Banks, the way they used to be....

There was a time when trying to get a loan out of your bank manager was like trying to get blood out of a stone. Those days are fast returning. Charles Moore tells the following story about times gone by:

When I got my first job (after leaving university in 1979, I had £14 left in the bank, so I wrote to the manager and asked for an overdraft of £400 to have a couple of suits made. He telephoned me, very concerned: ‘If you will excuse me being humorous, Mr Moore, I think you should cut your coat according to your cloth. You can buy a perfectly acceptable suit from Burton’s for a fraction of the price.’ Conscious that he had never met me, I put on a hurt tone of voice, and said that I was ‘a very strange shape’, and therefore could not get a suit off the peg. Embarrassed, he granted me the loan. But I feel that the poor man was doing his job, and that it is partly because his sort were stamped out by more thrusting, business-grabbing types that the banks now have no money left.