2 - The Bank in the 1950s

Summary

The Bank in the 1950s had a recognisably similar structure to that at its foundation 250 years before. Perhaps the more striking feature, however, was that it was still in essence Montagu Norman's Bank, and that included the structural reforms of the 1930s. Most of the senior figures in the 1950s, and often into the 1960s and sometimes beyond (e.g., Cameron Cobbold, Humphrey Mynors, Leslie O'Brien, Jasper Hollom, Roy Bridge, Maurice Parsons, and Hilton Clarke) had joined the Bank in the 1920s and 1930s, and the very powerful personality of Norman left its mark. Hollom, for example, who joined the Bank in 1936 and was Deputy Governor through the 1970s, recalled going to listen to Norman speak to a group in the Bank soon after he joined. He was entranced as Norman spoke, using the recent difficulties of a firm called Huntley and Palmer to illustrate what he said. Hollom said that he felt that Norman was speaking only to him and that he had never understood anything so clearly before, ‘that I was learning the innermost secrets of high finance and that this was him and him alone and he absolutely captivated one’. It was not only the people on whom he left a mark but the building itself, which still bears the marks of Norman's reconstruction. Although the world had changed greatly and the problems facing the Bank had too, the approach to these problems can still be seen to be those of a previous era.