…a proper lesson in how to conduct a real Glasgow ‘bender’…

…this ol’ Jurassic’s banking career kicked off just over 50 years ago in Docklands Govan in Glasgow… in the mighty Clydesdale & North of Scotland Bank Limited’s outpost, situated on the corner of Govan Cross, adjacent to the vast Harland & Wolff shipyards, the then kings of the shipbuilding industry on Clydeside… the area didn’t boast much in the way of wealthy merchants, nor stockbrokers… not even a lawyer nor accountant or two… in the WURDS of the politicians… Govan was definitely WURKIN class… ‘NUTHIN wrong with that’, I hear yeez say… and right yeez are… what it did breed was more than its fair share of characters… one such was Wee Jockie… his family name is conveniently lost, lest I get hammered for disclosure of confidential banking records… Wee Jockie was one of thousands of men who helped build the great ocean-going vessels for which the mighty Govan shipyards were justifiably famous in these days… he entered the bank one day, completely unknown to anyone… dressed in his cloth cap, trench coat over his dungarees, and stood at the main teller window… I recall he didn’t reach more than about five feet, cap and all… he wanted to open an account… the deposit was a crumpled cheque dated about a week earlier… Wee Jockie had never had a bank account before and had obviously been trying to figure out how to go about getting one… a simple signing of a form or two (none of yer money-laundering regulatory rubbish back then—certainly not in Govan) and his account was live… the cheque came from a local bookmaker, in the splendid sum of Sixty-Three Pounds, Five Shillings Sterling in pre-decimal money… now, yeez have to understand that the average weekly wage for a chap like Wee Jockie was prob’ly in the region of Seven Pounds Sterling... on that first day he withdrew Six Pounds Sterling… the very next day he was back… looking slightly the worse for wear… self-inflicted ailments of the Electric Soup vintage had left the signs of a full-blown hangover… this second day saw a withdrawal of Three Pounds Sterling… succeeding days came and we witnessed repeats of the standard Three Pounds Sterling takeaways… in those days the bank opened half-days on Saturdays, and just before closing at midday, Wee Jockie rushed in… bleary-eyed, and apparently not long out of his bed… and the weekend spend was looked after with a withdrawal of Eight Pounds Sterling…

…suffice to say, we could almost set the clock by Wee Jockie’s expected arrival times for the next couple of weeks… finally the balance had dwindled all the way down to a mere Five Pounds Sterling… he arrived with his usual puffy features, a certain air of alcoholic haze drifting around him… as he cleaned out that final Five Pounds Sterling, we heard his voice raised properly for the first time, he waved to us all and said, ’Thanks for a’ yer help…this has been the best bender I’ve ever been on— the Missus is still trying to figure out where I got the money from… Cheerio!’… it was evidently the last time he ever won big with the local bookmaker, ‘coz we never saw him again… I wonder if his wife ever got wind of how he managed to be blotto for a whole three weeks straight!… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

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