Fortune's Spear E-Book

Martin Vander Weyer

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 576

Beschreibung

Gerard Lee Bevan was the model of an Edwardian swell - arrogant, smooth, well-connected and highly cultured. He married money and influence - his wife Sophie Kenrick was a cousin of the future prime minister Neville Chamberlain - and over the years he kept a string of showgirl mistresses. But his was a success built on fraud and deception, and eventually Bevan could sustain the fiction no longer. After a series of desperate swerves, he fled the country on 8 February 1922, abandoning his family and leaving his stockbroking and insurance empire in ruins. Thus began an extraordinary flight across Europe - disguised as a Frenchman, using a stolen passport, with his mistress at his side. His subsequent arrest in Vienna, and the Old Bailey trial that followed, would shock the entire country. 'Fortune's Spear' is a parable of the way in which the prospect of easy money draws risk-takers in every era into a spiral of greed and deceit. Bevan may have been forgotten, but he richly deserves to be remembered. Drawing on c ontemporary evidence and told with novelistic flair, Martin Vander Weyer's gripping biography brings him vividly to life.

Leseprobe

FORTUNE’S SPEAR

The story of the blue-blooded rogue behind the most notorious city scandal of the 1920s

MARTIN VANDER WEYER

Contents

Title Page

Bevan Family Tree

Kenrick/Chamberlain Family Tree

Sonnet II

INTRODUCTION: THE MAKING OF A FRAUDSTER

CHAPTER ONE: A KENSINGTON WEDDING

Capital and Industry

Pillars of Society

The Playing Fields of Eton

Hollow-ware and Oddwork

CHAPTER TWO: ON ’CHANG

The Black Sheep

The Junior Partner

Bad Examples

The Senior Partner

CHAPTER THREE: AT HOME

Upper Grosvenor Street

The Veiled Politician

City Magnate and Don Juan

At Littlecote

CHAPTER FOUR: THE CITY EQUITABLE

A Wartime Opportunity

Lords on the Board

Crack Oarsmen

A Nine Years’ Wonder

CHAPTER FIVE: THE POST-ARMISTICE BOOM

The Lucky Englishman

A Craze for Speculation

Eminently Healthy

Wily Dundonians 139

Partners and Directors, 1918–22

CHAPTER SIX: BOOM TURNS TO BUST

Back from Brazil

The Twin Bastions

A False Prospectus

Hand-to-Mouth

CHAPTER SEVEN: FLIGHT

Ordered Abroad

Proofs of Debt

‘Parle français couramment’

All is Squared

CHAPTER EIGHT: CAPTURE

An Inspector Calls

‘My Poor Wife!’

Homeward Bound

And Whose the Fault?

CHAPTER NINE: TRIAL

At the Guildhall

Who was ‘Someone?’

Window-dressing

Muddled Away

CHAPTER TEN: MISFEASANCE

Mansell in the Dock

Wilful Neglect?

An Historic Judgment

Stung by a Tart

CHAPTER ELEVEN: FAMILY MATTERS

The Prison Librarian

Decree Absolute

The Bogus Major

Sheila’s Wedding

CHAPTER TWELVE: LAST YEARS

What Happened to Hatry?

Russet and Asp

The PPRS

A Pauper’s Grave

Exile

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Copyright

Bevan Family Tree

Kenrick/Chamberlain Family Tree

Sonnet II

YoudobelieveIlovedyou, don’t you, Dear?

Sincewewereswallowedinadversity

It’slightenoughtoreadthestranger’ssneer,

Forfawnandfrownareweighedinoboli;

Butthey’renotinaccompt:yourthoughtisall.

Intheolddancingdayswhenpeoplesaid

Iwasinleaguewithfortune, andthescale

Tippedseeminglytohumourmyleastneed,

Somefriendwouldstopmeinthethoroughfare

OrmarttoaskmewhyIwalkedsogay:

“Anotherthrow,” he’dguess, “WithFortune’sspear,”

Thewhilesmyheartwasjustwithyou, atplay.

Andnowwhenalmostheavenitselfseemsvile,

IfyoucanstillbelieveIstillcansmile.

Gerard Lee Bevan, RussetandAsp (1929)

INTRODUCTION

The Making of a Fraudster

Havana, Cuba, March1936

An Englishman old before his time makes his way slowly towards to an open-fronted café. He walks painfully, leaning on a silver-topped ebony cane. His breath is short, his shoulders hunched, his pallor sickly beneath the brim of his straw hat.

He reaches his customary table at the front of the café, sits with an audible sigh and a wince of pain, and flaps a hand in greeting to the waiter who will bring his customary coffee. He places the hat carefully on the chair beside him and mops his brow with a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his pale linen suit, stained at collar and cuffs by the humidity and filth of the city. Then he wipes the head of the handsome walking stick — his prized possession, his last beautiful thing, a gift from his beloved wife.

From an inside pocket come a pair of small, wire-rimmed spectacles, which he places on the end of his nose. Anyone watching him closely might observe that he blinks continuously, as though the city’s dust is perpetually troubling his eyes. But it is a nervous tic brought on by stress; these days he worries constantly — about making ends meet, about small debts owed here and there, about the state of his own health and the future for his wife.

He has a newspaper with him, a fortnight-old copy of TheTimes of London, well thumbed by previous readers. He has acquired it from the concierge of a hotel that he passes on his morning walk. It carries a report of King Edward VIII’s first broadcast to his subjects, in which the new monarch has spoken eloquently about the death of his father, George V, and his own dedication to his subjects.

But our man has never had much interest in the doings of royalty — or politicians, for that matter. For old times sake he turns to the City page, scanning it for the names of companies and their chairman whom he might once have known in London. He looks for news of Wall Street too, because his wife still owns a handful of shares there.

Then he sees her — small, dark, animated, pretty, many years his junior — crossing the bustling street between slow-moving cabs and bicycles. She carries a basket of fruit and flowers from the market. His eyes light up as he struggles to rise from his seat, a vestige of past gallantry.

‘Don’t be silly, chéri,’ she says. Her accent and body language are unmistakably French. She kisses him on the cheek and moves his hat from the chair so she can sit beside him. ‘Here,’ she takes a flower from her basket, passes it under his nose, trims the stem and places it in his buttonhole. ‘That’s better. How are you feeling now? At least it’s a little cooler today.’

