BRITAIN'S FOREMOST BANKER

Waikato Times, Volume 112, Issue 18803, 26 November 1932, Page 11 (Supplement)

BRITAIN'S FOREMOST BANKER

(H. C. O’Neill in To IT ID NOW RECOGNISED by everyone that there is no such tiling as a professional type. Some medical men look like farmers, some boxers like clergymen, some criminals like churchwardens. But there has never been an attempt to fashion the popular conception of a banker. Extreme Socialists naturally represent him as a hard-faced person, the living embodiment of one who grinds the faces of the poor. In any case, It matte* little. Mr Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, would not lit in with any picture we might form of a banker. He looks a little like Joseph Conrad and Augustus John. He wears by preference a low collar. His clothes are not ihose which convention prescribes for the City man. He has the brow of a visionary, the eyes, too. His voice is soft, so soft that the decision of his words comes almost as a shock. He is tall, slim, has the slender hands of an artist, and in his walk the suggestion of an athlete. This is

No Convincing Picture of a Banker. Nor if we go further Into his life and habits do we come nearer to any popular preconception. When he was nearly thirty he served In the Boer War and, as a Captain in the Bedfordshire Mounted Infantry, secured the coveted and, in those days rare, D.S.O. It seems appropriate that his favourite author should be Kipling; but a hanker, one feels, has no right to take to arms. He has done so In a yet more unconventional way. He undertook the remodelling of a ceiling in his house with his own hands. lie has, in fact, an instinct for creation and .the creation of beauty. But it is in gardening that instinct mainly finds an outlet. He loves music, poetry, line books and fine woods. 'The dreamer’s brow, the sure impressionism of Ills dress, the carefully trimmed heard —these seem to march with his feeling for beauty. But they do not suggest the competent soldier. Still less do they fit into the picture which the public has of him —such as it is. As, during recent years, the extent of his power has come to he realised and some parts of his policy have fallen into disfavour, and most of the evils under which %ve suffer have been attributed to him, he has had an increasingly bad Press. He would Indeed he called a “ sinister ” figure If It were not for the fact that two Chancellors of the Exchequer as widely apart as Sir Robert Horne and Mr Snowden praised him In terms that would make a shy man blush. What he thought of these tributes he alone knows. For that is another of his characteristics —he keeps his own counsel. He shuns the limelight as carefully and successfully as others court it. He gives no Interviews. He does not like public appearances, still less public banquets. At a given moment only a very few people know where he is. As far as the public knows he might be in America or Germany, or Austria, or even in the City. Wherever he is, it may he said that lie is Doing a Fine Work Finely. Here and there one may find the man of affairs who knows sofne small piece of salvage that is due to Mr Norman. Europe would ho a very much more hopeless place to-day hut for his 'tireless efforts to hind up the wounds left by Hie war. Eton and Cambridge saw to his early training; and then he entered the old banking house of Brown, Shipley & Go., which has its home in the heart of the City. Banking naturally drew him. His grandfather had been a director of the Bank of England for almost fifty years, and his wife’s grandfather was also a director for forty years and Governor for two. After the Boer War he returned to Messrs, Brown, Shipley, and in 1907 he becam’e a director. It was some years later that he joined the Bank of England, and in 1916 he threw in his lot with it completely. In four years he was elected Governor; and since that date he has broken all precedent, until at present it seems natural to regard him as perpetual Governor. It was many years before his name began to bulk large in the public interest. The war made a vast change In the fortunes of Great Britain. It used to be said that one result was to substitute New York for London as the world’s financial centre. Very few people realised the meaning of that statement. Very few grasped what England gains from the Immense volume of financial business that flows through London. But Mr Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, knew, and he saw that one of the earliest duties to be carried out after the war was the restoration of our credit. There are some, though not so many as there were, who still blame Mr Baldwin for his share in the funding of the British debt to the United Stales. But the initiative almost certainly came from the Bank of England, and it is significant that tlio Governor accompanied Mr Baldwin. A still more provocative action was the Restoration of the Gold Standard, and Mr Norman’s influence is to be seen there. The criticisms have been at times more embarrassing to their authors than to Mr Norman. There is hardly one responsible person who maintains that the gold standard should not have been restored. It is claimed that - it should not have been restored at that moment, and in precisely that way and at that parity. The same criticisms will certainly follow a return to the gold standard now, and it Is said that Mr Norman is using his influence in that direction. Whatever may be said, no one will deny that Instability in currency Is one of the worst obstacles to trade. It Is a strange thing. The life of a country is like the life of the body. • It will survive with the least encouragement and it takes a great deal to put an end to It. But it is beyond dispute that change, instability, is the worst evil it can suffer. Trade will climb over or evade almost every variety of tariff barrier—if they remain the same. It is for this reason that the economists at Geneva took as their first aim the stabilisation of tariff schemes before they attemped to reduce them, and the stabilisation

SKETCH OF MR MONTAGU NORMAN.

