Confessions of an International Banker

By Sean Hickey

From the City of London to the deserts of Arabia, the former Soviet states, and sub-Saharan Africa, this book traces the life and career of a man who has been a banker in some remarkably challenging environments over a period of half a century.
The author has counted bales of cotton in Yemen, dodged Israeli bombs in Lebanon, financed exports from Romania in the days of Ceausescu, been a banker to a member of a ruling family in the Gulf, conducted business in the sauna of a bank in Kazakhstan, and met Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
In his spare time, he has taken an active part in amateur theater groups in the countries in which he has lived, served as a member of committees administering cemeteries, and been a warden appointed by the British Embassy to assist their citizens in times of trouble.
As well as being an engrossing story of banking in many varied countries, the book includes chapters about the background to the problems of some of the places in which he has worked that show a clear understanding of the history and politics involved.
Having lived in the Middle East for much of his life, he comments on the Arab Spring, and his long and diverse banking career has enabled him to write incisively on events in the industry in recent years. He draws conclusions on both of these momentous stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Mar 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466973800

Sean Hickey

Born in a small north Norfolk village during World War II, Sean Hickey has since lived and worked in countries as diverse as Canada, Yemen, Cyprus, and Tanzania. His banking career, with both major international institutions and small privately owned banks, started with handwritten ledgers and ended using a state-of-the-art online real-time computer system. After a career spanning fifty years, he has retired to Lebanon but still maintains contacts with his north Norfolk roots.

Book preview

CONFESSIONS

OF AN

INTERNATIONAL

BANKER

Sean Hickey

Order this book online at www.trafford.com

or email [e-mail]

Most Trafford titles are also available at major online book retailers.

© Copyright 2013 Sean Hickey.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Front cover (top left to bottom right)

Pigeon’s Rock, Beirut, 1971

Dubai Creek, 1980

Toronto City Hall, 1965

Bab al Yemen, Sana’a, Yemen Arab Republic, 1972

BBME, London head office, 1970 (HSBC Bank Plc)

FBME Nicosia office 1964 (FBME Bank Ltd)

Cessna 206 after the crash, Makete, Tanzania 2009 (Mark Taylor)

An oil rig in the Arabian Gulf

Camels in the Abu Dhabi desert.

ISBN: 978-1-4669-7379-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-7378-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-7380-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012924039

61_a_efrhdfgj.ai

www.trafford.com

North America & international

toll-free: 1 888 232 4444 (USA & Canada)

phone: [phone].png fax: [phone]

Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1      Early Life and School Days

Chapter 2      First Jobs

Chapter 3      Canada

Chapter 4      The Middle East Problem

Chapter 5      Bahrain

Chapter 6      A Brief History of Lebanon

Chapter 7      Lebanon First Time Around

Chapter 8      Yemen Arab Republic

Chapter 9      Lebanon Again and MECAS

Chapter 10      United Arab Emirates

Chapter 11      The Cyprus Problem

Chapter 12      Cyprus

Chapter 13      Lebanon Once More and I Become a Consultant in Tanzania

Chapter 14      The 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon

Chapter 15      Return to Lebanon and Tanzania

Chapter 16      Return to My Roots in Interesting Times

Endnotes

To Maarouf

Foreword

When I started to think about writing this autobiography, I realised that I was in a similar situation to the late Duchess of Windsor when she decided to write hers, The Heart Has Its Reasons, in the early 1950s. Her husband, the former King Edward VIII, told her that her task would be difficult because she was undocumented, having never kept significant written records of her life.¹ I was in much the same boat, having never kept a diary to record anything more than business and social appointments and those have long ago been lost or destroyed. As I began to dig out as many such old records, souvenirs and photographs as I could locate, I realised that I had more to work from than I had originally thought. However, much of that which is related here relies on memory—I am said by many to have an excellent one—sometimes jogged by family, friends and former colleagues and assisted by limited availability of written records, souvenirs and photographs; the use of the Internet to do some research and to verify facts, figures and dates has been indispensable.

