So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  After we had settled down over coffee I explained that I had received some information about him in New Zealand which I felt he should know, even though I myself did not believe it for a minute. I had his undivided attention. He knew about Brads building a factory in Whan-gerey and agreed that for them to target Fiji was only to be expected. In the most tangential way possible I indicated the suspicion, held at a high level in New Zealand, that he had been seeing rather more of Brads than usual. His reaction was unexpected and rather charming. He said that the trouble for people in high places was that almost any interpretation could be put on what they did. When Prince Charles had visited Fiji he had gone for a walk along the beach with his daughter. The newspapers had picked up the story, embellished it and he, as her father, had to write a letter of apology to the Prince. Too embarrassing. Then he recalled that there had been some mention in the papers about my own divorce, the Olivier marriage had foundered, that sort of thing. He ended up by saying that whatever the Central Bank decided would be taken as final by him. He was as good as his word. I now think the Wellington gossip was misplaced. We were given the order and I let the matter drop.

  The Bradbury factory in Whangerey did cause them many headaches because of its being so far away. When De La Rue took Brads over a few years later we closed it down. Everything returned to normal, with us printing New Zealand banknotes in Gateshead, as if nothing had happened. A sweet revenge was HSBC’s agreement to our building a banknote factory in Hong Kong, for us to replace Brads as their printers.

  My own swansong as a regional manager in Asia and the Pacific was in Manila. There was a seminar: ‘The Future of Asian Payments Systems’. It was chaired by my friend Ting Roxas, President of the Philippine Development Bank. A number of Central Bank governors and senior banks’ directors were there. The two-day programme was led by an American technical expert in Electronic Funds Transfer Systems – EFTS. He was confident but insensitive to the seniority of the fifty or so Asians in front of him. His main thrust was that EFTS would replace handheld units of currency such as banknotes. He and his asso-ciates took us through what was then, more than thirty years ago, new territory.

  Before the first lunch I introduced myself as the De La Rue man to those whom I had not met. Over the two days the EFTS expert spoke repeatedly about the ease of counterfeiting banknotes. That audience knew more about banknote security than he did. He had hardly trav-elled beyond the shores of America, served by the US dollar. His other major weakness was that he made no mention of the grave dangers of fraud misplacing huge sums of cash on line, far more serious than any threat from counterfeit handheld banknotes. He took questions from us, some of them tentative because the subject was so new. His answers tended towards the patronising.

  After the final question, and to an uneasy audience, our chairman Ting Roxas gave a brief summary. Then to my surprise he said that there was in their midst a De La Rue man, known to many of them. He wanted to hear my comments. I rose and thanked him, rather nervously, and said that amidst such a gathering of central bankers, development and commercial bankers, I felt that from me, as a printer, a mere provider, a silence would be considered golden, and resumed my seat.

  Ting Roxas repeated his introduction of me, calling me Tarquin, in tones of friendship and asked me again, as a favour, to give my views. This changed the atmosphere. In return I called him Ting and said that De La Rue shared everyone’s concern about counterfeiting of any kind. No country suffered from this anything like as much as the United States. The main reason was that it was the world’s reserve currency, but it was insecure for modern times. How many, I wondered, had looked closely at the twenty dollar bill. They would see the Supreme Court building on the back, with some ancient cars in the street, the sort people remember in Charlie Chaplin films, the T model. This made it obvious that the United States, leader in so many fields of activity, was more than sixty years out of date with its banknotes. The front was black, the easiest of all shades to copy, and the back was green, also a single colour. No use of multicolour intaglio, no security thread, no watermark, no lithography. The currency was among the least dif-ficult to forge. That aside we shared the views of Interpol that a national currency should be replaced with updated designs every ten years or so, with machine-readable security features, now in place on all the banknotes we printed. These could authenticate all banknotes mechanically.