-day and To-morrow.) of currencies is even more necessary. But the Governor of the Bank of England would he one of the last to welcome a restoration of the gold standard upon the old terms which obtained until England had to abandon it. These two points, however, concern England directly and other countries indirectly. It is exactly the opposite with much of Mr Norman’s work in the last ten years. The war was followed by a period in which several European countries appeared to be going bankrupt. Austria has gone through a series of crises, and ft seems almost impossible to make a solvent State of her. But oach time she has been in difficulties the Governor of the Bank of England has been quickly on the spot with skilful first aid. The cynical Find Self-interest In An|y Aotlon. But it is certain that In Mr Norman’s make-up cynicism plays a far smaller part than in others. Viscount (then Mr) Snowden said of him: “It took but a short acquaintance with Mr Norman to know that his external appearance was the bodily expression of one of the kindliest natures and most sympathetic hearts it has ever been my privilege to know. . . I think of the prolonged Herculean efforts he has exerted to bring International finance to aid the ruined countries of the Continent to re-estab-lish their economic life. His sympathy with the suffering of nations is as tender as that of a woman for her child. But like every tender nature he can be indignant with injustice and international intrigue and chicanery.’’ Few men could wish a better testimonial than that, and it is, of course, deserved. For years now he has been ever at the service of the nation in difficulties. Wherever finance penetrates his Interest follows. In a orlsis it is his first endeavour to restore normal life at the earliest possible moment. The problem of transfer, that greatest of all bugbears of the post-war world, has been solved, in so far as it can he solved, by the creation of the Bank of International Settlements and, with Sir Josiah Stamp, he was mainly instrumental in bringing that into being. It may be noted that in this, as in other of his improvisations, he launched an Institution which, apt for Its immediate purpose, could be applied to much greater. The Bank of International Settlements is only at present In Its infancy; but 1 in years to come it may play a role in Europe which few even dream of at present. Even in this recurrent problem of Ireland the Bank may provide an Acceptable Way Out of an Impasse which oould not be found elsewhere. At least it can be said that here is a body which can he used to give ready and skilful help in international crises. Mr Norman has thus moved out of the domestic groove in which his predecessors lived their short period of office. He has been accused of every sort of enormity and the cruder charges need not detain us. But one that is made most often and with some specious air of justice Is that he is the conventional financier. The reader may judge for himself. No conventional financier could have merited Lord Snowden’s words. But a closer study of his work at home shows him so little bound by convention that the wonder is how lie has retained the confidence of the City and of the international world of finance so fully. There is nothing so sensitive as a financial reputation. The mere breath or suspicion of “ unsoundness ” —which as a rule means unconvcntionalily—is sufficient to ruin it. 'Mr Norman lias retained the City's confidence not by reason of bis conventionality, but in spite of it. He lias succeeded where a lesser man would inevitably have failed. He is, ■as all who come into contact with him realise, a great man, and from the beginning of the world men and women have lived and died for men rather than for principles. Take one or two of his other creations. The Bank of England was accused of standing alohf from industry. Under Mr Norman it has launched a Securities Management Trust, and it has secured as director of research Professor Henry Clay. The Immediate purpose of the Trust was the co-ordination of the basic industries; hut the final purpose was to Restore and Re-anlmato Industry, to assist rationalisation, to fit industry for the new^ scale upon which alone it can 'succeed. The Bank has an interest in the United Kingdom Trust, and another of its progeny is tile Lancashire Cotton Corporation. But these are all extraordinary schemes. To dabble in one of them would have ruined an ordinary man. To lie connected with all should have wrecked the reputation of any financier. Mr Norman pursues his way unheeding. One Government after another lias found in him Hie 1110 s 1 unselfish, ungrudging and untiring adviser. One country after another has learned to place perfect confidence in him. lie is a great world figure and a great public servant,. He could have any honour lie wished. He could travel as no royalty travels any longer. He prefers to work Jn silence and without recognition. That, perhaps, is his greatest fault in the eyes of the public. The charge that lie is the old conventional financier, most specious, is most unjust. The most obvious work which will be associated with his name is the rebuilding of the Bank of England. But he is doing it in characteristic fashion. "Change your hearts and not your garments," runs the old exhortation. Sd the Oid Lady of Threadneedle Streets seems much the same outside. The old, massive, historic walls remain. One would say, looking at them superficially, that everything is as it was. But At the Heart All Is Being Made New. Behind these walls the Bank is being rebuilt on modern lines. When a man is free to create, his work is a piece of autobiography. Mr Norman is writing In stone what manner of man he is, and even If his contemporaries fail to read the message, future generations will make no mistake.