In particular, my thanks are due to a number of people who have read either all of various drafts or sections covering places or subjects with which they are familiar and provided valuable comments, suggestions and assistance, or provided photographs. These include Jila Alikhani, George Christophorou, Peter Clark, Alexander Cooley, Curt Dalton (Dayton History), Josephine Haining (HSBC Bank Plc, Group Archives), Maarouf Joudi, Acis Montanios, Leslie McLoughlin, Duncan Revie, Ayoub-Farid Saab, Fadi Saab, Nigel Spinks, Anne Spruin (TD Bank Group Archives), Brenda and Peter Stibbons, Keith Sutton, Mark Taylor, Joyce Willett and Malcolm Williams.

Throughout the book, there are frequent transliterations of Arabic and Greek words, names and places; in the case of Arabic, I have generally used commonly accepted English spellings aided, of course, by my knowledge of the language obtained at MECAS. My knowledge of Greek is very limited. In this case, relating mainly to places in Cyprus, I have used what I consider to be traditional English spellings rather than those dictated by ISO 843, which, since 1997 have generally been adopted. For example, I use Larnaca, rather than Larnaka and Ayios rather than Agios.

References to that body of water between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula are to the Arabian Gulf or sometimes simply Gulf. I was taught at school that it was called the Persian Gulf, but before going to Bahrain in 1969, I was told to ensure that all mail was addressed to Bahrain, Arabian Gulf as otherwise it was unlikely to be delivered.

In writing this book, I have covered events over a period of almost seventy years. Much of my life and work has been in or involved with the Middle East. While I do not intend the book to be a history of the period or the region or a serious commentary on events current at the times concerned, I have included some background history of circumstances prevailing and events occurring in various places where I have lived and worked in order to put my small role and experiences in context.

December 2012

Chapter 1

Early Life and School Days

My father, Joseph, was born in Youghal, County Cork, in what is now the Republic of Ireland, in 1912, less than a month before the prime minister of the United Kingdom Herbert Asquith introduced the Irish Home Rule Bill in the British House of Commons. Although the House of Commons passed that bill in 1913, the House of Lords rejected it. Parliament passed a Home Rule Act (which excluded six of the counties that formed Ulster) in 1914 but suspended its implementation for the duration of World War I.

Subsequent events changed the situation, and eventually, Ireland was partitioned in 1921, and southern Ireland—the Irish Free State—was granted dominion status in 1922. During my father’s childhood, Ireland was passing through troubled times. He often related the story of his encounter with one of the Irish revolutionary heroes Michael Collins. On August 21, 1922, Collins visited Mallow in County Cork to inspect soldiers stationed there. He spotted my father, then aged about ten years, watching the proceedings from his home opposite the barracks. He went over to him, tussled his hair, and asked his name.

The next day, Irish Republican Army (IRA) fighters who were opposed to the terms of the controversial agreement with the British government that Collins had signed in December 1921, which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State, killed him in a gun battle while he was on his way from Mallow to Cork.

002_b_efrhdfgj.jpg

The author’s paternal grandparents, Daniel

and Anne Hickey, c 1908

The wedding of the author’s maternal

grandparents, Ben and Florence Mabel Leggett

(née Harrison), 1916

002_a_efrhdfgj.jpg

My father was the second of three children born to Daniel and Anne Hickey; his older brother, Gerard, had been born three years before and his sister, Mary, was born in 1918. My grandfather died from tuberculosis in 1918, just before Mary was born, when my father was about six years old. My father was sent to stay with his maternal grandmother and two maiden aunts in Mallow, about thirty miles (48 km) from Youghal, during his father’s illness and he was to continue to live with them throughout his remaining childhood. His first job was with MacLysaght’s Nurseries, near Mallow, where he gained a good grounding in horticulture. In later life, this enabled him to give advice to others on how to prune roses or cultivate geraniums, but I do not recall him putting his advice into practice himself; my mother had the green fingers in the family, and I have usually followed my father’s example of limiting my involvement in gardening to the giving of advice. In the 1930s, like so many Irishmen before and since, my father moved to London; in 1936, through a man originally from Mallow who was a manager at Harrods, he found employment with this famous shop in Knightsbridge and chanced to take lodgings in Brentford.