Suddenly ill at ease, he reaches for his hat and pulls it low over his brow. A well-heeled tourist couple, evidently English, the woman showing the agitation of one who thinks she is lost in a foreign place, are coming into the café to ask for directions. Our man shuffles his chair slightly, turning his shoulder away from them. But the husband notices him and stares.

‘I say,’ he whispers, nudging. ‘That chap looks awfully familiar. I’d swear I used to know him in the City’ And a few moments later, glancing over his shoulder as they leave the café: ‘It’s that chap in the City Equitable business, I’m sure it is. Used to be rich as Croesus and frightfully respectable. Ran off across Europe disguised as a Frenchman and ended up in jail. All over the ’papers in ’22. God, doesn’t he look old? What was his name?’

His name, in fact, was Gerard Lee Bevan, and his wife’s name — his second wife and former mistress, that is — was Jeanne. At the time of this imaginary encounter he had no more than six weeks to live. He had indeed been rich as Croesus, and a man of great reputation in the Square Mile and beyond as chairman of the City Equitable Fire Insurance Company, senior partner of the old-established stockbroking firm of Ellis & Co, son of the founder-chairman of Barclays Bank and scion of a great banking dynasty.

How and why he fell from that plinth to end his days a broken man in a rackety Caribbean watering hole is the subject of this enquiry.

But this is not a whodunit. There is no doubt that Gerard Lee Bevan committed the offences for which he was sentenced by Mr Justice Avory in December 1922 to seven years’ penal servitude, nor that those offences constituted serious episodes of fraud. There might be a question as to whether any of his associates ought to have gone to prison with him, but only one — Edmund Mansell, general manager of the City Equitable — was ever charged with related criminal offences, and he was acquitted.

Likewise, it is important to ask whether Bevan’s fellow directors of the City Equitable were culpable in a non-criminal sense for allowing him to get away with the things that he did, over a period of several years; they too were let off the hook, in a court case which for many years defined the limits of directors’ responsibilities. But that Gerard Bevan was guilty as charged is a matter of fact, and since there is not much mystery involved in reaching that conclusion it is probably helpful to the reader to begin with a simple summary of what his offences were and how they came about, so that the detail makes more sense as it unfolds.

Bevan spent the bulk of his City career, which began in 1894, as a stockbroker. Ellis & Co had always been conservative in its way of doing business, but when Bevan succeeded as its senior partner in 1912 he had ambitions to make it much less so. In particular, he wanted it to play a more aggressive role in flotations of stocks and bonds. He also had his eyes on international markets, and was developing growing networks of contacts in North and South America and continental Europe.

The outbreak of the first world war forced him to put his aspirations for Ellis & Co on hold, but brought him a different opportunity. A young man called Clarence Hatry offered to sell him a controlling stake in a fire reinsurance company, the City Equitable, which was poised for expansion because the war had forced the withdrawal from the London market of the previously dominant German and Austrian reinsurers.

Bevan grabbed that opportunity with both hands and made a great success of it. He led the City Equitable into marine reinsurance as well as fire, and watched the upward march of its premium income, profits and dividends to shareholders — many of whom were his friends, acquaintances and Ellis & Co clients.

Meanwhile, he formed a close association with Clarence Hatry, who — though he too would later go to prison for fraud — was at this stage emerging as a brilliantly creative corporate financier despite the constraints of wartime capital markets.

When the war ended, the stockmarket came spectacularly back to life. In the post-Armistice boom of 1919–20, Bevan, Hatry and a rather unlikely and comical third associate, the celebrated Boat Race rowing coach Peter Haig-Thomas, worked together on a series of lucrative corporate mergers and flotations.

In each case Hatry’s Commercial Bank of London did most of the brainwork, while Ellis & Co was the appointed broker to the issue. Bevan frequently took a seat on the board of the floated company and recommended its shares to his stockbroking clients, who were happy to follow his advice. The City Equitable came in on the deals as an underwriter — and sometimes as an eager investor in its own right.

It was conventional for reinsurance companies to hold most of their capital and reserves in the form of highly liquid British government ‘gilt-edged’ stock — that is what their shareholders and the insurance companies who were their chief clients would have expected to see in reinsurers’ balance sheets. But the City Equitable under Bevan’s leadership reduced the proportion of its assets held in gilts in favour of acquiring a portfolio of far more exciting investments elsewhere.

So far so good. The reinsurance company’s investment policy was far from transparent, but no one was complaining about the results. Some people in the City may have thought Bevan’s way of doing business rather cavalier, but that was often the reputation of successful stockbrokers of that era. Hatry was getting rich, and Bevan was getting even richer than he already was, while his clients and fellow City Equitable shareholders were prospering too.

At successive annual general meetings, praise was showered on Bevan as a titan of the modern City, a financier with the Midas touch. But when the stockmarket became more turbulent and prices started to fall in 1920, new issues became much harder to place. Securities created by Hatry and placed by Bevan were often unmarketable — that is, there were no genuine buyers in the market to match against sellers.

To maintain the impression of an active market, Bevan would buy the shares that clients of Ellis & Co wanted to sell, and either sell them to the City Equitable or make loans from the City Equitable to Ellis & Co to provide the stockbroking firm with sufficient cash to pay its clients and hold on to the shares until new buyers turned up in the market.

In flotations, he would sometimes encourage the original family shareholders of the company being floated to buy more shares in the market, thus encouraging the impression of healthy demand for the issue, against a guarantee that Ellis & Co would buy the shares from them if there were no other willing buyers.

He was able to do these things at will, without protest from his partners at Ellis & Co or his fellow directors at the City Equitable, because he had complete personal control of both businesses, and neither had the sort of internal controls that might have stopped him. Nor was there any challenge from their auditors, and most of his directors and partners genuinely had no idea what he was up to.

At the City Equitable, a small committee to which the board of directors delegated all investment decisions did no more than rubber-stamp whatever Bevan chose to do with the company’s cash and borrowings — often after the fact and in breach of the committee’s own limits. At Ellis & Co, Bevan’s four junior partners had little or no knowledge of how he financed their business or invested its capital, which gradually dwindled away as a result. To the extent that Bevan needed the co-operation of the general manager of the City Equitable, Edmund Mansell, he secured it by allowing Mansell to draw extraordinarily large sums of money for himself from the company to fund his own extravagant lifestyle.

