bidding and offering Kaffir stocks and his voice would ring throughout the Exchange.  And it didn't happen strangely enough in the industrial market, it only happened it seemed to me in the Kaffir market, it certainly didn't happen in the gilts; I think the gilt market were very much the gentlemen of the Exchange.  The Kaffir market was a little bit on its own, it was a little bit aloof, but they were very noisy.

BA: Were there any people notorious for the way they did their jobbing?

BW: Well, of course you didn't know really how other jobbers operated.  You knew how some of your own jobbers operated and when you became more senior you knew how all your jobbers operated.  But it was very difficult to see how other jobbers operated.  You realised that firms like, and it happens even today..., that Smith Brothers were always regarded as the market traders, they were real traders, they tended not to think about what a stock did, or in other words, rather my analogy of apples and pears - they were traders in the true sense of the word and they would change markets because they might get in a mess and they would stand up with their prices and dictate the tune, for a while; I mean they couldn't always win.  Very much traders rather than referring to back offices or statistical people and things like that.  And of course in those days jobbers might have had what we would call stats departments but they didn't have armies of analysts and things like that, they didn't come into the equation at all.  They had various people upstairs with slide rules who could work out this that and the other a bit quicker than you might be able to but basically jobbers were there to see the whites of their eyes and to trade as they saw supply and demand.  And I remember we became quite proficient as we got older in the new issue market and we became quite a force in the new issue market - that's first day dealings. And I always rather took the view when we had a new issue or when figures came out that what you had to do was to create the right atmosphere to people to deal with you. So I always took the view that as soon as those figures came out you would make the first price and so consequently you got all the people round you.  And prior to our taking that view, everybody would go to Wedd Durlacher when the figures were out because they would be if you like the authority on things and they'd be speaking to their stats department and so on but we took the view that we had to break that. And so what we did, we interpreted them ourselves and we made a price quicker than anybody else.  And I took the view personally that you could get the first one wrong but if there was sufficent business, if you got the first man wrong you get the rest right because he would have put you on the right path.  And for a while, for a good long while actually, we started to get a reputation that if you wanted a quick interpretation of their results go and see Bisgood Bishop.  And it worked jolly well.  The others, when you're thinking about how other jobbers worked, the gilt market was a law unto itself, I mean it was very gentlemanly and a huge market and you really didn't know unless you worked for them how they did it because they were dealing in billions of pounds of stock and it was very much controlled by the government of course and the government broker.  I suppose the industrials was a mish-mash of people and they probably dealt the same as we did.  I'm not sure that one knew a great deal about other firms really.  Much the same, I would guess, much the same, but as I say Smith Brothers was the real trader and they would tend to be leaders rather than followers but the rest were just doing the job as they saw it. And some of them were more influential than others because they had such big leaders, you know, they'd established themselves and they were powerful and so a lot of the business would have been directed to those firms because of the influence they had.  But by and large the run of the mill jobbers did the same job I think, yes there's no real mystery to it.

BA: Well I think that's a good a note on which to finish.

BW: OK

BA: Thank you very much.