Meanwhile my mother, Beryl, an only child, had been born in Norwich, Norfolk, in 1920. Both of her parents, Ben and Mabel Leggett, had been born in north Norfolk; my grandfather in Aylmerton, and my grandmother in East Runton. She moved with her parents to Chiswick, not far from Brentford, in the 1930s and after leaving school became an apprentice hairdresser.

One evening, sometime in 1939, both my father and mother happened to be in the same pub in Twickenham; my father, on seeing my mother, declared to the friend who was with him that she was the girl he intended to marry. After the outbreak of World War II, my father, like so many Irishmen, enlisted in the British Army; my mother joined the WAAFs, where she continued as a hairdresser at an RAF camp in Gloucestershire. In the meantime, my mother’s parents moved from Chiswick to Mundesley in Norfolk.

My father’s expressed intention was realised when my parents eventually married at the Church of the Sacred Heart in North Walsham, Norfolk, on October 22, 1940. Immediately after the wedding, my father left from Norwich railway station to Liverpool and then embarked on a troop ship bound for Mombasa, where he was attached to the King’s African Rifles in the intelligence corps. He subsequently took part in the liberation of Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then called) from the Italians and was present for the restoration of the Emperor Haile Selassie on May 5, 1941, being involved in the security arrangements for the emperor. In recognition of his work, the emperor presented him with a gold ring embossed with the Lion of Judah, the imperial symbol, which I now wear.

In 1942, my father developed a problem with his left ear that later turned out to be mastoiditis. He was shipped back from Abyssinia to Nairobi in Kenya and then to a hospital in Glasgow where he underwent what was to be the first of several operations in the course of his life which left him totally deaf in that ear. Subsequently, he was invalided out of the army. After my mother became pregnant, they settled in the quiet north Norfolk village of West Runton, where my father established an estate agency. Later he discontinued this business and joined a firm of builders and contractors in Cromer in a temporary job as an estimator. He remained with them until his retirement at the age of sixty-five in 1977, a temporary job that lasted over thirty years.

I was born on November 8, 1943, when World War II was in its fourth year. The year had begun with the Casablanca Conference in January, at which the president of the United States Franklin D Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill met to discuss the future conduct of the war. In November, Roosevelt, Churchill and USSR leader Joseph Stalin met in Tehran to discuss war strategy and agreed on plans for the invasion of Europe, which was to start in the following year. In December, Dwight Eisenhower was appointed supreme Allied commander in Europe to lead that invasion. An event that year, which was to influence my future life, the independence of Lebanon from France, took place on November 22.

My birth took place at a house called Innisfree in West Runton, the first of several homes in which the family lived in the north Norfolk area during my childhood. As was common at the time, I was born at home, with the district nurse in attendance.

We later moved to nearby Cromer where my father bought a house at 17 Prince of Wales Road. This was a three-story end-of-terrace property very close to the town centre. My first recollections of early life there include travelling by bus from Cromer to visit my maternal grandmother in West Runton, a journey of about two miles. The memory probably dates from the early postwar years, as I clearly remember that the buses were still painted in wartime grey rather than red, which later became commonplace for the Eastern Counties Omnibus Company’s vehicles. On these journeys, which often involved an overnight stay, I usually carried a small suitcase with me containing the necessities for my visit. Visits to stay with my grandmother continued for much of my childhood, and as I grew older, I was allowed to participate in her Saturday evening card sessions; these were regular gatherings with a few of her friends to play such games as Newmarket and Rummy with stakes of a few pennies on the outcome. I kept a jam jar at her house in which my winnings accumulated until I was allowed to spend them. On every visit to my grandparents, I could also expect to receive money from my grandfather and his mother, my great-grandmother, who lived with them—sixpence from each to begin with, later increasing to one shilling from each (five pence today). This supplemented my pocket money considerably.