As a result, Ellis & Co came to owe the City Equitable almost a million pounds and Mansell owed it over a hundred thousand, while the City Equitable ended up owning a portfolio of investments wholly unsuitable for any insurance company. Bevan made matters worse by using City Equitable funds alongside his own to invest in other ventures which caught his fancy, including Claridge’s Hotel in Paris and a vast Brazilian cattle ranching enterprise.

All this remained opaque to the other partners of Ellis & Co until the point was reached at which Bevan had effectively destroyed their firm. It was hidden from the directors and shareholders of the City Equitable by a sleight of hand in which government stocks, bought and sold within a matter of minutes and never actually held in the City Equitable’s custody, appeared in the annual balance sheet where the full extent of the loans to Ellis & Co ought to have been shown.

As market conditions deteriorated against a background of worldwide economic slump in 1921, Bevan’s manoeuvres became increasingly desperate and his life began to disintegrate. He gambled in casinos, lived with a succession or possibly a combination of mistresses, and borrowed money wherever and whenever he could.

As his situation failed to improve, Bevan took a distinct step into criminality. Having acquired several smaller reinsurance companies, he asset-stripped them to generate cash that was channelled illicitly to Ellis & Co, at the same time floating them on the stockmarket under a new holding company, City Equitable Associated, with a largely fictional prospectus — and thus scooping more cash from investors with which to hold creditors at bay.

This house of cards was impossible to sustain. The City Equitable could no longer pay its claims, and was besieged by rumours of financial difficulties. By the end of January 1922 — having concealed its insolvency for many months — the City Equitable was bust. Likewise, Ellis & Co was in ruins.

Bevan, rather than facing the music or taking a revolver into his library and ‘doing the decent thing’, chose to flee the country, probably with the ultimate intention of reaching South America.

We will follow his flight across Europe — complete with fake identity, and slow-witted policemen in pursuit — leading to his violent arrest in Vienna, his extradition to London, his trial and imprisonment and the strange life he led afterwards that ended in Havana. Before that, we will look at his stultifyingly respectable Victorian upper-middle-class upbringing, his first marriage, and his emergence as a City swell.

All this provides a colourful narrative, much of which might have come from the realms of fiction. As we shall see, Bevan’s story has many echoes in the novels of his lifetime — from Jules Verne’s AroundtheWorldinEightyDays (1873), in which Inspector Fix pursues Phileas Fogg across the globe under the misapprehension that he has robbed the Bank of England, to Evelyn Waugh’s AHandfulofDust (1934), in which the machinations of character and fate cause an English country squire called Tony Last to end his days in the Brazilian jungle, condemned forever to read Dickens to his captor.

Most especially, Bevan and his social circle could have stepped straight from the pages of John Galsworthy’s ForsyteSaga or from the cast of one of his successful West End plays. We will call upon Galsworthy as our unofficial guide and interpreter at many points in this narrative, and revisit in particular a sub-plot of the Forsyte family story, concerning the affairs of the Providential Premium Reassurance Society and its corrupt general manager, Robert Elderson. Written around the time of Bevan’s trial, this richly comic boardroom drama undoubtedly draws on the facts of the City Equitable case, and illuminates many of its moral and psychological lessons.

Besides these diverting cultural resonances, Bevan’s downfall also offers an opportunity to contemplate the perennial nature of fraud, and the mind of the fraudster. What is it that turns an apparently reputable financier into an out-and-out villain?

In Bevan’s case, it ought to be said, he never actually acknowledged himself to be anything of the latter sort. For the rest of his life he argued that if circumstances had allowed him to wrestle with the City Equitable’s finances for long enough, he would have put matters right, and that the deceptions he carried out — particularly the window-dressing of the City Equitable balance sheet — were no worse than what was done daily all over the Square Mile.

If that were so, his was a particularly egregious example of the technique, maintained over an extended period of time. Nor did Bevan’s demeanour win him sympathy in court; rather the reverse, since here was a man who had fled abroad in disguise rather than face the consequences of his actions like the gentleman and City professional he purported to be.

One question this book will ask is whether there was always a flaw — a streak of wickedness, moral deficiency or deep unreliability — in Gerard Lee Bevan, or whether his personality actually mutated for the worse as circumstances changed against him. It will ask whether, if there had not been such a severe slump in the stockmarket after the post-Armistice boom, he might have ended his days rich, guiltless and contented in his magnificent Wiltshire country house, surrounded by fine art, books and Chinese porcelain, instead of as an ex-jailbird scratching a living as a distillery manager in Cuba.

And it will ask what must it have been like for his first wife Sophie, née Kenrick, daughter of a high-minded, low-church Midlands industrial family, to live through the shame and distress of her husband’s downfall. Opinionated, demanding, increasingly eccentric as she grew older, Sophie does not emerge from this story as a very lovable character. But Gerard Bevan clearly loved her when they were young, before he started cheating on her and dragging her through the embarrassment of banner headlines and bankruptcy; and when he abandoned her, he largely abandoned also his responsibilities towards their two young daughters. So Sophie Bevan deserves a fair hearing too.

Fraud takes many forms, and involves many kinds of people. In good times, when markets are soaring, the incorrigibly unscrupulous never miss the opportunity to take advantage of the gullible. In bad times, when prices are crashing, the previously straight often resort to deception to try to save themselves from ruin. It is the same in every decade, every turn of the economic cycle. It is a pattern of behavior that no regulatory regime or surveillance system has ever succeeded in eradicating.

And that is because fraud is a special kind of human failing: a crime of the mind rather than the hands. It does not require the dexterity of the pickpocket, the physical courage of the rooftop cat-burglar, the violent psychopathology of the mugger. It requires instead a persuasive tongue, a heightened appetite for risk, a certain degree of numeracy and cunning, and a moral blindness to the effect of selfish actions on other people’s lives — attributes which match very closely those of the ruthless financier who makes a successful career by staying just on the right side of the line.

It is the fineness of that line between, on one side, what is permitted by law but is ethically dubious, and on the other, that which is plainly dishonest and actually illegal, that makes fraud such a fascinating field of investigation.

Gerard Lee Bevan worked in the City for almost 30 years and was recognised as one of its most consistently successful money-makers. Those who did business with him for most of those years might have said that he treated risk with arrogant insouciance, that he was vain in admiring his own judgement and failing to acknowledge his own mistakes, that he sometimes sailed close to the wind in his methods, that he was not as clever as he thought he was — but never that he was overtly a rule-breaker.

