Alastair Irvine

‘You need a better class of work, my boy.’ My GP father’s well-meaning but unhelpful reaction to my second redundancy, both of which occurred in 1989. I was barely 27; he had a job for life. Four short years but a historical era earlier, I had sallied forth to the London Stock Exchange in September 1985 as a graduate trainee with Laurie, Milbank & Co. Convinced of the old boy network, without malice my erstwhile lecturer John Hutton, now Lord Hutton and former Labour defence secretary, gently ribbed, ‘So Uncle Laurie came up trumps, then.’ There was no Uncle Laurie. The merger with Simon & Coates in October 1986 formed American bank Chase Manhattan’s new London-based securities business. My first year in the City was straight from The Pickwick Papers.

The loud, wheezy hoot of the pit horn used to signal the end of the shift. Blaring across the town, it blew the changes. We’d all hear it. My father, as his father before him, was a GP in Ashington, a large mining town in Northumberland. Ashington was the hub of a network of subsidiary collieries including Woodhorn (now a museum), Ellington and Lynemouth, which both appropriately featured as film locations for Billy Elliot. ‘The UK went bust in 1976 under chancellor Denis Healey and had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund. Do we have a debt crisis today under his namesake?’ Mining was in the local blood. To work ‘doon the pit’ was a proud profession and a natural family succession.