Free A Prince Among Stones by Prince Rupert Loewenstein Page B

the Bank of England if Hilton Clarke raised his eyebrow. I recall an occasion when the directors of Leopold Joseph, including the three brothers, were all summoned by him. Jonathan Guinness arrived a little late and after a while it became apparent that a tin of condensed milk in the pocket of his mac had found its way upside down and therefore was leaking through the hole he had punctured in it. What Mr Hilton Clarke made of that he did not share with us.
    So at work I was in a world rooted in tradition. Even in the 1960s I would wear a bowler hat and had I been in the money market I would have worn a tall hat. Some elements of City life were evolving, however. We realised that business would have to follow the American line, much more serious, much less time to oneself, no swilling down of dry martinis in the middle of the day. Even during my first visits to New York for Bache in the 1950s I had noticed that people by and large didn’t drink at lunch whereas in London that was the whole point.
    Outside the Square Mile there were significant changes afoot in the life of English society, which altered the way that people dressed, thought and ran businesses, and it was imperative that it did, otherwise it would have become moribund. Social life was changing. The presentation of debutantes at court ceased in 1958. Many large houses were being sold. Normal dinner parties for fourteen to twenty guests in dinner jackets gave way to a much more casual approach.
    Josephine and I had dinner with a great friend of ours and when we arrived at 8.45, apart from our hostess all we noticed were about ten people sprawled on sofas or sitting on the floor not speaking a word. Josephine and I looked at each other and said, ‘Now we understand what it means by people being stoned’, and from then on we got used to the fact that at certain parties – not all, by any means – this would be repeated, and more and more people we knew started behaving in the way that became so popular in the 1960s.
    Five years on from the purchase of Leopold Joseph I was contacted in my office by Christopher Gibbs. We had met, in that wonderful French phrase, dans le monde , a party here, a party there, in no particular way. Christopher was a bright young man about town, from a large and rich family, whose wealth, like Arturo Lopez’s, had originally been built on guano.
    Christopher knew Mick Jagger, and Mick had asked him to find somebody to advise the Rolling Stones on their financial situation, which was not good. Mick had realised that he had made a tremendous mistake in listening to the approaches of Allen Klein. The Stones’ first manager, Andrew Oldham, had no professional qualifications at all, but was a breezy young man who arranged their first gigs and thought that he might make some money out of the Stones for them and himself. By comparison, Allen Klein was a very knowledgeable, highly intelligent, if unconventional chartered accountant, who’d set up on his own in New York and specialised in giving advice to rock musicians.
    But it was now clear to Mick that something was wrong. He was deeply worried. He knew the group was doing well and had a good contract with Decca. Their singles and albums were selling strongly, and they were playing to enthusiastic crowds. He couldn’t understand why they weren’t seeing a penny. By and large they had no money. They were all overdrawn.
    Unhappy with what was happening, Mick turned to Christopher for help. From Mick’s point of view Christopher was an Establishment figure, a young man from the upper class, which in those days still mattered tremendously in the City; he had the requisite entrée into the City. Christopher may have had the entrée, but he could find no one interested in looking at the finances of what virtually everyone in the City viewed as degenerate, long-haired, and, worst of all, unprofitable layabouts. When Christopher spoke to me he said he had