  The audience liked this. As we filed outside and said our farewells to each other I saw some men deferentially making way for someone who wanted to see me. Of all people it was Tan Sri Ismail, governor of the Malaysian Central Bank who had taken the business away from us. He seized both my hands. He said he was delighted I had had to be coaxed into saying something, so modest of me, and even more delighted that I had belittled the mighty US greenback. The real significance of this was that the next time the Bank Negara went to tender for banknotes De La Rue were awarded the lot.

  The United States has since modified its banknotes a little, and among a few other new features they now have watermarks.

  Twenty-one

  The years in the East put me together again although the delights had only been fleeting. I returned to England hoping to find a lasting rela-tionship. I bought a small apartment in Kensington. Its address appealed to me, as an Olivier, working for De La Rue: 4 de Vere Mews. Very prissy. It was in a converted stable block which had had stalls on the first floor as well. One or two builders’ wheelbarrows remained and I was the first occupant to move in, to the accompaniment of workmen finishing the courtyard, fountain and flowerbeds. Tristan was at West-minster, after being head boy at Cottesmore, and Isis was slotted to go there in Sixth Form. Clavelle we kept at the state school near Whitchurch because her mother and I were relieved that she had settled down somewhere at last.

  My new job was General Manager of Minting and Metals, starting early November 1979. This opportunity provided me with greater ful-filment than anything I had ever done. The Royal Mint was represented by De La Rue except where it dealt direct, as with the colony of Hong Kong. It shared out its business in a consortium with Imperial Metal Industries and the Birmingham Mint. Our market was worldwide. My predecessor was Dennis Paravicini. He introduced me to Dr Jeremy Gerhard, the Deputy Master of the Royal Mint. It was the tradition to refer to him as ‘The Deputy Master’ and to use his title when speaking to him. The title ‘Master’ belonged ex-officio to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Dennis introduced me to the mints, and the manufacturers of their equipment. Seeing the mighty machine tools in operation at the Royal Mint’s new factory in Llantrisant, South Wales, was an inspiration.

  Its line of furnaces melted and blended the alloys at a heat of fifteen hundred degrees Celsius, and pushed them continuously through a sleeve into a strip about an inch thick and a foot wide. These were cut and stacked in lengths of about seven yards, then rolled repeatedly until reduced to the right thickness for the coins. These rolls were fed into blanking presses which struck out the required shapes, mainly round, sometimes scalloped or even square as in the case of Swaziland. Surface impurities were washed away from the blanks in revolving acid baths. Then they were annealed and rimmed to give the high edge the Royal Mint prided itself on, and fed into the minting presses to be struck by the obverse and reverse dies.

  The Royal Mint had recently moved there from its traditional site beside the Tower of London, where Bert Fichter had been in charge of production. He oversaw the new fifty pence coin. This was an inge-nious shape: a curved equilateral heptagon, designed to behave as if round when pushed into a slot machine. He did not want to transfer to Wales and was pleased when Dennis offered him the job in Basingstoke of technical minting adviser to De La Rue. He was a stalwart hard worker whose family originated in Alsace. He had very strong hands, always cold, which was the hallmark of a man brought up in the craft of tool making.

  Overseas, Dennis introduced me to the Swiss Mint, the two German mints near Düsseldorf, and the Colombia Mint in Bogotá. There, w
hen we checked into the hotel, the receptionist mispronounced my name, calling me ‘Señor Oliver’. I politely corrected him, and pointed out that Olivier had two ‘i’s’. Dennis followed up by saying he was ‘Senor Paravicini, with three.’

