One of the fixed highlights of my year: the Worshipful Company of International Bankers’ annual banquet at Mansion House. As a Freeman of the Company, dining beneath the chandeliers of the Egyptian Hall in the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London is the kind of evening that never quite becomes routine, and I sincerely hope it never does.
The Company is a curious and rather wonderful thing: a modern livery company, not yet a quarter century old as a full company, with some eight hundred members drawn from across the world’s financial centres, wearing the ancient forms of the livery movement lightly and its charitable purpose seriously. The evening showed both faces. A string quartet from the Guildhall School played us through the reception, the loyal and civic toasts rolled out in their proper order with the anthem sung for the first and pointedly not the second, and the Company was toasted in its own words: “May it flourish root and branch forever.” The speeches, from a prominent economist and a senior voice of the Africa Finance Corporation, ranged from the year’s market outlook to opportunities in Africa, a part of the world about which, as the Master rightly noted, we do not hear nearly enough.
Dinner was seared venison loin with a game suet pudding, which made February my month of venison, Edinburgh having served the same a fortnight earlier from the Balmoral estate. I raised no objection on either occasion. A tawny port with the toasts, and a stirrup cup to close, held open until a quarter to eleven for those of us reluctant to concede the evening.
The detail I keep returning to, though, was the carpet guard: sea cadets of the City of London unit, based aboard HMS Belfast on the Thames, lining the way in their uniforms. Somewhere between the ceremony, the toasts, and the teenagers learning navigation on a wartime cruiser, you understand what the City’s traditions are actually for, which is passing something on.
Charlton Krentz 