Tea and crumpets
THE City, like an American academy, has the knack of declaring something to be an immemorial tradition with effect from Tuesday of last week. The historic trading floor (on which, says the chairman of the gilt-edged market, grass will now grow) was considered as modern as an atrium when the Queen declared it open, just in time for the mid-Seventies market col- lapse. Mid, that is, 1970s. Donald Cobbett, when he first ventured onto its predecessor more than half a century ago, traded with men who could remember its opening, without Queen Victoria, in the 1880s. A couple of jobbers had started it off with a brisk trade in Brighton 'A's, the leading speculative stock of the day — the shares of the London Brighton and South Coast Railway. Before the Big Bang (Milestone, £2.95) is his account of the old days, of Dickensian characters and Rabelaisian scenes — it seems that Throgmorton Street used to offer tea-houses in the Oriental sense, where the young ladies would re- spond to warnings of the occasional police raid by dusting off the cakes. On either side of the street, he says, human nature does not change. Manners change — and, he maintains, changed for the better 13 years ago when the Exchange, suitably nudged, changed the rules which made it an all-male club. A senior broker, writing to the Times to say that a gentleman's club's rules were nobody else's business, had to be disavowed. Still, as Donald Cobbett would say, and so would my friend the jobber: the one thing you cannot do in markets old or new is job backwards.
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