Meanwhile he lived the opulent life of a post-Edwardian plutocrat, but with taste and restraint. He was not physically greedy, having no interest in the pleasures of the table. He committed adultery, but (if this can be allowed as a mitigating clause) with showgirls rather than the wives of his friends or neighbours. If he had a secret vice, it was for collecting beautiful objects.

In all these respects, anyone passing judgement on Bevan’s life up to the time of his fiftieth birthday in August 1919 (anyone, that is, who did not have access to the innermost secrets of his companies’ accounts, which even at that stage would have hinted otherwise) might have concluded that he was no worse and no better than a thousand others of his class, time and métier.

When boom turned to bust soon after that birthday, however, Bevan resorted to a series of unequivocally dishonest devices and repeated lies — to shareholders, bankers, clients and even to his own brothers — to maintain the impression that all could still come right under his golden touch. He did not enrich himself by behaving in this way: his own fortune, a large portion of which was represented by his equity interest in Ellis & Co and his shareholding in the City Equitable, was by then evaporating at least as fast as that of anyone who was harmed by what he did.

The reinsurance business of the City Equitable, though it too experienced difficult market conditions in 1921, was probably sound enough to have survived. What ruined the company was Bevan’s habit of using its reserves to invest in anything he fancied, and to bankroll Ellis & Co’s involvement with Hatry in new issues and their aftermath.

As TheEconomist would say after Bevan’s conviction, the assets and the potential for future success of the City Equitable had simply been ‘muddled away’, at a cost to its creditors and shareholders (and those who invested in the City Equitable Associated flotation) of at least £3.75 million, equivalent to £150 million in modern terms.1Adding in the unpaid debts of Ellis & Co (but eliminating the overlap, since the largest of those debts was to the City Equitable) takes the equivalent figure to £200 million or so. Even today, when the scale of public-company balance sheets and of dealings and misdealings in the securities markets runs into many billions, a £200 million fraud would be a major scandal. In 1922 it was colossal: the collapse of the Bevan empire, his flight across Europe and the revelations at his trial filled newspaper pages throughout that year, and had repercussions long afterwards.

As such episodes always do, this one caused questions to be asked about financial regulation, accounting standards and the role of directors and auditors. On that last issue, the City Equitable case led eventually to a tightening of company law, so it did ultimately change the game. But in a more general sense the scandal merely reaffirmed what has been observed down the ages about human nature and money; that certain types of people will always be prone to excessive risk-taking and marginal dishonesty when there is a possibility of great riches, and some of that group will give way to greater dishonesty when the tide ebbs and the promised riches are about to be swept away.

That is — you might agree, when you know a little more about him — a fair summary of the character type which Bevan fits, and it raises one further question, or parlour game. Where should we place him on the spectrum of the great fraudsters of all time?

The question is perhaps best answered by identifying what Bevan was not doing. He was not, for example, operating a ‘Ponzi scheme’ — an outright swindle in which money is collected from savers attracted by the offer of unusually high returns, but those returns are simply paid out from the incoming cash to lull investors into believing all was well, while the capital is siphoned off for the benefit of the swindler.

The originator of this racket was the Italian-American Charles Ponzi who was jailed for ‘mail fraud’ in 1920; his most notorious modern imitator was Bernard Madoff, a fund manager in New York and Florida who was jailed in 2009 having gathered in no less than $65 billion under false pretences and lost $18 billion of it.

By contrast with Ponzi or Madoff, Bevan was running a genuine business, but in a dangerous and deceitful way. Nor was he the kind of fraudster who is motivated by power and influence as well as, or more than, money itself. Such, in Bevan’s own time, were Jabez Balfour and Horatio Bottomley, whose careers as members of parliament and noisome public figures were supported by a pyramid of fraudulent property companies in Balfour’s case and a series of imaginative stings on the general public in Bottomley’s. Another character in this mould was the fictional Augustus Melmotte MP in Anthony Trollope’s TheWayWeLiveNow (1875), a crooked financier of railway schemes who ends up poisoning himself.

In more modern times, the sometime Captain Robert Maxwell MP, the megalomaniac proprietor of the DailyMirror who drowned after falling or jumping from his yacht in 1991 before justice could catch up with him, seems to fit the same pattern. In the collapse of Maxwell’s group of companies under a mountain of debt, and the way in which he was found to have shuffled money between them to try to keep them afloat, there are clear parallels with Bevan.

Indeed, we may be fairly sure that if the City Equitable had maintained a pension fund for employees in 1921 (in common with all but the most socially progressive public companies of that era, it did not) Bevan would not only have managed it imprudently but would have raided it for cash just as Maxwell stood accused of stealing from the Mirror Group’s fund.

But there the similarities end. Unlike these publicity-seeking politician-businessmen, Bevan sought no fame or public platform. He played a high-stakes financial game simply because he believed he had a talent for it, he was stimulated by the game itself, and he enjoyed the lifestyle it brought him.

He does however stand comparison with another modern fraudster who was not remotely like him in personality, background or tastes: Nick Leeson, the Singapore-based ‘rogue trader’ whose dealings ruined the investment banking house of Baring Brothers in 1995. Whereas Bevan was a Cambridge-educated City aristocrat of many years’ market experience, Leeson was a 27-year-old former settlements clerk from Watford. But the pattern of their behaviour matches. Leeson started out conducting an entirely legitimate trading activity in Japanese equity futures contracts on behalf of his firm. Mistakes were made and covered up, and risks multiplied in the effort to make back the losses. Other directors and executives of the bank failed to scrutinise Leeson’s departmental accounts until it was too late. What appeared to be a profitable business was in reality concealing mounting losses, and when market conditions turned adverse (after the Kobe earthquake in January 1995) the losses became catastrophic. Having blown away Barings’ entire capital, Leeson fled across several Asian countries before finally being arrested at Frankfurt airport, extradited, convicted of fraud and consigned to Singapore’s notorious Changi jail.

