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Every morning, my old-fashioned bank-manager father used to set off from home at first dawn proudly wearing his bowler hat, a starched wing collar, a tie with the bank logo emblazoned on it, and swinging a furled umbrella. No dress-down Fridays for him.
He trusted formality and the solid Victorian-built institutions in which he worked. He even pretended to love the Drain, the nickname for the cramped underground line which he took along with many Home Counties commuters from Waterloo to Bank station.
And on his days off he liked nothing better than to take his children on a pilgrimage to his place of work in the middle of the City's historical landmarks which he was determined to impress upon us.
The last laugh: Stanley Roberts with wife Marjorie and dog Robin
Central to the tour was the Bank of England, or the Old Lady as he called her, because you could depend on her in the days when banking, England and the City itself were synonymous with fair play, probity and excellence.
I thought of my father this week as the 'wise' Old Lady prepared for quantitative easing - which means printing money just like some Third World dictator might do when its economy is in freefall.
I thought of him, too, as the disgraced former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin continued stubbornly to cling to his £703,000-a-year pension, despite a national uproar from the public and politicians alike.
By the end of his career my father was very senior in banking. He had reached the top of the NatWest - which later became part of Sir Fred's RBS, a group that managed last year to lose a staggering £28 billion.
I like to think that the difference between him and today's banking 'titans' - the ones whose greed and short-termism helped bring the industry to its knees and sent it begging to us taxpayers - is that he strove to fulfil those principles of prudence and honesty that he believed so important in the City.
After the National Provincial, the bank he had joined as a teenage teaboy, merged with the Westminster creating the NatWest, he took voluntary early retirement.
Having seen in the merger, he became joint chief general manager and then refused a seat on the bank's board, saying he did not trust what banking had become.
Mergers and changes: Stanley Roberts started at the National Provincial which later merged with the Westminster to become NatWest
The merger in 1970 shocked banking circles at the time because the resulting conglomerate was so big. How prescient his concern now seems - just look at the size of RBS, which at its height had 40 million customers in 53 countries and an annual income of almost £30billion.
Even back in my father's days, long before your local High Street branch had become a trendy wine bar and when you still had a personal relationship with your local manager, he saw the changes waiting in the wings.
As far as he was concerned, things were already moving too swiftly in the job he loved and he could see nothing good on the horizon.
My dad, who had worked his way up through provincial branches, seemed to me at the times the epitome of the old-fashioned local bank manager, a dead ringer for Dad's Army's Captain Mainwaring.
By the end he was based in the Head Office of the National Provincial in the City of London, with little cause to meet the general public. One of his last jobs was to run the advance department - in other words he was in charge of loans, the area where it has all gone wrong today.
He suspected that his own bank's radical innovation in the early Sixties, the unsecured personal loan, would spiral out of control. He also deplored its other introduction - the now ubiquitous use of plastic which makes it so disastrously easy for individuals to overspend with minimum accountability. And the ivory-towered nature of banking at head office level may well have contributed to his decision to pack it all in.
Roberts did banking very differently to Sir Fred Goodwin
He would have been appalled to see today how impersonal the profession has become, from top to bottom. He would never have understood how call centres can substitute personal contact with bank managers.
So right now, he will be either be turning in his grave over the sorry fate of his beloved profession - or else gloating in the hereafter. My old dad, Stanley Roberts, was a great believer in comeuppance and he is probably gleefully rubbing his hands and saying: 'I told you so.'
Born at the beginning of the last century, he grew up in North Wales when there were few jobs at all, less still white-collar ones, and he thought himself lucky to be taken on, aged 15 in 1925, by one of the then 'Big Five' High Street banks.
In my childhood we knew their names like a litany: Barclays, Westminster, Martins, Lloyds and his, the National Provincial.
He started as a teaboy in one of their most far-flung branches in Blaenau Ffestiniog, Snowdonia. The bank gave him a job for life and he was overjoyed at such security - especially when, in short order, the world sunk into Depression followed by World War II.
