Free A Prince Among Stones by Prince Rupert Loewenstein

believe in spending time or money on entertaining during business hours. The story goes that one day the office manager was astonished to hear that Oscar had asked for ‘two coffees and a glass of port’. On further investigation this turned out to be a Chinese whisper: he merely wanted ‘two copies of our latest report’.
    The dilemma faced by the bank after his death was that none of Leopold’s sons had children, and, with no family succession, the three brothers spent much time throughout the 1950s and 1960s pondering the future of the firm. Various mergers were explored and approaches considered, but nothing had been resolved by the time the bank came into my sights.
    In the official history of the bank, the story is told that Alexis and I sat leafing through a copy of the Bankers’ Almanac looking for likely candidates, and deciding against any banks with knights of the realm on the board of directors as we thought they would be unlikely to sell. At Leopold Joseph we had a personal contact: a second or third cousin of Josephine’s, Freddie Lowry-Corry, was working there. That it had been founded by a German called Leopold (my father’s Christian name) was a neat coincidence.
    Alexis and I initially made a bid for an 80 per cent holding in the bank, which was rebuffed as the Josephs did not want control of Leopold Joseph heading overseas. Undeterred, we then gathered a group of friends and clients together to form a consortium to purchase the bank. They included Anthony Berry from the Kemsley newspaper family – which at one time owned the Sunday Times , alongside the Daily Sketch and the Sunday Graphic – and Jonathan Guinness, whom I had known since Oxford (and who is still one of my closest friends). As well as being on the board of the family brewing company he had worked in the City at Erlanger’s and moved to the board of Philip Hill when they took Erlanger’s over. While on the board of an investment trust he had talent-spotted two bright young men at Rothschilds, Louis Heymann and Richard Cox-Johnson. Both Jonathan and I felt that we had to have some hard-working professionals involved, and he heartily recommended them both, since he was certain that they would want to leave Rothschilds where they felt they were being underpaid; he was right.
    The news that we had acquired the bank was, pleasingly, announced on 23 July 1963, the 100th anniversary of Leopold Joseph’s birth, and followed by a dinner at the Café Royal to mark his centenary.
    We agreed that the Joseph brothers (who were then in their sixties, while most of the consortium were thirty years younger) should stay on the board for three years to teach us the ropes, but I soon found that some of those ropes were rather frayed. To be honest, they taught us very little. They were really like a nineteenth-century version of a merchant bank and, though a good one, out of touch with current practices.
    I was sent over to New York to report on the banking contacts we had there. I returned somewhat horrified by the fact that the Josephs had not secured their lending arrangements with Salomon Brothers, who were their principal money brokers there, in the way that was normal for banks at the time. The profit that banks in London usually looked for in the transactions of taking and lending vast sums of monies was a quarter of 1 per cent. With Salomon Brothers Leopold Joseph took one-sixteenth of a per cent.
    When I relayed this, the Josephs were not at all put out. They said, ‘We’re perfectly happy with our arrangement with Salomon Brothers. Old Mr Salomon and our father were great friends; one went to New York and one went to London and we trust them completely.’ This, alas, was not good enough for us, and so we had to tighten up a few of those relationships and to try to open up a few more. At a board meeting in September 1966 the three brothers stepped down together, finally ending the family