Conversation with God. David C. Wilson

The insurance agent or ‘clubman’ was welcomed into homes on council estates and into terraced cottages throughout the land. He was the archetypal, bicycle-clipped, and anoraked individual who was so familiar on the streets of any British town of that era. Times were, however, changing and whole communities had been transplanted into satellite shire towns from the cities, by the slum clearances of the fifties and sixties. When combined with progressive deindustrialization, this produced massive social changes, not least, to sales of industrial branch, insurance policies. I had realized instinctively from my first day as an insurance agent, that there was a declining market for the weekly paid, industrial branch life policies, and so had concentrated upon sales of ‘ordinary’ branch life policies (collected monthly through the banking system), together with general or non-life policies. Gradually, this resulted in a great deal of free time since I found I could efficiently service my ‘round’ in little more than two days, leaving the remaining time available (theoretically) for new sales. In practice, however, I filled this time with innumerable hobbies and activities—anything to take my mind off my current situation.

      That current situation involved a number of factors which in hindsight I have come to understand in total as a kind of bereavement, and I now understand that I was undergoing grief which did not diminish as the years passed by. But what, it may be asked, was I grieving for? It certainly wasn’t the change in the ‘status’ of my current work compared with the scientific work done previously, and I felt no remorse for seemingly abandoning the fruits of my expensive education. In my refusal to remain in science, or at least in the teaching of science, I had it seems killed off my first love, my own potential, indeed my own becoming. Science had not simply been my work, it had been my belief-system, and I had believed in the new humanism based as it was on scientific materialism. I was now no longer intimately involved in that work with the consequence that I was floundering in grief as a result of a severed relationship with my erstwhile ‘god.’ I was learning the truth of the maxim “no man is an island” at first hand, and the gradual formation of new personal relationships with hundreds of clients, many of whom became friends, never completely alleviated these feelings.

      Anger

      Although the feelings of grief never went away, they could be anesthetized and this was done by means of furious activity, and numerous hobbies were indulged in, including winemaking, often five or ten gallons at a time, which on this scale dominated the house. Then there was the kit-car, which became a vast money-sink, the investments in stocks and shares which, although successful, didn’t prove to be the big money-spinner hoped for, and all of these were accompanied by the perpetual DIY. Throughout this time the children were not exactly neglected or deprived so much as left to their own devices, for as a father I wasn’t giving 100% and I knew it. Sundays were different, however, and the whole family as often as not would go walking on bits of the local Gritstone Trail—a footpath through the nearby Pennine foothills. As these walks continued and the seventies gave way to the eighties, I began to experience another emotional state which curiously only occurred during the walks, and in the very places where one would most expect to find peace I became angry. I spent those later walks in silence, seething with a resentment against the world in general for not realising my quintessential excellence, and my ‘Micky Mouse’ employer in particular for its insistence on pressing for sales of yesterday’s financial products. In perfect hindsight of course, it seems quite natural to have expected grief to be followed by anger, an anger that more accurately highlighted my own unfulfilled potential. I was also angry with my wife, Chris, who was dragging me off on these walks when I really wanted to be planning ahead, checking my shares portfolio, working at something, anything, which would realize that lost potential. So as I walked, I inwardly fumed until the anger gave way to a determination to change things—once and for all. It should be understood that the angry determination of these walks was an internal state, which did not spill over into nastiness or unpleasantness towards either Chris or the kids. Indeed, it led eventually to a constructive dialogue with Chris about our future, as we worked out our plans to go into self-employment.

      Status

      We struggled for a long time over precisely what we were going to do in self-employment, before Chris agreed to join me in opening an insurance brokerage. Such a venture permitted me to employ the accumulated expertise of the past few years, years during which I had made a specialism of general branch insurance. Things didn’t turn out the way we expected, however, and our new office took just 20 pence for photocopying in its first week’s trading. Instead of doing business ‘off the street’ I found it necessary to continue to make personal calls on clients, who, if I were able to help them with their car or house insurance, would usually reward me with purchases of the more lucrative financial products. I discovered to my great surprise that I could sell, indeed had to sell to survive, and that this was linked to a more fundamental self understanding in that I was at last in a meaningful relationship with society by contributing my new expertise to it. I was amazed to discover, moreover, that the world had finally sat up and taken notice of us, seemingly because we had opened an office and I had exchanged my anorak for a three piece suit. The practising of my new ‘profession’ was finally allowing the grief and anger of the past few years to subside, especially as clients and even friends and family began to look on us in a new light. In the space of six or seven years I had experienced a roller coaster ride in terms of status, as I had moved from professional chemist/teacher to insurance agent before ‘ascending’ once more to the dizzy heights of self-employed broker. All this was of course taking place against the Thatcher backdrop of support, acclaim, and praise for entrepreneurial activities, and although our ascendancy seemed archetypally Thatcherite, the thought never crossed our minds that we might be included amongst those who would come to be called Thatcher’s children. Thatcher’s children included the ‘Hoorah Henrys’ and the ‘Yuppies’ (young and upwardly mobile), and I suppose we could have been described as ‘Yuppies’ if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was fast approaching forty. Upwardly mobile we remained, however, and we demonstrated this to all and sundry by buying a huge, stone-built house with a correspondingly huge mortgage. The mortgage could not be justified by any multiple of our non-existent accounts, and derived from a liaison with the hungry and aggressive manager of a newly opened building society branch office. So there we sat, kings of the hill—the house was in fact called ‘Springmount’—apparently set up for life and even discussing early retirement.

      Regulation—The Theft of an Industry

      In the early nineteen eighties some sixty five percent of the retail financial services industry—then known as the life assurance industry—lay in the hands of small firms of brokers. There were perhaps twelve and a half thousand such firms, usually comprising two or three partners, and whose combined business was worth many billions of pounds a year in new business fees and commissions. Many of these were composite brokers like our own firm, combining sales of financial products with general insurance sales. Sadly it seems, the wind of change is always blowing, and if a way could have been found to wrest this billion pound market from their hands, then the 1986 Financial Services Act was that way. The analogy, which springs to mind for this process, is the way in which the big supermarkets relieved the thousands of small grocers of their market share in the fifties and sixties. The grocers succumbed to the supermarkets whose massive buying power enabled them to undercut prices. Unlike the grocers, however, the brokers could compete on price with the big banks, building societies, and direct-selling insurance companies—their main competitors, and were consequently safe from this ‘fair’ form of competition. Businesses are, however, not only sensitive to price pressures, they are also vulnerable to cost pressures, and the onset of regulation under the new act brought about a massive yet disproportionate increase in business operating costs for the small brokerage. Although staggered over several years, the costs rose inexorably, beginning with the self-regulatory fees of several thousand pounds per year, and progressing with the enforced implementation of new systems and the quadrupling of paperwork. The new compliance visits to clients brought about a doubling or trebling of servicing costs, before finally the imposition of the requirement that all brokers (now called financial advisors) must obtain qualifications in financial services, ratcheted costs up further.

      None of this could be done in a political vacuum of course, and the blind hatred of the ‘chattering classes’ for the commission based remuneration system