As Bevan’s story unfolds in detail, the reader will see the validity of this comparison of two miscreants from such very different eras and backgrounds. It is all to do with the universality of human response. Here is Leeson himself commenting in that vein on an early 20th-century fraud case with which Bevan would certainly have been familiar — the case of TheVoyseyInheritance, a 1905 play by Harley Granville Barker that was revived in 2006 at London’s National Theatre, which cleverly invited Leeson to offer a comment:

We [Leeson and the play’s central character Edward Voysey, who perpetuates a fraud conducted by his late father] both clearly knew the difference between right and wrong… I knew that I shouldn’t be doing it but continued all the same. The question is: why? Ethically correct in our upbringing, something misfires when we are confronted by the ultimate ethical dilemma. Each day I would do whatever was needed to survive, although I knew that each action contradicted what I knew was right…

Very quickly I became blinkered to all that was happening around me; everyone had bought into the success story and the important thing was to keep the myth — and in turn the status — alive at all costs. As much as I knew that I was wrong, I rarely paid attention to the impact my actions would have on those around me, or indeed to what the personal cost would ultimately be to me. Very quickly a form of tunnel vision descends that only allows you to see the future in terms of successfully digging yourself out of the situation. However bad it gets, failure is still never an option.

That could easily have been a description of the mind of Gerard Lee Bevan, though it is perhaps a little too frank to have come from the pen of Bevan himself. The species of fraud in which Leeson and Bevan and the fictional Voyseys were involved is the product of the interaction of character flaw and financial circumstance, rather than criminality in its purest, wickedest form.

Within that species are many variants of method and outcome, including those in which the fraudster himself is also, in the end, a loser. But still it is fraud, still it parts innocent people from their savings, still it damages trust in institutions and markets. It is always with us — and as the reader will surely conclude, having weighed all the evidence in the case of Gerard Lee Bevan — there is never a convincing excuse for it.

1 A note on inflation and exchange rates. From time to time during this narrative, sums of money are translated for illustrative purposes into their 2010 equivalent, but it would be tiresome for the reader if that comparison were made too often. Suffice to say that steep inflation during the first world war was followed by a sharp deflation in the post-war slump, with the net effect (according to the Bank of England) that prices roughly doubled over the decade of Bevan’s heyday, from 1912–22. Between 1922 and 2010, inflation averaged 4.4 per cent, which makes £100,000 in 1922 the equivalent in purchasing power of £4.4 million in 2010. As a rule of thumb, sums mentioned during the key years of the Bevan scandal from 1919–22 can be multiplied by 40 to give an idea of their equivalent value today.

Again as a rough guide, sums mentioned in French francs, which fluctuated widely against the pound in the early 1920s, can be converted at 50 francs to the pound; this means that 100,000 French francs in 1922 would have been the equivalent of about £80,000 in 2010.

CHAPTER ONE

A Kensington Wedding

‘… They were all what is called ‘of a certain position’. They had shares in all sorts of things… They collected pictures, too, and were supporters of such charitable institutions as might be beneficial to their sick domestics. Originally, perhaps, members of some primitive sect, they were now in the natural course of things members of the Church of England, and caused their wives and children to attend with some regularity the more fashionable churches of the Metropolis… Their residences, placed at stated intervals round the Park, watched like sentinels lest the fair heart of this London, where their desires were fixed, should slip from their clutches, and leave them lower in their own estimations.’

John Galsworthy, The Man of Property 1906

Capital and Industry

TheTimes of Thursday, 5 October 1893 carried the following announcement in its Marriages column:

BEVAN: KENRICK. On Tuesday, the 3rd Oct., at All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, by the Rev. R. S. Tabor, assisted by the Rev. Gustavus Bosanquet, Rector of Clophill, GERARD LEE BEVAN, son of Francis Augustus Bevan, of Fosbury Manor, Wilts, and Trent Park, New Barnet, Herts, to SOPHIE, eldest daughter of J. ARTHUR KENRICK, of Berrow Court, Edgbaston.

There must have been a certain tension in the air at that wedding. Gerard was about to become a partner in a long-established City stockbroking firm. His father was a leading Lombard Street banker, his late mother the daughter of a baronet. His bride came from a celebrated Midlands industrial dynasty.

The bridegroom’s family, with their titled and metropolitan connections, sat a notch higher on the social scale than the bride’s, who had always tended to marry within their own provincial community. But in a period of upward mobility for successful Victorian business dynasties of all kinds, that is unlikely to have raised eyebrows, especially as the extended Kenrick clan included the Chamberlains, the most powerful family in Birmingham, which was the late 19th century world’s most important industrial city.

Sophie’s father, Arthur Kenrick might also have pointed out, if he had made a speech at the wedding breakfast, the happy coincidence that both families traced their ancestry to modest merchant origins in Wales — genealogy being as important to the participants in this story as it is to the reader trying to imagine their world. Over the previous century, Arthur might have added, both families had achieved national prominence in their chosen fields of enterprise. And though it would have been vulgar to say so aloud, no wedding guest could have failed to notice that both families had amassed substantial fortunes.

In fact both bride and groom, born in the late 1860s, belonged to an especially fortunate generation. As the historian A.N. Wilson described them in TheVictorians (2002): ‘this immensely privileged class, probably more comfortable than any human class who had ever existed on the planet.’

The guests that day were witnessing what was in many ways an ideal late-Victorian match of capital and industry, at a moment of high Victorian self-confidence. It was a marriage that would produce two daughters and reach its silver anniversary before it became, rather publicly, a marriage in name only; and almost 30 years before it finally ended in divorce. Ahead of the couple was a path through the most glittering realms of Edwardian society.

Yet something was not quite right. Gerard Bevan, a month before his 24th birthday, was a clever and polished young man, from an eminently respectable stable. But he had already shown himself unsuitable for the family banking partnership after a brief trial there. Instead he had been fixed up with a career in the London Stock Exchange — which suited his nature much better, and was a classic way for the City to accommodate a well-bred black sheep.

As for Sophie, she was two and a half years older than her husband and no oil painting: ‘large and plain and tiresome,’ according to one description, ‘with a rather low voice and a very decisive manner of speaking.’ And she was ‘marrying out’. That is, she was about to go down the aisle of an Anglican church — albeit one favoured by folk of what John Galsworthy called ‘a certain position’ — that was a long way in every sense from her own family’s preferred place of worship, the Unitarian Church of the Messiah in Broad Street, Birmingham.

According to legend in the Bevan family, Sophie’s father and brother had both warned the bridegroom that she was, in some unspecified ways, ‘difficult’. But her forceful personality, rather than her looks, was evidently the very thing that most attracted Gerard, and these interventions only made him more keen to lead her down the aisle.

Perhaps in return, someone on the Bevan side had tried to warn the Kenricks that Gerard was unreliable. Those who took a dim view of him might have speculated that he could only be so determined to pluck Sophie off the shelf because she brought a substantial dowry. As a fourth son, he could not expect much inheritance of his own.

