by Andrew Newman
Getting high
A
pologies to readers for the ‘high jinks’ title featured in
this month’s Market talk on page 4. (It’s not easy devising these headings, you know).
In this case, that headline was a derivation from ‘high’ and ‘junket’ which seemed to sum up the pleasures of looking down on parts of the City of London from a great height, while enjoying convivial company, but occasionally wandering over to the window and letting the imagination do the rest.
The magnificent greenhouse that tops the London Gherkin makes a fine venue for a rebrand celebration. And there far below, nestling in its shadow just across the road in Bury Street lies Holland House, formerly known as National Employers’ Mutual House. Its heritage-listed green and black marble perfectly mirrors the hue of its modern gigantic neighbour.
Standing on this spot for the first time, way back in 1961, found me full of all the youthful hopes and dreams at the prospect of an insurance career with NEM. This was the era when retirees took their pension from the same employer they started out with - the ‘job for life’ - and we new joiners naturally assumed we would be doing the
same nearly 50 years later - in 2010! The next century! At the time it simply didn’t seem possible... and of course it wasn’t.
In that era there were still adjacent parts of the City that had never been re-developed since the attention given to them by the Luftwaffe 20 years before. The memory of one such Sixties’ bombsite was sparked looking down from another building, this time from the 17th floor of the magnificent 5 Aldermanbury Square in this long since rebuilt area of London.
As a member of the annual influx of clerk fodder school leavers, attracted to plentiful jobs in the City, it was rare to wander any further eastward than Aldgate Pump, and never north beyond Liverpool Street station. The area surrounding what later became the Barbican was ‘no-go’ simply because there was hardly anything left standing.
One exception was the Cripplegate Theatre. The NEM had a thriving am-dram society led by Rex Rogers, who happened to be my first boss. He would create an annual production, and we would all troop down to the theatre to cheer on our colleagues who had been inveigled into treading the boards.
Some aspiring actors didn’t take much persuasion of course, and there were some great leading ladies who otherwise wasted their talents in the day job typing, or playing their comptometer machines with dazzling finger work. One of the male leads went on to greater things.
Prompted by that thought, I looked up former Cripplegate star Vass Anderson on the web. He doesn’t seem to have a site of his own, but has appeared in enough films and TV Frosts and Bills to have prospered outside the world of insurance, despite his FCII qualification. And with those ideas still lingering, that brings us to the recent Aldermanbury Declaration sponsored just across the way at CII HQ. The idea of getting more FCIIs into the boardroom has been tried before (that summary is a gross oversimplification I know, but it helps explain my drift). The fact is, just because someone has proved they are academically gifted, it doesn’t mean they can apply that knowledge in the real world. And that would explain why an actor, ‘resting’ between roles, found himself at a desk at the NEM on the section led by an ambitious, but as yet unqualified 19-year old wanting to make a career for
himself, not on the stage, but in his chosen role in the insurance industry.
●
stone’s throw from the Square of course lies Aldermanbury itself, long term headquarters of the CII. Amid the neighbouring architecture it looks quite cosy, especially in the sunshine with its stonework now scrubbed clean, and the surrounding foliage making it look very idyllic.
A
But that wasn’t always the case. Spared by the
aforementioned Luftwaffe in the 1940s, its immediate neighbours were not so lucky, and it stood alone for many years. Passers-by could sense the edifice was yearning for better days, but it wasn’t until 1983 when the film came out that we got an inkling that what Aldermanbury really wanted to do was to hoist anchor at the Guildhall, and set sail down London Wall to the rich pickings in the shipping lanes of Fenchurch and Leadenhall in search of fat, bloated merchant banks and conglomerates, exactly as depicted in the Terry Gilliam pirate spoof ‘The Crimson
Permanent Assurance’
All of which proves that there is more than one way of getting high, and letting the imagination go ‘on the road’.
APRIL 2010 insurancepeople 33
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