He was promoted to Liverpool and then the bank brought him to London where, on one of his first days in the City, he had a defining experience.
Walking past the imposing building of the Worshipful Company of Plumbers, my poor homesick father decided this institution, one of the most ancient of the Livery Companies, was something he could legitimately join in order to feel at home.
He walked in and announced that he qualified for membership because his own father was a plumber in Llandudno Junction. The receptionist behind the desk blanched and asked him to leave immediately. Judging by the number of times he told that story, he never forgot the slight and made certain he would command respect from then on.
He rented a house in East Sheen, the London suburb where the bank's head office was relocated for the hostilities, and stayed there, confident just like Captain Mainwaring, that a bank employee was someone to be reckoned with. Just like Mainwaring, too, he even did a spell in the Home Guard.
He thought he had really arrived when he was given two tickets to watch the Queen's Coronation Parade from the bank's Trafalgar Square branch - yes, there was one there too, and if I remember right, today it is yet another restaurant.
He took me along for the occasion, desperate that I would grow to love the bank as he did and work there. I tried. One school holiday, I got a job in the postroom in head office, but it wasn't for me.
Best of all I think he loved being a Central London manager, as he was when he ran the Leicester Square branch, which is now - yes, you've guessed it - a restaurant.
The Old Lady: The Bank of England
There, he was able to help the British film business, which was based in nearby Soho. Among the customers he looked after were Ealing Studios actor Mervyn Johns and his daughter Glynis. His dire warnings about the need for proper accounting must have driven them crazy - he insisted on personally making certain Glynis did not indulge in any of the spendthrift follies he readily associated with the showbiz lifestyle.
Another of his customers was the young dancer Gillian Lynne, who would later choreograph Andrew Lloyd Webber's hugely successful Cats. My father took her under his wing and she told me years later that he helped her considerably.
He prided himself on being able to tell from the moment anyone walked into his office whether they had talent and drive, combined with a sense of responsibility, and were therefore going to pay the bank back.
Those were the days when banks lent their own money and had to balance their books; when managers were chosen for their common sense and judge of character.
His faith in his judgment was not misplaced. The films he approved, including The Railway Children, did well. And no matter how distinguished he became in his later years, he never lost his disapproval of spendthrift behaviour, wherever he found it.
Every week, he would quote Charles Dickens's Mr Micawber - 'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery' - as he kept our pocket money at miserly levels in an attempt to encourage thriftiness.
But his sternest disapproval was for the late Earl Spencer, Princess Diana's father, who was one of his customers when, for a time, he ran the Northampton area branch of the bank. It was his job to ring up the Earl whenever necessary and advise him he had gone above his overdraft facility which, even then, was £1million.
Lavish lifestyle: Roberts was critical of the late Earl Spencer
Given Lord Spencer's lavish lifestyle, this happened more often than it was supposed to and my father - on first name terms because of the frequency of their communications - was maddened when 'Johnny' inevitably turned round and said: 'Oh that's all right, Stanley, I'll just sell another Rembrandt.'
To my father, who had no such extravagant birthright, this was flagrantly irresponsible behaviour.
During his 45-year career, few people other than landed aristocrats, their ancestral piles stuffed with valuable museum pieces, were able to command a sevenfigure loan facility. My dad burned with the injustice of this but could never have imagined the day when everyone would be allowed to exceed their spending limits.
Banking's first publicly visible thrust into modernity occurred just as my father retired.
The NatWest Tower, today still the highest building in the Square Mile, was at the planning stage when Dad retreated to his retirement in Surrey. On trips to London he watched fearfully as the symbolic skyscraper crept upwards, breaking all previous planning rules - a brash forebearer of things to come.
In retirement, he should have been enjoying the rewards of his hard work, consorting as he was with ministers from Harold Wilson's Labour government, dining at the Dorchester and living in the prime commuter belt. But he never lost the feeling that hard times were coming because he believed the modern world was on a collision course with reality.