But the marriage settlement discreetly fixed between bewhiskered family solicitors must have protected Sophie’s interests pretty effectively, since they turned out to be well separated from her husband’s when he eventually went bankrupt. And if money was really Gerard’s motivation he could easily have aimed richer and higher. He was, in any case, about to make a great deal of it by his own efforts.

Such reports as we have of his personality do not suggest a playboy or an idle wastrel, but a young man who was just as serious as his wife-to-be. He was abstemious when it came to food and drink. He did not smoke cigars. He had been a regular attender at the chapel of his Cambridge college. He had a delicate aesthetic sense that would later emerge in poetry and connoisseurship.

He was perhaps a bit intense, with an unattractive hint of arrogance in his manner. But there is no obvious reason why anyone should have thought him, on his wedding day, the ‘daring and unprincipled scoundrel’ he was judged to be many years later.

So let us begin by giving Gerard the benefit of the doubt, as well as feeling some sympathy for Sophie. Let us assume there was a quotient of love in the match, even if we imagine we can hear aunts and dowagers on both sides of the congregation whispering doubts.

Let us try to sketch the scene that morning — and in doing so, create a collage of the worlds in which Gerard and Sophie were brought up, and the way their characters were formed.

Pillars of Society

All Saints Church in Ennismore Gardens, South Kensington, was built in the late 1840s in the ornate, 12th century ‘Lombardic’ style that was enjoying a revival at the time. It was a short stroll from Prince’s Gate, where the Bevan family had successively owned or leased several large townhouses since the area had first been redeveloped by a builder called Freake in the late 1850s.1

To be precise — since mapping offers a clue as to how the bridal couple first met — Prince’s Gate is an L-shaped stucco terrace, of which one section faces Hyde Park and the other forms the eastern side of Exhibition Road, leading towards South Kensington station. Gerard’s grandfather Robert Cooper Lee Bevan was the first leaseholder, in 1857, of No 31 Prince’s Gate, on the corner of the ‘L’ with its front door opening onto Exhibition Road but its principal rooms overlooking the park; it is now the embassy of Afghanistan.

In 1866 Robert Bevan — whose principal home was a large estate in Hertfordshire called Trent Park — bought the exceptionally opulent No 25 Prince’s Gate, in the middle of the parkside terrace. The seller was his distant relation Samuel Gurney Junior, an MP (and promoter of the project to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable) who was a sleeping partner in the discount house of Overend & Gurney — the collapse of which shook the City of London a couple of months after this house sale was completed.

We might wonder whether the hugely wealthy Robert had done this deal privately to provide Samuel with liquidity when trouble was looming. In any event, when Overend & Gurney went down, Robert publicly opposed the idea that he and other leading London bankers should get together to rescue it. Perhaps he felt he had already done his bit for cousinhood. He sold the house, to another banker, in 1884.

As for Gerard’s father, Francis Augustus Bevan, generally known as Frank, he first owned No 72 Prince’s Gate at the end of the Exhibition Road terrace, adjoining what was then the South Kensington Museum but would become much more famous as the Victoria & Albert. Later he owned No 59, a few doors to the north on the corner of Prince’s Gardens, and this was most probably where Gerard Lee Bevan was born on 9 November 1869. But since Gerard’s records at Trinity College, Cambridge show his home address as No 60 Prince’s Gate, we can assume that Frank had in fact acquired two adjacent houses (now demolished) to accommodate his very large family. And that establishment was barely more than a hundred yards from a house which provided a London base for Sophie Kenrick’s family, of which more in a moment.

Meanwhile back to All Saints, where the vicar was the genial Ravenscroft Stewart, a Scot who had been a parish priest in Derbyshire before arriving in Ennismore Gardens in 1884. Passionate about the fabric of his church and adept — almost to the point of aggression, by some accounts — at fundraising, we might guess that he had made himself a regular caller at the Bevans, who were very typical of his parishioners.

All Saints was not as high, liturgically or socially, as the likes of St Paul’s Knightsbridge, just down the road, or the fashionable churches of Mayfair. It served a well-heeled but unflamboyant middle-class district south of the park between Knightsbridge to the east and Exhibition Road to the west. Some of the householders in Prince’s Gate, Prince’s Gardens and Ennismore Gardens were members of the old landed aristocracy, but most were representatives of relatively new money: industrialists, shipowners, bankers like the Bevans, or simply inheritors of wealth accumulated by their fathers and grandfathers.

The most plutocratic neighbour, when he was in town, was the great American financier John Pierpont Morgan at No 14 Prince’s Gate, a mansion even larger than its neighbours which is now the Royal College of General Practitioners. But as a foreign grandee, he was the exception.

Most of the local residents were ‘Forsytes’, in the generic definition offered by Galsworthy’s tongue-in-cheek family commentator, Young Jolyon:

A Forsyte takes a practical — one might say a commonplace — view of things, and a practical view of things is based fundamentally on a sense of property…. My dear sir, the Forsytes are the middlemen, the commercials, the pillars of society, the corner stones of convention; everything that is admirable!

Jolyon might indeed have had in mind his uncle Roger Forsyte, whom Galsworthy placed in Prince’s Gardens, a stone’s throw from the Bevans, and encapsulated as a ‘collector of house property’.

This was, then, a comfortable and comfortably-off enclave of the capital. And it was the ladies of these households, no doubt all of rather fixed views as to how they liked their religion dished up, who predominated in the All Saints congregation — to the extent that Stewart sought to balance matters by welcoming soldiers from the nearby Knightsbridge Barracks and hosting a regular get-together called a ‘Husbands’ Supper’.

One contemporary letter from a parishioner said of Stewart that he ‘was very good at getting money, though he was not a scholar or even a very good preacher… His sermons were dull.’ That may be one reason why he was not a named celebrant at the Bevan-Kenrick wedding, though it is very likely that he was present and robed for the occasion. A more interesting question is whether the Kenricks had brought with them their Unitarian minister from the Church of the Messiah in Birmingham, James Crossley. If so he, like Stewart, was relegated to a subsidiary role, while the service was led by two priests who were closely associated with the Bevans.