Another early memory is of the coldest winter on record in 1946-1947. Very low temperatures combined with heavy snowfall, which blocked roads and railways. The weather disrupted delivery of many items, including coal to power stations, which resulted in electricity cuts. Rationing of many items was still in force and was to remain for some items until 1954. Life was still difficult in these early postwar years, and this development lowered public morale even more. When the thaw came in late March, widespread flooding resulted, adding further to the misery of those affected.

I do not remember suffering from the continuing rationing of many items during my childhood, but I do recall the availability of a rather unpleasant form of concentrated orange juice supplied by the government for children only, which I was required to drink because it was good for me. The availability of only a limited amount of rationed petrol for private motoring soon after the end of the war was of little significance, as my father did not own a car in those days.

The author (left) and Lesley Kirby

(now Park), Cromer beach, 1944

005_a_efrhdfgj.jpg

Throughout my childhood many summer days were spent on the beaches of north Norfolk, often in the company of family friends. Notwithstanding what I now consider to be unacceptably low temperatures, I and my friends played happily in the sand and the sea. One of these friends, Lesley Park (née Kirby) now has the dubious distinction of being my oldest friend; we were neighbours when she was born, just a month after me, and we have kept in touch ever since.

As my mother and father had married in England early in the war, when travel was difficult, if not impossible, none of my father’s family from Ireland had been able to attend nor had any of them met my mother. In the summer of 1947, my parents decided that a visit to Ireland to introduce my mother and me to our relatives should take place. While my memories of this trip, at the age of about four years, are limited, I can recall one or two events, and others are fresher in my memory as my father often related them in later years.

We travelled by train from Cromer to London Liverpool Street station and then from Euston to Holyhead to catch the night boat to Dún Laoghaire, just south of Dublin. We first visited my uncle Gerard and aunt Christine and their children—my cousins Frank and Mary—in Dublin. Then we again travelled on by train to Mallow, County Cork, where we stayed with my father’s two maiden aunts and their brother, his uncle, by whom he had been brought up following the death of my grandfather. My great-grandmother, who had ruled the household during my father’s childhood, had died by then.

My great-aunts kept a small general shop that was attached to the house in which they all lived. In the shop, they sold cigarettes and tobacco, sweets, newspapers and similar items; I was thoroughly spoilt by all of them who vied to supply me with sweet treats from the shop. The house had a feature, which I had never encountered before, a private chapel, which was used for prayer twice a day.

Ever since my parents met, my father had told my mother about the scenic beauty of Ireland and in particular, Killarney and its surrounding lakes, about forty miles (65 km) from Mallow. During our visit, we went to Killarney where we stayed at the Great Southern Hotel. This large hotel, now renamed the Malton, had been built by the Great Southern and Western Railway Company in 1854, when the first railway line to the town was opened and was among the first of the Victorian era railway hotels owned by railway companies and built around that time, wherever railway lines were laid in Britain and Ireland. While staying at the hotel, I became ill and was left in the care of the hotel porter while my parents visited the scenic attractions in the national park. This included taking the obligatory ride in a jaunting car, a horse-drawn carriage famous in the Killarney valley for over two hundred years. It was only after this visit that my father confessed to my mother that in spite of his always singing the praises of the area and having lived so close to it during his childhood, he had never before visited it.

In 1947, with wartime rationing still in place in England, many things were difficult or impossible to obtain but could be found in Ireland. The managing director of the firm for which my father worked had asked him to purchase material for a suit, and this was duly done. It was placed in the bottom of a suitcase, and above it were packed items of mine. When we reached the customs on returning to Holyhead, in the days before red, green and blue channels, the customs officer asked to open the suitcase. When this was done, he started to remove my things, and my reaction was to rush to him and tell him that he could not take my clothes. My innocent intervention distracted him from further investigation of the contents of the suitcase, and the material was eventually made into a new suit for the managing director.

