Obituary: Alfred George Campbell, banker

My father, who has died aged 98 following an operation to pin a broken hip, was born in Selkirk to a father who ran a dental practice and a French Catholic mother. They met at a dance in London and married in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

His grandfather was a journalist in Berwick, the proprietor of the local newspaper The Berwickshire Journal. One of his earliest memories was the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, when Paris celebrated.

He was educated as a boarder at John Watson’s School in Edinburgh (now the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art). It was a Spartan existence: “porridge every morning, mince and tatties often, sausages and cabbage, with few goodies”. The dormitory in which he slept is now a beautiful space showing contemporary art. From John Watson’s he went to Selkirk High School, coming out “Dux”, despite struggling in French.

He began a three-year apprenticeship in 1930 with the Selkirk branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, when his first year’s salary was £30. Following his 100 per cent pass in the practical banking exam he was summoned to the head office in Edinburgh, but always maintained his connections with Selkirk, singing in the Choral Society and administering its accounts.

By 1936 he was based in London as part of the bank’s inspection teams, and got engaged to Ina Bell, from Selkirk, who was working as a nurse at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

With the approach of war he decided not to be assigned to the infantry, but was enlisted in the Royal Artillery and became batman to Sir Basil Spence, for whom he had only good words. As a serving soldier his gunner’s pay was enhanced by a married allowance, and he duly married Ina in Edinburgh, around the time when he was transferred to the Royal Engineers for a period, before going back to the Royal Artillery, firing Swedish Bofors guns.

Within a couple of months of his arrival in Bombay, he had been promoted to Captain and crossed India twice, before moving again to protect the Imphal airfield in Burma, where the men were promptly cut off by the Japanese army, listening to night howls from the enemy, who never were able to take the airfield.

Not long after VJ Day he travelled to Tel Aviv in the bomb bay of a four-engined Stirling, then to Casablanca from where he was taken back to England in a Lancaster, arriving in a near-hurricane, and seeing liners at anchor near Southampton, unable to dock.

Reunited with Ina in Edinburgh after three years, he re-joined the Royal Bank, this time in the law department, by now on a salary of £250 per annum.

By 1952 he was a senior inspector, carrying out his final inspection at Bond Street with two assistants. Moving to the chief accountant’s department, he was responsible for the installation of 50 Burroughs ledger machines as part of the first bank mechanisation.

He also oversaw the destruction of old banknotes, a formidable process requiring up to 18 staff identifying notes and stacking them against numbers. The old notes were burnt under strict supervision in the bank’s own furnace, which began to breach the newly-introduced Clean Air Acts.

During one firing, pieces of burnt and blackened notes were being found all over central Edinburgh. He must have tidied up the process, however, and he was appointed chief accountant in 1954, and signed the £5 bank notes.

One of his preoccupations was to oversee the note issue. At the same time as suspect forged £5 notes were being identified in Glasgow, Blackpool and Edinburgh, a request was made by a Swiss bank and property dealer in Zurich for a new development in Switzerland, and the Bishopsgate office of Lloyds bank asked Alfred for approval.

He was suspicious, and asked for a “sample”, which was brought to Edinburgh on the overnight train by an official. They looked very good, but he was worried about such a large issue of new notes. This was confirmed when Alfred showed the sample to the managing director of the banks’ note printers. He quickly saw the notes were forgeries, using fluorescent white ink printed on the reverse and an ingenious purpose-made block.

He asked London to contact the police, to apprehend the “messengers” who had presented the notes to the bank in Switzerland. They were never caught, although the forgeries were destroyed before they could be laundered in the UK. A year or so later Interpol found the printing block in a German garage.

A new issue of the £5 note was introduced with advanced anti-forgery techniques.

In 1930 there were eight separate banks in Scotland; by the mid-1960s two had been taken over and several more were in takeover talks. It was an era when big was better and wastage was critical to profitability.

Alfred had frequent meetings with senior bankers from other banks, in a growing atmosphere of acquisition and merger. He attended meetings in a run up to the merger of National Commercial Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland, which was ratified in 1969, by which time Alfred had become assistant general manager and executive director.

There were many meetings to agree formal merger agreements and Acts of Parliament, but the newly-merged bank was by far and away the largest bank in Scotland. Alfred was appointed general manager of the newly-merged bank to face a future of rapid change and diversification in an electronic world.

He retired in 1972, noting that all he had to do was to live, and he and Ina were very good at this, taking up painting, undertaking the daily ritual of The Scotsman crossword and travelling around the world but always staying in touch with his family.

In his old age, his reaction to the banking crisis was to note that the problems were down to excessive greed, noting the difference between his silver retirement platter and the tens of millions being dispensed today.

ROBIN CAMPBELL