Nor did he forgot his roots and the lessons they taught him.
My favourite memory of him is during the 1984 miners' strike. My super-successful father would drive to his posh Surrey golf course in his big shiny car and go straight to the 19th tee where, slamming a large whisky down on the bar, he would say to the shocked assembly of Tory voters who were his golf partners: 'Let's hear it for Arthur Scargill.'
His family had been miners, you see, and all he could see about the new order was a community losing jobs.
Later he held forth to everyone about the City's Big Bang (when Thatcher did away with trading and banking restrictions in 1986) and how it would change everyone's borrowing habits for the worse.
Soon everyone, whatever their prospects, was mortgaged up to the hilt and over the limit on their credit cards, not worrying because there was always a new lender to send you another facility. The entire economy was based on buying now and paying later.
As deregulation took over, together with screen-based trading, the old values and disciplines in which my father was rooted were banished. No longer did people actually have to have real assets to thrive. Banking had become as unrecognisable as the City itself.
My dad never lived to see the worst of it. He would have been appalled at the new breed of highly-geared gamblers who called themselves 'bankers' swinging around Central London in their red Ferraris and spending four-figure sums on meals, flaunting their designer clothes bought with staggering bonuses.
And they would have had nothing but contempt for a crusty old figure like my cautious father.
There were no bonuses for him during his working life, despite his great success. He had struggled to bring up his family when he was young. Even when he retired on a full final salary pension, he refused to spend his money because he was sure he was going to need it when the brave new world came to grief.
He predicted the financial services industry would end in tears, arguing they were 'a house of cards' rather than real product. He lamented the fact that experience was no longer considered a virtue and that youngsters were doing his beloved job and making a complete mess of it.
But the biggest insult of all, he told me sadly just before he died in 1993, was that in the 20 years of his retirement, the value of his property had increased so much that it had made more money than he had done during his entire hard-working life.
He thought it made a nonsense of his existence, by discrediting the true value of the work ethic. We rolled our eyes heavenwards at the time of course, but as I look around now, it is easy to think fondly of my dear old dad.
,
He trusted formality and the solid Victorian-built institutions in which he worked. He even pretended to love the Drain, the nickname for the cramped underground line which he took along with many Home Counties commuters from Waterloo to Bank station.
And on his days off he liked nothing better than to take his children on a pilgrimage to his place of work in the middle of the City's historical landmarks which he was determined to impress upon us.
The last laugh: Stanley Roberts with wife Marjorie and dog RobinCentral to the tour was the Bank of England, or the Old Lady as he called her, because you could depend on her in the days when banking, England and the City itself were synonymous with fair play, probity and excellence.
I thought of my father this week as the 'wise' Old Lady prepared for quantitative easing - which means printing money just like some Third World dictator might do when its economy is in freefall.
I thought of him, too, as the disgraced former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin continued stubbornly to cling to his £703,000-a-year pension, despite a national uproar from the public and politicians alike.
By the end of his career my father was very senior in banking. He had reached the top of the NatWest - which later became part of Sir Fred's RBS, a group that managed last year to lose a staggering £28 billion.
I like to think that the difference between him and today's banking 'titans' - the ones whose greed and short-termism helped bring the industry to its knees and sent it begging to us taxpayers - is that he strove to fulfil those principles of prudence and honesty that he believed so important in the City.
After the National Provincial, the bank he had joined as a teenage teaboy, merged with the Westminster creating the NatWest, he took voluntary early retirement.
Having seen in the merger, he became joint chief general manager and then refused a seat on the bank's board, saying he did not trust what banking had become.
Mergers and changes: Stanley Roberts started at the National Provincial which later merged with the Westminster to become NatWestThe merger in 1970 shocked banking circles at the time because the resulting conglomerate was so big. How prescient his concern now seems - just look at the size of RBS, which at its height had 40 million customers in 53 countries and an annual income of almost £30billion.
