Dear old Coutts, the private bank used by the King, now requires clients to have £3 million in the kitty before they deign to allow you to open an account. The £3 million minimum deposit is the biggest single jump of the bank’s wealth test in its illustrious 333-year history, designed to attract ‘ultra-high-net-worth individuals’ apparently. Whoever they are, I am not one of them.
I had an account at Coutts opened for me by my mother when I was 15 at a small, rather cosy little branch it used to have on the corner of Sloane Street and Cadogan Square. As I went in and out, I got to know the cashiers who greeted me by name, which made me feel I’d really arrived, although where I wasn’t quite sure. I knew that it was a grand bank and felt rather privileged to have an account there, mainly because it seemed to impress people and make them think I had more money than I did.
The chequebooks were nice, too – different to the chequebooks of ordinary mortals, with a grander layout and slightly larger in size, as befitted the members of this snazzy club I’d joined without any effort at all on my part. It was the 1970s and lots of people I knew had an account at Coutts, the bankers of choice for the landed gentry and the aristocracy since the end of the seventeenth century; rather as Christie’s was the auctioneer of choice for the upper classes, not the rather down-market Sotheby’s. They had and still have a branch on Eton High Street for obvious reasons, although someone I knew whose father – a peer of the realm – opened an account for him there was reported to have been utterly astonished that he was required to deposit funds in it. The old aristo ways still prevailed back then: banks were for borrowing from, not for putting money into.
In those days having a Coutts chequebook meant I could cruise around Harrods – just up the road from my branch of Coutts – still in its glorious pre-Al-Fayed incarnation – writing cheques left, right, and centre. When I became overdrawn – which didn’t take long – I remember being called in for an avuncular chat with the kindly manager who offered me coffee and biscuits before gently taking me to task for my spendthrift ways, but he didn’t suggest I leave, far from it. I had a title which was enough for the management in those far-off days, and so I remained a customer.
I went on with my Coutts account until some point in the 1990s. For some reason I can no longer recall my account was now with the Lombard Street branch in the City. Lombard Street was a serious place, the ‘English Wall St’, where making money was all anyone thought about. This wasn’t cosy old Sloane St but an intimidatingly large branch where the old forelock tugging attitude was a thing of the past. I remember my fear and shame at being summoned by the manager there to discuss my increasing indebtedness. He had a lugubrious, unwelcoming manner and strange grey patent leather shoes, which I couldn’t help noticing. I was a single mother by this point with two small children and an uncertain income as a writer. He questioned me in great detail about my finances and as the interview wore on, it dawned on me that I was being sacked by Coutts for the great crime of not having enough money.
Nowadays Nigel Farage might call it being debanked, although as far as I know that expression was not yet in existence. Being overdrawn was no longer the slightly jokey business that it had been 20 years before; I was an undesirable customer who needed to be shucked off and sent elsewhere to a more down-market bank. Off I shuffled to the Royal Bank of Scotland, which, by some strange twist of fate, had bought Coutts in 2000. I was back within the fold, so-to-speak, but without the special privileges of former years.
When I became overdrawn, which didn’t take long, I remember being called in for an avuncular chat
But seeing Coutts touted as a status-symbol and a sign that you’ve arrived produced a certain pang for those long-lost days when you actually knew your bank manager and the cashiers called you by name. In the new electronic age, we’ve all become bank clerks, doing the job that people behind the tills used to do. It’s good in a way, slicker, quicker, all done in a nanosecond but a part of me still misses those older, slower days where your bank manager was quite likely to know other members of your family, not always a good thing, in my case, but you take the point. Whilst I appreciate being able to check my balance, move money around, and pay people without having to talk to a human, it’s utterly soulless and, given that technology works about 75 per cent of the time, not as reliable as we’re led to believe.
Unless I win the lottery, I’m very unlikely to be able to bank with Coutts again, but if I could I’d be back there like a shot.
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