  On our way home we paid our respects to the main US mint in Philadelphia. This cathedral-sized place manufactured only US coinage, with the occasional exception of Panama. The cutting edge manage-ment was executed by a sharp-featured and vigorous little man while his boss was a giant Dutchman. The two of them, of such contrasting sizes, reminded me of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. There the pace of striking appeared to be slow, but the majestic Bliss presses struck four coins at every stroke, producing more per minute than high-speed presses striking singles. In addition to my being General Manager of Minting and Metals I was to be the first managing director of Royal Mint Services – RMS. This was an idea the Deputy Master had put to Peter Orchard, for a new venture to be sales-led by De La Rue, with the incomparable tech-nical expertise of the Royal Mint in support. It was to offer expert advice and equipment to existing mints, and to construct mints in their entirety for countries which insisted on having one. The chairman of RMS was the Royal Mint’s number two, Roy Gravenor, the other two directors being Dennis and Bert’s successor in Wales, Ernie Howlett. We had only one employee to start with, Dave Rolf, a safe pair of hands, based in Llantrisant.

  Dennis became the De La Rue Group’s company secretary. We have been the best of friends ever since, seeing each other each year at a dinner with other old timers from De La Rue, and send Christmas cards to each other from ‘two i’s’ to ‘three i’s’. He helped with the phraseol-ogy and design of a brochure Dave Rolf and I put together on RMS.

  I spent Christmas in the pouring rain in Devonshire with Alan Dowl-ing, the previous sales director of the Royal Mint. He had become our consultant and his advice was alarming. He said the Royal Mint had become so uncompetitive it would soon lose its overseas markets. This tied in with what Dennis and I had heard from the two German mints, that the Royal Mint had had it too easy for too long in its traditional African and Middle Eastern markets, and they were going to attack as never before. I asked Alan to get together with his successor, the new sales director of the Royal Mint, Alan Lotherington, and write a paper on Export Prospects. Their findings were: ‘The Royal Mint still has more export customers than any other mint, though in terms of volume its market share has declined. … The Royal Mint has a poor record in competitive tenders in recent years, winning only two orders outright since January 1977.’

  Eventually this hard-hitting report percolated through both the Mint and the Treasury. They recognised the call for drastic action to reduce costs. Plans were announced for voluntary redundancies of the Royal Mint’s workforce of 10% in 1981–2 and a further 7% in 1982–3. This was without precedent. I was not the most popular man but the policy did enable us as a team to win the next major tender, for more than one hundred million coins for the Philippines. We also won the largest coin tender in history, for 2,700,000,000 coins for the Argentine, to refor-mulate their entire currency by reducing the number of zeros caused by hyperinflation. Unfortunately the Falklands war made them cancel it.

  Meanwhile RMS sent brochures to a few carefully selected countries. Almost immediately we received an inquiry from the Central Bank of Iraq. They had decided that with a population of more than ten million they should mint their own coinage. They wanted an offer for a striking mint, and the supply of blanks ready for them to strike, plus the tech-nology for origination, the pantographs and tool-making equipment for the dies. Just the cold metal end. Two weeks later there was a request from Iran for the same, plus the hot metal end as well: the melt-ing, rolling and blanking. This called for a contract worth three times as much.

  Dave Rolf worked flat out with one of the first word processors and produced long and detailed offers for each, in time for RMS’s first board meeting. My board approved and the two offers went out by special courier that day.

  De La Rue was visited by the special adviser to the Central Bank of Iraq, Mr al Kassab. He was the terror of bank employees and also of our own regional manager. Our banknote division sent along three of our best whom I accompanied to meet him at the Sheraton Hyde Park Hotel. He presented himself as almost grotesque: fingertips thrust together, lips pouting. He dealt fast with his banknote problems and dismissed the others. I realised he was an actor, enjoying himself behind his terrible mask. He sat further back into his armchair, sipped more whisky, lit a cigarette and gazed back at me, quizzically. I had seen through him. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘don’t look at me like that.’ And burst out laughing. He offered me a whisky and we had dinner together.

