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Henry Hodge, Peter Jones and Patrick Allen pictured in 1977. |
The banker who got it right
HE was the archetypal bank manager of decades ago – genial but tough, generous but cautious.
He was the sort of manager you would find in any High Street bank in the 1950s.
Fortunately, he was still around in the mid-70s when three young and ambitious lawyers nervously approached him in his Camden Town office for a loan.
Bert Enright was a bit wary. He knew another young hopeful solicitor in Camden Town who had ended up as a jailed fraudster.
But Enright saw something in these three men – and gave them a start with a £15,000 loan.
Now, the firm he helped to set up, Hodge, Jones and Allen, is one of the biggest firms of solicitors in central London – and on Thursday a big party was held at their new, rather swanky, offices in Bloomsbury (See page 6).
One of the aspirants, Patrick Allen, who had gone before Enright, as a school child would go before a headmaster, recalled the day with amusement more than 30 years later in a room packed with lawyers, politicians and businessmen.
But one person was missing. The man himself. Where was Enright? An apologetic Enright had not been able to make the party.
Then, as Patrick Allen described the day Enright had said “Yes” to a loan, it suddenly occurred to me that this affable bank manager had been responsible for another successful venture – the Camden New Journal!
I had nervously accompanied a colleague in early 1982 – five years after the birth of Hodge, Jones and Allen – to the offices of Midland Bank that still stand next to Camden Town Tube station, now known as HSBC.
In his first-floor office Enright cast his experienced banking mind over the CNJ’s business plan.
After a bit, he agreed, knowing, of course, that the request for a £50,000 loan would be underwritten by a new scheme for small businesses introduced by the Conservative government. Enright was too canny just to fling money at anyone.
This week I tracked him down at his Bushey home and discovered he had been based in Camden Town for 14 years, previously in King’s Cross and Holborn, before his retirement.
Describing the day the three lawyers saw him, Enright said: “One looked incredibly young, the second had the suave air of an actor, casual floppy hair across his brow with a cut-glass public school accent, while the third was lofty but trendy with big hair fashionable at the time.”
He couldn’t have met three greater innocents.
Any capital, he asked? No. Any assets? No. Any potential clients? No.
“But I wanted to help them however impoverished their dreams,” he told me.
Enright, now 76, was one of the best-known figures in Camden High Street. His clients ran into several thousands.
But that special breed, personified by Enright, has vanished today.
“The personal touch has gone in banking,” he sighed.
But then a lot of small businesspeople in Camden Town today, who don’t have a local manager they can turn to, would agree with him.
As I talked to Enright about his old customers I realised he sounded like a social historian. Amazingly, he rattled off name after name of business men and women, embroidered with anecdotes about their companies, all still fixed in his memory 20 years after his retirement in 1990.
It wasn’t difficult to find that Enright agreed that local banking had now sunk into anonymity.
I doubted whether he would have agreed to the sort of toxic loans the big banks handed out – loans that almost brought the economy to its knees.
Then he plied me with questions about the New Journal’s performance – still the same old manager, I thought!
Then he gave a loud chuckle of appreciation as he heard about our success – his instinct for a sound business plan had proved spot on.
Waging war on recession an expensive business
I CAN’T blame our great thinkers at the Town Hall for trying to boost businesses and employment in the borough, but do they have to spend more than £200,000 in trying to do it?
In an advertisement in a national newspaper for “creative individuals” to join their re-shaped Economic Development and Regeneration team, they advertise five jobs – employment initiatives manager who will work with “internal and external stakeholders to tackle unemployment”; employment partnership co-ordinator who will work “with key partners to identify gaps in provision”; business partnerships co-ordinator who will support “entrepreneurial activity”; town centre development officer who will develop “initiatives which support the vitality of town centres”; and economic development officer who will “support the co-ordination, development, commissioning and delivery of a range of business and employment initiatives”.
Annual salaries for each job range from £32,000 to £47,000.
If you can cut through the maze of gobbledegook, you wonder why some of the existing staff can’t do the advertised jobs. The advertisement alone probably cost several thousand pounds.
Or has the council decided to go into job creation in a big way?
Psychodetectives
DOES Frank Tallis fancy himself as a bit of a super sleuth from one of his novels?
A trained clinical psychologist he has forged a successful career writing detective stories.
His stories, set in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, pitch a young doctor and disciple of Sigmund Freud who solves his crimes using radical analytical techniques. He believes there’s little to separate the life of a detective and his own – “both study evidence, look for clues, reconstruct histories, and seek to establish an ultimate cause.”
Mr Tallis will speak about Freud’s influence on the crime writers at the Freud Museum in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead on Tuesday (October 20) at 7pm. For more information contact 020 7435 2002
Theatre royalty for Celtic king
SIR Ian McKellen was sitting directly behind me in the stalls for the National Youth Theatre’s excellent production of Cymbeline at the Arts Theatre on Monday.
He muttered with approval throughout the show but, at the final curtain, the award-winning actor – the NYT’s vice president who started his career with the company in Holloway – scurried off into the night.
What had drawn him there? Perhaps the chance to see Shakespeare’s mysterious romance proved irresistible. The play, about the Celtic king of Britain’s struggle with the Romans, has been rarely staged since the 18th-century essayist Dr Samuel Johnson called time on its “unresisting imbecility”.
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