The Man Who Tapped My Shoulder
The Man Who Tapped My Shoulder
This is the story of a quiet English banker in old Dubai, and how one gentle tap on a young clerk’s shoulder turned into a lifetime of learning and second chance
Adrian Turnbull’s story, as I remember it, begins in a hot, dusty Dubai that no longer exists, and with a feeling I did not yet have a name for — the feeling of being quietly, kindly noticed.
In those days, the bank still looked like something left behind by the Empire. At the top were the English officers with their villas, cars, maids and houseboys. Below them, in neat layers, came the Indians, Pakistanis, Yemenis and Sri Lankans: a few assistant officers, plenty of clerks, and at the bottom the peons, or farashes, in their uniforms, carrying files from one desk to another and calling everyone “Sir.” The flag had changed; the habits hadn’t.
Into this arrangement walked Adrian Turnbull.
He came from London, from Head Office and from a well‑grounded English family, chosen by the bank’s intern hunters and posted out to the desert as part of the machinery. In Dubai he shared a house with another young banker, Barclay Butler - flamboyant, determined to squeeze every drop of fun out of the place. Adrian was different: taller, curly‑haired, riding a Honda motor cycle when others might have chosen something more showy. He moved through the office with a quiet courtesy that seemed almost out of place among ledgers, telephones and hierarchy.
What struck us, the Asian staff, was simple. He treated everyone the same way. Assistant officers, clerks, peons — it made no difference. He spoke without raising his voice or lowering his dignity. In a building where respect usually travelled in only one direction, this small reversal felt, to us, like a fresh breeze sneaking in through a badly‑fitted window.
Somewhere in the late seventies — 1978, when my own life still felt as thin as the telex tape I handled all day — Adrian fell in love with a girl from Sri Lanka. Her name was Maryanne Cooper, Mij to a few of us. She worked at another bank nearby. In the afternoons, after she finished, she would walk over to ours and sit on a chair at the back of the open office, waiting patiently while Adrian finished his day. He was tall and fair; she was dark‑haired, with a hint of European blood in her features. Together they looked like a small, quiet rebellion against the old staff chart.
They decided to marry.
The wedding was at St Mary’s Church in Bur Dubai, a simple Catholic ceremony in a church that smelt of wax, incense and old hymns. I was there, rather stiff in my best clothes. Adrian wore a suit, Mij a white gown. When he went up to the lectern to read from Corinthians, he seemed to tower over it; for a moment, the tall Englishman and the Sri Lankan bride made that modest church feel like the centre of something larger than our little branch. Afterwards there was a small reception — some food, a few speeches, laughter that wasn’t quite sure how loud it was allowed to be. Adrian bought a Honda Civic for use by him and his wife. Then, as happens with bankers, they were posted away — Dhaka, I think — and Dubai closed over the absence.
I went back to my machine, a young telex operator sending other people’s words across oceans.
Some years later, on an ordinary morning in the early eighties, Adrian came back.
This time he returned as Gulf Mechanisation Officer, with Mij and a little boy, Richard — a small, cheerful copy of his father. The title sounded grand to us; anything with the word “Gulf” in it did. But the man himself had not changed. He still greeted peons by name, still held doors if someone’s arms were full of files, still asked how you were and waited long enough to hear more than “Fine, Sir.”
By then, I had begun to suspect that my own life should not end in the telex room. I took a sideways step into clerical work, giving up a small allowance to become a bank clerk. I worked in Savings, feeding passbooks into NCR machines and printing balances. On rotation I went to the front office, serving customers and clearing cheques — useful work, but the sort, as Adrian later said, that anyone could be trained to do.
One midday, while I was standing at the counter in my long sleeves, sorting cheques into a neat pile, I felt a light tap on my shoulder.
I turned. It was Adrian.
“Anyone can do what you are doing,” he said, not unkindly. “There is something more interesting for you, given your skills. Would you like to work in Gulf Mechanisation?”
I said yes before the words had finished settling in my mind.