Even back in my father's days, long before your local High Street branch had become a trendy wine bar and when you still had a personal relationship with your local manager, he saw the changes waiting in the wings.
As far as he was concerned, things were already moving too swiftly in the job he loved and he could see nothing good on the horizon.
My dad, who had worked his way up through provincial branches, seemed to me at the times the epitome of the old-fashioned local bank manager, a dead ringer for Dad's Army's Captain Mainwaring.
By the end he was based in the Head Office of the National Provincial in the City of London, with little cause to meet the general public. One of his last jobs was to run the advance department - in other words he was in charge of loans, the area where it has all gone wrong today.
He suspected that his own bank's radical innovation in the early Sixties, the unsecured personal loan, would spiral out of control. He also deplored its other introduction - the now ubiquitous use of plastic which makes it so disastrously easy for individuals to overspend with minimum accountability. And the ivory-towered nature of banking at head office level may well have contributed to his decision to pack it all in.
Roberts did banking very differently to Sir Fred GoodwinHe would have been appalled to see today how impersonal the profession has become, from top to bottom. He would never have understood how call centres can substitute personal contact with bank managers.
So right now, he will be either be turning in his grave over the sorry fate of his beloved profession - or else gloating in the hereafter. My old dad, Stanley Roberts, was a great believer in comeuppance and he is probably gleefully rubbing his hands and saying: 'I told you so.'
Born at the beginning of the last century, he grew up in North Wales when there were few jobs at all, less still white-collar ones, and he thought himself lucky to be taken on, aged 15 in 1925, by one of the then 'Big Five' High Street banks.
In my childhood we knew their names like a litany: Barclays, Westminster, Martins, Lloyds and his, the National Provincial.
He started as a teaboy in one of their most far-flung branches in Blaenau Ffestiniog, Snowdonia. The bank gave him a job for life and he was overjoyed at such security - especially when, in short order, the world sunk into Depression followed by World War II.
He was promoted to Liverpool and then the bank brought him to London where, on one of his first days in the City, he had a defining experience.
Walking past the imposing building of the Worshipful Company of Plumbers, my poor homesick father decided this institution, one of the most ancient of the Livery Companies, was something he could legitimately join in order to feel at home.
He walked in and announced that he qualified for membership because his own father was a plumber in Llandudno Junction. The receptionist behind the desk blanched and asked him to leave immediately. Judging by the number of times he told that story, he never forgot the slight and made certain he would command respect from then on.
He rented a house in East Sheen, the London suburb where the bank's head office was relocated for the hostilities, and stayed there, confident just like Captain Mainwaring, that a bank employee was someone to be reckoned with. Just like Mainwaring, too, he even did a spell in the Home Guard.
He thought he had really arrived when he was given two tickets to watch the Queen's Coronation Parade from the bank's Trafalgar Square branch - yes, there was one there too, and if I remember right, today it is yet another restaurant.
He took me along for the occasion, desperate that I would grow to love the bank as he did and work there. I tried. One school holiday, I got a job in the postroom in head office, but it wasn't for me.
Best of all I think he loved being a Central London manager, as he was when he ran the Leicester Square branch, which is now - yes, you've guessed it - a restaurant.
The Old Lady: The Bank of England There, he was able to help the British film business, which was based in nearby Soho. Among the customers he looked after were Ealing Studios actor Mervyn Johns and his daughter Glynis. His dire warnings about the need for proper accounting must have driven them crazy - he insisted on personally making certain Glynis did not indulge in any of the spendthrift follies he readily associated with the showbiz lifestyle.
Another of his customers was the young dancer Gillian Lynne, who would later choreograph Andrew Lloyd Webber's hugely successful Cats. My father took her under his wing and she told me years later that he helped her considerably.
He prided himself on being able to tell from the moment anyone walked into his office whether they had talent and drive, combined with a sense of responsibility, and were therefore going to pay the bank back.
Those were the days when banks lent their own money and had to balance their books; when managers were chosen for their common sense and judge of character.
