The Bank, the Scotsman, and the Brit with a Roaring Car

Looking back, I sometimes think my real education didn’t happen at school or even at university, but in a sun-baked Dubai branch of a British bank, where the air smelled of toner ink, cigarette smoke, and ambition. It was the 1970s to early 80s when telex machines rattled like nervous typewriters and telegraphic transfers could make or break a day, a deal, or a career. Into this world I arrived: a young clerk at the bottom of the hierarchy, armed with more enthusiasm than experience, and just enough innocence to get into interesting kinds of trouble. What I didn’t know then was that my tutors would not be trainers or manuals, but a colourful procession of young lads, British managers: a Scotsman whose accent defeated my ears, a carefree lad with a roaring car and a crumpled shirt, athletes, adventurers, and gentlemen with impeccable manners and questionable driving habits. Together, they turned an ordinary bank into a stage on which loyalty, madness, kindness, and quiet rebellion played out in daily scenes. This is the story of some of those men — and the young clerk who somehow kept up with them.

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When I first joined the bank, my manager was Colin Beatie — a proper Scotsman whose accent could’ve puzzled even another Scotsman. Every conversation felt like decoding a bagpipe recital. Still, Colin was a good man — precise to the last decimal, the kind who’d rather misplace his shoes than a ledger entry. It didn’t surprise me later to hear he’d crossed into politics and joined the Scottish Parliament. The man had governance in his bloodstream — along with, I suspect, a fair measure of single malt.

Then there was my top manager, Barclay Butler — “top” not in the managerial sense, but because gravity never quite managed to keep him down. He’d glide into the office wearing what could only be described as last night’s enthusiasm — shirt crumpled, tie forgotten, and the faint perfume of Dubai’s jazz bars still hanging about him.

His father, a bank general manager in Oman, funded these escapades with the efficiency of a central bank. Whenever Barclay’s wallet ran dry — which happened every other Thursday — a telex would go winging off to Muscat. By Saturday morning, voilà: a telegraphic transfer in dirhams would materialise like a royal decree. It was banking as performance art, and Barclay was both star and beneficiary.

We were roughly the same age, and in that strange way of fate, he was both my boss and my mate. He had a sports car that roared down Dubai’s streets like a dragon with indigestion, and a grin that could make the auditors nervous. Technically, he was “Mr. Butler,” the covenanted officer responsible for authenticating international transactions using secret test codes. In reality, he was Mr. Butler to everyone — and to me, simply “Barclay”, a partner in youthful conspiracy.

One day, perhaps in a fit of misplaced confidence or mild hangover, he handed me all the bank’s test keys — locked in a cupboard that became my domain. Now, these were no ordinary keys. In the 1970s banking world, test keys were sacred; they authenticated payments between our 160 global branches and could rearrange fortunes if misused. Only a covenanted officer was supposed to touch them. Not even an assistant officer who were plenty. I was a mere clerk — the bottom rung of the hierarchy — yet there I was, sitting on the bank’s most dangerous secret, feeling simultaneously important and terrified.

Eventually, David Gardiner, the assistant accountant, began to suspect that Barclay was far too relaxed for a man running coded financial transmissions. He insisted that Barclay sign every message himself. telexes zipped across the globe — all authenticated by me, with the reverence of a calligrapher and the thrill of a pirate.

It was madness, of course. But it was our madness — a small rebellion against the stiff collars and strict codes of the British banking world. Barclay trusted me absolutely, and I, for my part, learned that reckless trust can sometimes be the sweetest form of loyalty.

After Colin Beatie and Barclay Butler, the parade of British managers in my young banking life continued like an oddly curated casting call. Each one brought a different flavour to the branch — some comic, some heroic, and some simply unforgettable.

One of the most tender memories I have of Barclay is not of his roaring car or late nights, but of the day I broke down in the telex room. David Gardiner had sharply admonished me for rummaging through his in-tray in search of delayed telexes, and, being the young lad I was, my only defence mechanism was to burst into tears. It was not dignified. It was not manly. It was, however, very human. Barclay walked in, took out his handkerchief — a proper cloth one, not the disposable sort — and gently comforted me. That small act of kindness has stayed with me far longer than any telegraphic transfer. For all his chaos and crumpled shirts, Barclay was, at heart, a good lad who genuinely cared.

After Barclay came Mark Harrison, the branch’s resident poster boy for clean living. He was super-fit, already married, and treated his young wife as if she were visiting royalty on a state tour. He spoke to her in such a soft, respectful tone that I, standing nearby with my bachelor’s bravado, felt immediately underqualified in the department of romance. From Mark, I learned that “being a man” could include speaking gently and opening doors — not just paying bills and pretending not to cry in telex rooms.