The first was 74-year-old Robert Tabor, former headmaster of Cheam School in Surrey,2 where Gerard had been a pupil from 1878–83. Tabor’s first connection to the family was that as a young man he had been a priest at Enfield in the parish that included Robert Bevan’s Trent Park, and where the Bevans had paid for the building in 1839 of a new church, Christ Church Cockfosters.

Tabor tutored Robert Bevan’s older children, including Frank, at his parsonage. In 1855 (by which time Frank was at Harrow), Bevan provided Tabor with funds to buy Cheam and turn it into England’s most famous preparatory school — a boarding school which took boys from the age of seven or eight up to 13, to prepare them for the next stage of their education at establishments such as Harrow, Eton or Winchester.

Robert Bevan sent several of his younger sons to Cheam and was said to have been so fond of both the place and its headmaster that on his deathbed in July 1890 (just as Tabor was retiring) he murmured last regrets that he could not attend the Parents’ Day cricket match. Frank followed his father’s example and sent six of his seven sons to the school.

Assisting Tabor in the wedding ceremony was the Rev. Gustavus Bosanquet, rector of Clophill in Bedfordshire, whose family had several connections to the Bevans — Gustavus’s wife was Frank’s first cousin. And Frank himself was the dignified paterfamilias in the front pew. Beside him would have been his wife Maria, and ranged behind them the groom’s brothers, half-brothers and half-sisters, plus a dozen or more of Frank’s own brothers and sisters (some of them younger than the groom) and innumerable first and second cousins.

The scale, complexity and religious tone of the Bevan contingent at All Saints that morning requires quite some explaining. Although their antecedents were Quakers, the family and many of their ilk had shifted to various persuasions of the Church of England as their wealth and social position evolved.

Robert Bevan, a devout Anglican who held daily prayer meetings in his banking parlour, fathered seven children by his first wife, Lady Agneta Yorke, sister of the fourth Earl of Hardwicke. After her death he had nine more with his second wife, Frances Shuttleworth, daughter of a bishop of Chichester.

Frances Shuttleworth first met Robert Bevan when she attended bible-readings at Trent Park. Originally an Anglican like her husband, she transferred her adherence, with his support, to the low-church Plymouth Brethren, who sought to shun the trappings of the material world. She was noted for her translations of mediaeval German hymns and she prevailed on Robert to give up hunting as a matter of conscience. Even by Victorian standards, she must have been grim company.

Frank Bevan, in turn, fathered ten children by three wives — but the fact that the first and third of those marriages had taken place only 13 years apart was not a matter of which the starched ladies of the All Saints congregation, or even his austere stepmother, might have disapproved.

Frank was at least as devout and high-minded as his father, though Evangelical rather than high Anglican. And it should not, of course, be inferred that Gerard’s later infidelity to Sophie was a trait inherited through paternal genes. Rather, the prolific pattern of fatherhood displayed by both Robert and Frank tells us of the negligible state of early and mid Victorian family planning even among the privileged classes, and their belief that procreation was both a duty to and a gift from God.

If John Galsworthy (a close contemporary of Gerard Bevan) is to be believed, it also illuminates an aspect of Victorian thinking about dynastic fortunes. InChancery (1920), the volume of The Forsyte Saga which picks up Galsworthy’s epic family story in the late 1890s, tells us:

A student of statistics must have noticed that the birth rate varied in accordance with the rate of interest on your money. Grandfather Forsyte in the early 19th century had been getting ten per cent for his, hence ten children. Those ten… had averaged from four to five per cent of theirs, and produced accordingly. The 21 whom they produced were now getting barely three per cent in the Consols3 to which their fathers had tied the Settlements they made to avoid death duties, and the six of them who had been reproduced had seventeen children, or just the proper two and five-sixths per stem.

The principle seems much the same for the Bevans. In short, the prolific birth rate of these two Victorian generations was unconstrained by considerations of income — and their ability to pay for doctors and midwives meant that their infant mortality rate was lower than was the case among the less privileged classes. It was only towards the end of the century that forms of contraceptive practice and abstinence were more widely adopted, with the intention and effect of producing smaller families with births at wider intervals.

Meanwhile the mothers still suffered, whatever their station. Frank had already had the misfortune to become a widower twice. His first wife Elizabeth had been the daughter of Lord Charles James Fox Russell, the Serjeant at Arms of the House of Commons, and grand-daughter of the sixth Duke of Bedford. She died in 1863 a few days after giving birth to Frank’s first son, Cosmo.

His second wife, Constance, was a daughter of Sir James Hogg, first baronet, sometime member of parliament and chairman of the East India Company. Constance gave Frank five sons in little more than five years — Gerard was the middle one — and died in 1872 a few months after the arrival of the youngest.

Undiscouraged — indeed, anxious to find a new mother for his boys — Frank married for the third time in 1875, to Maria Trotter from a Hertfordshire landed family. They had a son and three daughters, again at short intervals.

Gerard was still a toddler when Constance died, so unlikely to have had any memory of his natural mother, and five and a half when Maria became his stepmother. Maria was constantly occupied with her own pregnancies and infants, and can have had little time or energy for the rabble of small boys corralled upstairs by nannies and nursemaids. She was remembered by the family as ‘a very nice woman who had a ghastly time with the five very pert boys’. The younger three, Gerard, Owen and Ivor, were particularly troublesome, and teased her mercilessly.

But they did not get much discipline from their father, who reportedly could not control them at all — and who, in the Victorian manner, would in any event have seen his offspring, selectively or enmasse, for no more than a few minutes each day.

One way or another, therefore, Gerard had little parental influence in the years before he was sent away first to Cheam and then to Eton. There is always an element of chance in how human character develops: most of Gerard’s siblings led blameless lives. But in any large family one or two are made different from the rest, and it is hardly surprising that Gerard turned out so completely unlike his father.

Frank Bevan really was a pillar of Victorian virtue and the City establishment, bred from a mix of mercantile and aristocratic antecedents. On the paternal side, Bevans claim descent from Jestyn-ap-Gwrgant, the last Prince of Glamorgan, who lived in Cardiff Castle in the eleventh century. More certainly, they descend from a Quaker merchant family in Swansea, of which two sons came to London in the early 18th century to become pharmacists in Plough Court, off Lombard Street in the City. The turning point in Bevan dynastic history came when Timothy, one of the pharmacist brothers, married Elizabeth Barclay, daughter of a partner in a Lombard Street banking house.