His faith in his judgment was not misplaced. The films he approved, including The Railway Children, did well. And no matter how distinguished he became in his later years, he never lost his disapproval of spendthrift behaviour, wherever he found it.
Every week, he would quote Charles Dickens's Mr Micawber - 'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery' - as he kept our pocket money at miserly levels in an attempt to encourage thriftiness.
But his sternest disapproval was for the late Earl Spencer, Princess Diana's father, who was one of his customers when, for a time, he ran the Northampton area branch of the bank. It was his job to ring up the Earl whenever necessary and advise him he had gone above his overdraft facility which, even then, was £1million.
Lavish lifestyle: Roberts was critical of the late Earl SpencerGiven Lord Spencer's lavish lifestyle, this happened more often than it was supposed to and my father - on first name terms because of the frequency of their communications - was maddened when 'Johnny' inevitably turned round and said: 'Oh that's all right, Stanley, I'll just sell another Rembrandt.'
To my father, who had no such extravagant birthright, this was flagrantly irresponsible behaviour.
During his 45-year career, few people other than landed aristocrats, their ancestral piles stuffed with valuable museum pieces, were able to command a sevenfigure loan facility. My dad burned with the injustice of this but could never have imagined the day when everyone would be allowed to exceed their spending limits.
Banking's first publicly visible thrust into modernity occurred just as my father retired.
The NatWest Tower, today still the highest building in the Square Mile, was at the planning stage when Dad retreated to his retirement in Surrey. On trips to London he watched fearfully as the symbolic skyscraper crept upwards, breaking all previous planning rules - a brash forebearer of things to come.
In retirement, he should have been enjoying the rewards of his hard work, consorting as he was with ministers from Harold Wilson's Labour government, dining at the Dorchester and living in the prime commuter belt. But he never lost the feeling that hard times were coming because he believed the modern world was on a collision course with reality.
Nor did he forgot his roots and the lessons they taught him.
My favourite memory of him is during the 1984 miners' strike. My super-successful father would drive to his posh Surrey golf course in his big shiny car and go straight to the 19th tee where, slamming a large whisky down on the bar, he would say to the shocked assembly of Tory voters who were his golf partners: 'Let's hear it for Arthur Scargill.'
His family had been miners, you see, and all he could see about the new order was a community losing jobs.
Later he held forth to everyone about the City's Big Bang (when Thatcher did away with trading and banking restrictions in 1986) and how it would change everyone's borrowing habits for the worse.
Soon everyone, whatever their prospects, was mortgaged up to the hilt and over the limit on their credit cards, not worrying because there was always a new lender to send you another facility. The entire economy was based on buying now and paying later.
As deregulation took over, together with screen-based trading, the old values and disciplines in which my father was rooted were banished. No longer did people actually have to have real assets to thrive. Banking had become as unrecognisable as the City itself.
My dad never lived to see the worst of it. He would have been appalled at the new breed of highly-geared gamblers who called themselves 'bankers' swinging around Central London in their red Ferraris and spending four-figure sums on meals, flaunting their designer clothes bought with staggering bonuses.
And they would have had nothing but contempt for a crusty old figure like my cautious father.
There were no bonuses for him during his working life, despite his great success. He had struggled to bring up his family when he was young. Even when he retired on a full final salary pension, he refused to spend his money because he was sure he was going to need it when the brave new world came to grief.
He predicted the financial services industry would end in tears, arguing they were 'a house of cards' rather than real product. He lamented the fact that experience was no longer considered a virtue and that youngsters were doing his beloved job and making a complete mess of it.
But the biggest insult of all, he told me sadly just before he died in 1993, was that in the 20 years of his retirement, the value of his property had increased so much that it had made more money than he had done during his entire hard-working life.
He thought it made a nonsense of his existence, by discrediting the true value of the work ethic. We rolled our eyes heavenwards at the time of course, but as I look around now, it is easy to think fondly of my dear old dad.
,