Mark and I also shared a private amusement in the way our then manager insisted on coding customer names. What started as careful, disciplined work soon turned into a quiet competition between us. I threw myself into it with youthful zeal and, before long, I could code outgoing messages and decipher incoming ones at a speed that secretly delighted me. Occasionally, the manager would look at me with a puzzled frown, wondering how the clerk from nowhere had become so fast, while Mark stood by looking stern and innocent.

Then came Roger Howell, who treated the bank as a minor inconvenience between his sporting pursuits. He played anything involving a ball, a bat, or a racquet, and on weekends he graduated to more adventurous activities: wadi bashing in the desert in a 4WD or taking the bank’s boat out into the Arabian Sea. Yes, the bank had a Land Rover and a boat, as if it couldn’t decide whether it was a financial institution or a travel agency for British expatriates. The boat was anchored off Jumeirah Beach, ready for the expats to pretend they were rugged explorers rather than men who signed loan documents for a living.

One Thursday, Roger went out to sea after work — as you do — and failed to return. By Friday, his absence was no longer amusing. Search parties were sent out, Dubai Police patrol boats were involved, and the mood in the branch turned from banter to dread. After 24 hours, many assumed the worst. Then came the news: Roger had been found alive. His boat had capsized in the high seas, and he had kept himself going by pedalling his legs in the water, like a swimmer who refused to admit defeat. It was a remarkable feat of stubbornness and survival. By Sunday, he was back at his desk, as if popping out to nearly drown was just another weekend hobby.

Colin Geddes managed me briefly. Curly hair, slight build, the kind of man you’d overlook in a crowded room. He didn’t last long in my story – a few months, perhaps. The length of a long lunch.

We met again somewhere in North Asia. Tokyo or Seoul, around 1997. He was with Standard Chartered by then, running things up there. I was passing through. The bank’s orbit had a way of doing that – throwing familiar faces at you in unlikely cities, as if to remind you that the world was smaller than you thought.

What I remember most is the car. A Mazda RX7. He drove it off a cliff one Friday. In Dubai, Friday was the weekend, which perhaps explains something.

Then there was Rod Sampson, a tall man who announced his arrival not with a handshake but with a car purchase. He bought a red Mazda RX-7 outright — a proper racing machine — and with that one act secured his status as the branch’s unofficial motoring deity. For those of us still saving for our next taxi fare, Rod’s RX-7 was both an object of admiration and a reminder that the managerial pay scale lived on a different planet.

Rod was succeeded by Allister Bulloch, a cool, unflappable sort who solved the problem of transport not by driving a taxi, but by hiring one full-time. After work, he would wave goodbye to the others, then gesture me into “his” cab for a lift home, our manager-employee relationship briefly transforming into passenger and patron. There was something wonderfully absurd about sitting in the back seat of a taxi your boss had on hire, wondering whether to offer the driver a tip or just call out, “Same time tomorrow, Allister?”

It still amuses me that I was on a first-name basis with most of these men — Allister, Rod, Colin, Mark, Roger of Steve Winwood fame and of course, Barclay. Only Colin Beatie and Roger Howell remained more formally addressed, perhaps too British in the old-school sense to be anything other than “Mr. Beatie” and “Mr. Howell.” Titles were important in that world, but friendships, it turned out, cared very little for hierarchy.

My final manager in that chapter was Roger Hartley, the most impeccably decent Englishman you could hope to meet. He loved Steve Winwood’s music, which immediately made him seem modern and soulful in a way the older guard never quite managed. He was decent in the small things as well as the big ones — the sort of man whose kindness was evident in how he spoke to the tea boy as much as to the senior manager. It came as no surprise when Jayne Smithson, an American beauty who worked in the next cabin as staff controller, fell in love with him and married him. Decency, it seems, still had its rewards.

Today, it warms me to know that I am still in touch with some of these characters from my banking youth: Mark Harrison in the UK, Rod Sampson and Colin Geddes on LinkedIn, and Roger Hartley in California. The hierarchy is gone, the titles have faded, but the memories — and the friendships — have remained curiously intact.

In the early eighties, I drifted — almost by accident — into what was then called technology, though the word had not yet acquired its present confidence. It was housed in something rather grandly named the Gulf Mechanisation Office, where we spoke, with a seriousness that now feels distant, of bringing computers into the bank.

“Gulf Mechanisation Office” — the name lingered with an old-world authority, faintly colonial, faintly industrial. It belonged to a time when mechanisation itself was still a promise, not yet a memory, and the future arrived not as software, but as machines one could almost hear breathing.