Silvanus Bevan, son of Timothy and Elizabeth, joined the Lombard Street bank in 1767. The name of the bank changed from time to time according to the make-up of a partnership drawn from several related families, but by the time Silvanus’s great-grandson Frank joined in 1861, it had settled as Barclay, Bevan, Tritton & Co. The Trittons (whose dynastic founder also married a Miss Barclay) were about to play a guiding role in Gerard’s Stock Exchange career, and we can be sure that they too were represented at his wedding.

Frank had succeeded as senior partner of the Lombard Street bank when Robert died in 1890. It was a time of change in the cosy world of private banking, in much more than name. This brought heavy responsibilities on Frank’s shoulders — and all the more so a few years later when he became the first chairman of the modern Barclays Bank after a bold multiple merger. More of that and how it affected Gerard in the next chapter. But apart from being a busy banker and an energetic husband, what sort of person was Frank Bevan?

Full-bearded and stocky, his photograph suggests benign solidity. The first official history of Barclays, published not long after his death, eulogises his ‘wisdom and sagacity’ and credits him with diplomatic skills that made Barclays a happy and successful ship in its early years.

That suggests quite a formidable business leader. But less deferential modern historians tell us that Frank ‘did not inherit either the rugged physical strength or the decisiveness of his father [Robert]. He also lacked imagination and had a rather limited outlook.’ The writers concede, however, that these qualities strongly recommended him to other bankers who were contemplating merging their own firms with his, while not wishing to give up their traditional ways of business. ‘His relaxed, easy-going temperament, his charitable instincts and his strong sense of humour perfectly fitted the delicate task of soothing the process of integration.’

A kindly fellow then, a natural conciliator — and a man of wide-ranging commitments and preoccupations. He gave his time outside the bank to the treasurership of St Peter’s Hospital in Covent Garden, and was active on behalf of the London City Mission, the Church Patronage Trust and Christ’s Hospital. He was a magistrate and a lieutenant of the City of London. He liked music, art, cricket and horses, and in his later years he developed a pioneering interest in motoring.

Frank was also ‘a man of property’ (another Galsworthian phrase) on a substantial scale. Fosbury and Trent Park, the two homes that were given as his addresses in TheTimes announcement of Gerard and Sophie’s marriage, extended to 4,000 acres between them. When these properties passed to him on his father’s death, he also received the lion’s share of Robert’s chattels, which were valued at almost a million pounds.

Fosbury Manor in Wiltshire had first been acquired by Silvanus Bevan in 1810, at the end of his banking career, and had passed down through three generations. Trent Park was bought as a wedding present for Robert in 1833 by his father David (Silvanus’s eldest son), allegedly achieved by nodding in his sleep at the crucial moment of the auction.

Sited on what had once been the royal hunting grounds of Enfield Chase, the mansion of Trent Park was designed by the architect Sir William Chambers for George III’s physician Sir Richard Jebb, who is believed to have had the grounds landscaped by Humphrey Repton. The Bevans’ chief contribution to its development was to plant a double avenue of lime trees and some 30,000 oaks. Perhaps tiresomely expensive to run as a family home even by the standards of the 1890s, it required a domestic staff of 14 men and 11 women.

Though Frank moved to Trent Park, we might guess that it did not particularly suit him, with his many commitments in central London, to change the habit of three decades in order to make it his home during the week, even when the motor car became a possible means of commuter transport a few years later — but long before the arrival on the edge of the park of what is now the Cockfosters terminus of the Piccadilly underground line.

Nor would it have been practicable to take the family and its entourage down to Fosbury, deep in rural Wiltshire, more than a few times a year. His offspring evidently continued to regard South Kensington as home, hence their attachment to All Saints. His son Owen was still living at 59 Prince’s Gate in 1894.

Another of Frank’s traits was his resilience in the face of family tribulations and sadnesses, of which there were more ahead. Leonard, his oldest child by Maria, would hang himself in 1901; the only surviving description of Leonard says he was ‘extremely musical [and] slightly homosexual’. Maria died two years later — and when the undertaker found Frank sitting in his library to tell him that the cortege was ready to move off, Frank replied disconsolately, ‘You know I never attend my wives’ funerals.’

Thereafter his daughters took it in turns to keep Frank company. In due course, he sold both Trent Park (to Sir Edward Sassoon, a wealthy MP married to a Rothschild)4 and Fosbury (to a bibliophile by the name of Alfred Huth from another banking family who had been neighbours in Prince’s Gate) and moved to a comfortable townhouse in Mayfair, where Gerard and Sophie would become his nearest family neighbours.

The Playing Fields of Eton

If Frank had never been an active disciplinarian or visible presence during his sons’ childhood, the young Gerard would have encountered a firmer hand for the first time in Robert Tabor at Cheam and then in the person of another wedding guest: the Revd. Raymond Coxe Radcliffe, a Cambridge scholar who was his housemaster at Eton and taught him mathematics and classics. Bevan was in Radcliffe’s house from September 1883 until December 1888, and school records give us a useful picture of what sort of boy he was.

He was not a King’s Scholar (in which case he would have been in the elite house called simply College, rather than in Radcliffe’s) nor an Oppidan Scholar, and he did not win any of the major school prizes — though he was sufficiently bright to gain a place at Cambridge.

He was, however, quite a good sportsman. That is not to say he was a Corinthian hero like his contemporary Hugh Bromley-Davenport, who went on to play Test cricket for England, or his distant kinsman and later business associate Theodore Barclay, who went on to row for Cambridge and win trophies at Henley. Nor was Bevan mentioned by name in Eton in the ’Eighties, a rather ponderous account of the major sporting feats of the decade by one Eric Parker, whose other works included Highways and Byways in Surrey.

But Bevan was a useful team player. He ‘got his Field’ in 1887 — that is, he was a regular member of the first team for Eton’s distinctive winter ball game, a form of eleven-a-side football with the addition of a rugby-like scrum called a ‘bully’ — and was Keeper (or captain) of the Field in 1888.

In the even more arcane Wall Game — a trial of stamina in the form of long, muddy ‘bully’, played against an ancient wall — he was a member of both the Oppidan and Mixed Wall XIs of 1888. In the traditional St Andrew’s Day contest between the Oppidans and the Collegers, Bevan’s Oppidans team lost by seven shies to nil, a high score but evidently not so exciting an encounter as the previous year’s, in which a boy called Benson wrote himself into Wall Game history by kneeling on the ball without respite for a full twenty minutes at the bottom of the bully.