The author (centre) with parents, Joe

and Beryl and sister, Brenda, 1949

007_a_efrhdfgj.jpg

In May 1949, I was admitted to the local hospital in Cromer with an undiagnosed illness. I was told that I was seriously ill and at one time not expected to live. Eventually my appendix was removed, and I recovered; I now have an abnormally large scar on my abdomen as evidence of the operation, which invites enquiry every time a doctor sees it. What was wrong remains a mystery to me and, I have always suspected, to the doctor who treated me. At the time, the children’s ward in the hospital was closed for renovations, so I was accommodated in the men’s ward, where, when I recovered enough, both the nursing staff and patients spoilt me. I particularly remember the ward sister, Sister Doughty, who was known to make a special trip on her bicycle to a nearby shop to buy ice cream for me.

About a month after my illness, my sister Brenda was born, also in West Runton at the home of our grandparents. Again, as was common in those days, my mother was attended by the district nurse for the delivery. The six-year difference in our ages did not contribute to an easy relationship during our childhood. We were always arguing and quarrelling, but the passage of time seems to have narrowed the gap and we never seem to disagree now. Age must have mellowed both of us!

Another early memory is what may well have been my first visit to the cinema to see the 1950 Walt Disney production of Treasure Island, starring Bobby Driscoll as Jim Hawkins and Robert Newton as Long John Silver. I was taken, as a special treat, by an elderly lady lodger who was occupying the front bedroom at 17 Prince of Wales Road at the time. Walt Disney Productions was to play another part in my life some twenty years later.

It must have been around this time that I started to spend some of my Saturday mornings at Norman Troller’s roller skating rink in Cromer. It was one of the few places in the town where children could gather on Saturday morning to pass a few hours with their friends. Sadly, the rink has long since disappeared, and the site is now a car park for a supermarket.

My father contracted poliomyelitis in 1951, a disease, which, after the availability of a vaccine later in the 1950s, has all but been eradicated in many countries, including England. He was hospitalised in an isolation ward in the West Norwich Hospital from where, he was later to recount, he had a good view of one of the Norwich cemeteries. There was great concern that my sister and I could have been infected by him, which lasted for several weeks until the possible incubation period expired. Luckily we did not contract the disease, and my father recovered, the only after-effect, which remained with him for the rest of his life, being a slight weakness in his left arm.

Shortly after this illness, the family moved across Prince of Wales Road to a flat in a building called Clevedon House, owned by the firm for which my father worked. This was an interim move, pending locating a country cottage to buy in the area. In 1952, the country cottage was identified at 2 Goose Lane, Alby, about six miles (10 km) from Cromer. It was the centre one in a row of three. My father bought this cottage together with an adjoining one, which was rented to a very elderly couple. His intention was that when the aged occupants died, he would combine the two properties and that this would make a very comfortable home. In the meantime, we had to live in the centre cottage, consisting of a sitting room and kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs. The lavatory was a chemical one at the end of the garden, and we took our weekly bath in a portable tin one in the kitchen, filled with water heated in a gas boiler. This was quite common at the time, when a large proportion of homes in Britain lacked bathrooms and indoor lavatories.

Throughout my childhood, there was a constant presence of American servicemen in north Norfolk and other parts of Britain. There was a large US Air Force base at Sculthorpe, about twenty-five miles (40 km) from Cromer, which had been an RAF airfield during World War II and was then used by the Americans from the time of the Berlin Airlift in 1949 until 1962. Since there were insufficient married quarters on the base, many families lived in rented accommodation in the area, including Cromer and Sheringham. At times, many became our neighbours and friends, some of whom I have maintained contact with since those days. Often these servicemen would bring their American cars with them when posted to England, albeit they were usually large and very unsuited to the country lanes of Norfolk.

