The Obedient Banker

The Obedient Banker is the true life story of a young man who in 1951 at the age of twenty joins the London City branch of a colonial bank (later to become HSBC) as a trainee officer and after five months finds himself thrust into a strange world in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which was far removed from the quiet West Sussex village where he was brought up and the elite public school in Oxford where he was educated. Many of Jerrys fellow trainee officers had similar backgrounds and upbringings which helped them to adapt to new lifestyles which required complete obedience to the Banks rules and regulations. Hence the title of the book One critic writes: It is almost impossible for the reader not to identify with the struggles and successes of a young aspiring banker whose initiatives are so often tempered by the restraints imposed upon him by a highly regulated colonial system which he feels obliged to adhere to. Far away from his homeland and confronted with unusual situations which demand solutions beyond his capabilities, the obedient banker treads a tightrope between convention and innovation that only commonsense and self restraint can resolve. From taipans to tigers, from Japanese geishas to Indian princesses, from charging picket lines to illicit distilling and from the squalor of Bombays slums to the affluence of Beverly Hills, Jerry has captured it all in his fascinating book. Apart from numerous amusing anecdotes and unusual banking procedures, of considerable historical interest are the illustrations and the detailed accounts of the 1955 bank strike in Japan, the Sino-Indian War in 1962 when Chinese troops crossed the McMahon line, the fall of Saigon to the VC in 1975, the atrocities in Chile in 1976 under their military dictator General Augusto Pinochet and the closure of the banks branches in Yemen in 1980.

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