It’s sad that a Delhi consumer forum should fine Standard Chartered Bank for “extortion” and “harassment”. I still think of the bank as the hallowed Grindlays, the name my grandmother continued to use till she died two years short of a century, although National Provincial acquired Grindlays in 1923. Mergers and acquisitions were acts of betrayal that she ignored.
Other Indians were even more familiar with Grindlays. When I interviewed Lord Aldington, the chairman, in 1969 (I was living in London then) about Indira Gandhi’s bank nationalisation and published the interview in India without naming either him or the bank, Sir Biren Mookerjee promptly wrote to ask, “I suppose that was my old friend Aldington?” Grindlays was Aldington’s family firm; his father and grandfather were directors.
Aldington made history by being awarded $2.2 million damages against Count Nikolai Tolstoy, the historian who accused him of handing over thousands of Cossack prisoners to certain death at Stalin’s hands when World War II ended. My recollection is of Aldington retorting when the Reserve Bank demanded the names of Indian account holders, “How do I know whether Mr Patel is Indian, Pakistani, British, Kenyan or Ugandan?”
My choice of Grindlays for my first account – mercantile Calcutta joked that the rival Chartered Bank was the “Shuttered” Bank – was rewarded when the English manager telephoned one day to ask if I could drop in to see him. I did and he wondered why I didn’t have an overdraft. “Well, you do, but not officially!” It took me a moment to digest that I was overdrawn – Grindlays wouldn’t dream of dishonouring cheques – without an overdraft arrangement. “Shall we regularise things?” he said, and I signed papers allowing me credit of Rs 2,000 (two months’ pay!) without any collateral.
If I ran short of cash in those years of traipsing around India, I could always turn up at the local Grindlays where I was never refused. Once the Madras manager kept me waiting after I sent in my card. When I was ushered in, it was to find him behind an open copy of the Calcutta paper I worked for. “Ye’re a long way from home laddie?” he asked in broad Scots. I think he had delayed seeing me while he rummaged for the paper.
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Graciousness survived the sahibs. My branch’s first Indian manager, a Bengali, telephoned every month to say “The Queen’s cheque has come.” The London newspaper for which I worked part-time used Coutts, the royal bankers. When we were going to Honolulu on sabbatical, the young Tamil assistant manager happily stored a zinc trunk with my collection of antique silver without charging rental.
Grindlays has flirted with just about every banking house you can mention — Lloyds, Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Amex, South Korea’s First Bank, China’s Bohai Bank, ANZ and others. With 56 branches ANZ Grindlays was for a while India’s largest foreign bank, but Grindlays’ prancing elephant logo kept alive a corporate memory of service and responsibility to customers. It’s been a different institution altogether since 2000 when Grindlays lost its identity – I would say soul – in the Standard Chartered behemoth. Size isn’t always an advantage.
Banks today live up to the comparison with the man who lends you an umbrella (for a charge) when it’s dry but snatches it back when it rains. Friendly managers have disappeared. Instead, faceless executives banish accounts without so much as a by-your-leave to distant branches where the bank needs to show it has business. Anonymous customer-care officers misspell customers’ names and write (when they bother at all to respond to complaints) in ungrammatical English and meaningless jargon.
Supposedly confidential demat lists are not safe from prying relationship managers who demand the securities in the name of portfolio management. They cream off the commission at each churning. Refused shares, they demand Rs 25 lakh – the portfolio management service minimum – to play ducks and drakes with. Ambitious young executives are forced to become greedy sharks because instead of paying decent salaries, banks set them targets, regardless of an outcome that also destroys confidence in a bank’s integrity.
My grandmother’s Grindlays’ connection began before the National Provincial acquisition. Our address in the forties was 6 Church Road, Lucknow, and it seemed a happy coincidence that her bank letters came from 6 Church Lane, Calcutta. Grindlays was loath to close one of their oldest accounts when she died. On such small details are relations built.
Lord Aldington would have understood. But, then, who’s Lord Aldington, Standard Chartered bankers will ask.