I can recall being fascinated and envious of these examples of American wealth and sophistication at a time when car production in England was still recovering from the war years, and car ownership was far from common. Indeed, the first family car that my father bought was a prewar Standard 8, manufactured in 1936, which he acquired in the mid-1950s; I think that it cost £30.00! It was later replaced with a postwar car, a 1948 Morris Eight in about 1958 and that in 1960, by a 1953 Vauxhall Velox, the car in which I eventually learned to drive, of which more later.

It may have been the presence of so many American servicemen that caused me to develop a desire for all things American, although this urge has receded significantly, as I have aged and as I have become more and more disillusioned with the foreign policy of the United States, especially in the Middle East. I recall an incident when I was around nine years old when I saw a plastic model of an American army truck with an anti-aircraft gun mounted on it, in Rex Brown’s toy shop near our home in Cromer. I pestered my father for days until I persuaded him to buy it for me; I believe that the cost was two shillings and six pence—12.5p today. My mother did not approve.

The author’s parents, Beryl and Joe Hickey, Coronation Day, June 2, 1953

010_a_efrhdfgj.JPG

The winter of 1953 was a very severe one. In January of that year, widespread flooding affected the southeast coast of England and much of the Netherlands, caused by the coincidence of exceptionally high tides and a strong north wind, causing a tidal surge during the night of January 31-February 1. My father was one of the many volunteers who turned out that night to fill sandbags in an attempt to stem the flow of seawater and render assistance. Norfolk coastal areas suffered severely. Flood defences were broken by the force of the storm, and floodwaters swept up to two miles inland, inundating low-lying areas of the Norfolk coast. Cromer pier suffered severe damage that made it unsafe to use for some time. In all, 307 people were killed, and 24,000 homes were damaged along the Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent coasts.

On June 2, 1953, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took place. It was often said to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be able to see a monarch crowned in England, and, indeed, such an event has not yet occurred again in my lifetime. As I finalise this book, Her Majesty and her subjects are celebrating her Diamond Jubilee. This is an event that has occurred only once before in English history.

At the time of the coronation, television was beginning to play a part in people’s lives, although at the time only in black and white on twelve- or fourteen-inch screens and with only one channel, the BBC. The family was invited to visit American friends, who had previously been based at Sculthorpe and lived in Sheringham, and who then lived near Lincoln, for a few days at the time of the coronation and to watch the event on their television. Sales of televisions prior to the coronation were as spectacular as the event itself, and this can be said to have marked the start of the age of television in Britain; it was not long afterwards that my family acquired its first. The fourteen-inch screen Ferguson set was obtained from Radio Rentals. This company had originally been established in 1932 to provide radio sets on a monthly rental basis. Many people found this more affordable, and the system also provided the security that if the set broke down, a replacement would be provided at no extra cost. It was also possible to upgrade to a better model if such became available. The system was extended to include television sets after World War II. Among the popular programmes for children at the time we got our first television were Andy Pandy, Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men, Muffin the Mule and Crackerjack, a programme originally hosted by Eamonn Andrews, which ran from 1955 to 1984. Children’s programmes were broadcast from five to six each afternoon, after which transmission ceased for one hour, during which time mothers were supposed to put their children to bed before the evening programmes began. Like thousands of others of my peers, I sat with my eyes glued to the small screen for the hour and resisted all attempts to get me to bed afterwards.

It is interesting to compare the television coverage of the 1953 coronation with that of the Diamond Jubilee Pageant in 2012. A major difference, of course, was the quality of the picture and the fact that the jubilee coverage was in colour rather than black-and-white. In 1953, the commentary to the television coverage was provided by Richard Dimbleby, a veteran journalist who covered many state events in his career and whose hushed tones, sometimes described as pompous, became his trademark. Dimbleby paid meticulous attention to accuracy, carrying out most of the research himself.² This cannot be said of the several, much more casual journalists who covered the Diamond Jubilee pageant in 2012. The presenters complained that they had not been sufficiently briefed, and during the coverage, I noticed a number