The next day I moved upstairs. My first task was to type the Departmental Operating Instructions — the DOIs — for each department and adapt them to our realities in the UAE. They were carefully written documents from London, approved by serious men who worried that branches in far‑off ex‑colonies might be running their current accounts, savings and trade finance in ways that would alarm King William Street. Our job, Adrian’s and mine, was to turn those cautious sentences into something our people could actually follow.
Typing, for me, was a familiar comfort. At telecommunication school they had covered the keys with wooden guards and timed us; I had finished near the top of my group. So I sat there day after day, bringing London’s rules to life on Dubai paper, while Adrian sat beside me and quietly explained what sat behind each paragraph: why a control existed, how an error could creep in, what an auditor would look for. It was my first real education in banking, and it did not come from a classroom. It came from a patient man who never once made me feel foolish for asking basic questions.
When the DOIs were ready, we slipped them into binders and sent them to department heads. It was our first assignment from Head Office, and the start of many more. Soon there was talk of computerising the Gulf branches — the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, even Turkey. Dubai would host the system; distant branches would be linked by data lines that were still, at that time, more hope than certainty.
Account numbers had to be assigned, file types defined, systems tested. I found myself, a former telex operator, holding up the ledger and allocating numbers. I went through account opening mandates, gave each customer an identity in the new system, and wrote down codes I can still half‑recall. All the while, Adrian treated the whole thing not as a project he owned, but as a lesson we were doing together. He introduced me — through letters and, later, in person — to the technical staff in London: names like Pauline, John and Dave, who lived in a world of IBM systems and PAS (Provisional Accounting System) that I was only just learning to pronounce.
He sent me to IBM for training — a cold room, a serious instructor, and a keyboard full of new commands. In August that year, the Dubai branches cut over to the new system. There were late nights and long days, tense cutovers and small celebrations when things worked. On some of those nights, when the rest of the bank had gone dark and the only sound was the hum of machines, Adrian appeared with sandwiches or a takeaway meal, as if to say, without saying it, that we were in this together.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I was promoted to assistant officer.
It is easy, years later, to list the technical achievements: systems implemented, branches converted, countries supported. What I remember more clearly is the way Adrian taught. He never made a speech about my “potential.” He simply assumed I had it, and handed me work that required me to grow into it. He corrected quietly, praised sparingly but sincerely, and, most importantly, trusted me with tasks that looked, to my younger self, far too large.
He left again, as bankers do. Others came to join before he left — Paul Rivers with his coding brilliance, colleagues from London with new systems to install — but for me, the pattern had already been set. When, some years later, Adrian and Mij returned once more to the Gulf, this time with a little girl, Sara, and a grander‑sounding title about standardisation and optimisation, titled PIU for Profit Improvement Unit. I was getting ready to leave for Australia. Without my asking, he wrote a recommendation letter for any future employer in Sydney. “You are very brave to leave the UAE,” he told me. I carried that sentence, and the letter, with me across the ocean. It helped me into Standard Chartered Australia.
Years afterwards, in London on business from Sydney, I met Adrian again, this time in the corridors of New London Bridge House. He had moved on to other roles, other countries, other responsibilities. We were both older, a little greyer, but for a moment the years folded up, and I was again the young Sri Lankan who had once been tapped on the shoulder at a cheque counter.
Adrian eventually retired to Wiltshire after a spell at Deutsche Bank and Bank Mellon, where he managed outsourcing initiatives. He and Mij live a quieter life now. We still keep in touch, exchanging news in the unhurried way of people who know they owe each other something no calendar can measure.
There are people who arrive in your life noisily, with slogans and advice. And there are others who appear as Adrian did: quietly, doing their work well, offering you a place at their side, and leaving you, when they move on, a slightly better version of yourself.
In a bank that still smelt faintly of empire, Adrian behaved as if everyone belonged. In a room full of clerks, he looked at a young man with ink on his fingers and said, almost casually, “Anyone can do what you are doing. There is something more interesting for you.”
It was a small sentence. It was also, for me, the beginning of an education — and the point at which my life took a different road.
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