Tim Heald

At the time of his death in 1972 my father worked for WD and HO Wills, the Bristol tobacco people. Wills were huge and rather enlightened employers and even now plenty of Bristolians remember the days when everyone either worked for the company or had a friend or relation employed there. Wills produced a cigarette called ‘The Bristol’ but were most famous for cheap Woodbines and Wills Whiffs — small cheroots sold in packets of five. For the first three quarters of the 20th century, the company seemed unassailable — and synonymous with its home city.

Budapest is the only city I know where Gresham’s Law takes pride of place. On the Pest side of the Danube opposite the Iron Bridge, in a niche on the front of what is now the Four Seasons Hotel, stands a statue of the propounder of ‘Bad Money Drives Out Good’. His presence is a reminder that this old Eastern European city was a hub of capitalism before it became the drab communist capital that it was throughout most of my life. The hotel used to be the European headquarters of the London-based Gresham Life Assurance Company.

The Luftwaffe blitzed Plymouth for two months in 1941 and destroyed 20,000 houses, 100 pubs, 42 churches, 24 schools, eight cinemas and six hotels. In a symbolic act of defiance many of the survivors formed up behind the lady mayoress and danced on the Hoe, where Sir Francis Drake had played his similarly symbolic game of bowls almost 400 years earlier. The Germans exultantly claimed that Plymouth could never be rebuilt. The city’s next response was to produce a blueprint for a New Plymouth — the Abercrombie Plan, Sir Patrick Abercrombie being the foremost town-planner of the day. Ironically, his plan’s partial implementation meant the destruction of more historic buildings than were lost to Hitler.