  The business called me to Baghdad. It was springtime and the Tigris was bursting its banks with floodwater. Entire trees were rolling down under the bridges, yet the air in the city was harsh and dry. I went to see Mr al Kassab. He was most welcoming over a cup of tea. I asked him about the hostility of the western press to Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Socialists. He said it was misplaced. The government had pro-vided every single village with electricity, fresh water and primary edu-cation. Discipline had had to be harsh because the population was so disparate. In the North were the Kurds, non-Arabs, who shared the same language and blood as the Kurds in neighbouring Turkey and Iran. The Iraqi government was run by minority Sunni Moslems, like him-self, in a predominantly Shi’ite population which was increasingly influ-enced by the Shi’ites in Iran. The interference of Iran had surged with the overthrow of the Shah and the arrival of the Ayatollahs. He felt it would not be long before Iraq invaded Iran with weapons supplied by America, and with the encouragement of an American Administration traumatised by the incarceration of its diplomats in Tehran. He there-fore said that with regret he had decided not to sign up for RMS to build their mint. Next year his forecast war did break out.

  Iran had similar fears. They advised our regional manager that they too would postpone building their mint. These were two huge setbacks. We had to do the rounds of all the suppliers included in our quotations, mostly in Birmingham, and bring them diplomatically into the picture for them to understand that the two big cancellations in no way reflected a failure by RMS. This gave me the time to learn from their engineers, all keen to share their knowledge.

  The Mint Masters’ Conference took place that year in Utrecht, in May. Bert Fichter and his wife came with me and we stayed in Amster-dam. There I found an answer to my continuing desire to help Third World countries. The development of clad coins by the US had not gone well overseas. The edges looked messy. An alternative would be to elec-troplate blanks made of mild steel, with a thin layer of alloy all round. The coins would look exactly the same as solid ones of bronze, cupro-nickel or any other coinable alloy. Ninety percent of the coin would be a mild steel core, with each surface plated five percent with alloy. This would reduce the intrinsic value of the metal. No matter what the scourges of inflation on purchasing power, or any hikes in metal prices, the quantity of alloy would be so small that it would be worth no one’s effort to recover it, whether copper, nickel or anything else.

  Taking the world coinage as a whole, the millions of tons in weight had an intrinsic value worth billions, all subject to the London Daily Price for copper, nickel and other metals with fluctuations which were unpredictable and at times alarming. The target I wanted to aim at was to revolutionise the composition of coinage throughout the world, reducing the cost to national exchequers by millions of pounds.

  There was a problem in presenting the case unarguably, showing at a glance the relationships between so many variables: metal prices, production cost, intrinsic value, face value, purchasing power and the time ravages of inflation. I had to find a way of presenting my case with the simplicity of Copernicus. Even so it’s a bit technical for a memoir with its tables and graphs so I have summarised and simplified my presentation in the Appendix.

  It was successful. The Deputy Master wrote to my CEO Pet
er Orchard:

  Dear Peter,

  I would like you to know how much we appreciated the contri-bution made by Tarquin Olivier in yesterday’s seminar on materi-als for low value coins. On his own initiative he had prepared a paper which made a significant contribution to our discussions through the insight it gave into the importance of black market rates of exchange, and which he presented in a thoroughly straightforward manner. I have, of course, expressed our appreci-ation to Tarquin and I am most grateful to you for making him available for the session.

  Yours,

  Jeremy

  There was more depth to my presentation than hinted at in his letter. The Royal Mint decided in January 1982, after the Treasury had approved, to invest £425,000 in a capital project to install an electro-plating plant for the production of plated mild steel blanks for our 1p and 2p coins. So all our bronze coins are now magnetic. With metal prices prevailing that year the saving to our Exchequer was around one million pounds. In the ensuing years they started plating in brass as well for export and eventually nickel in 1990.

  So, as in the best of all possible worlds, they had developed a healthy new overseas market on the rock-solid basis of a captive home market. My contribution at the very least had been to hasten the process. I think that is the most significant thing I have ever done for developing coun-tries. It saves them millions of pounds, every year, while protecting the integrity of their coinage.

  In Third World countries the need was especially acute. They needed extremely low denominational values for their coins, for the survival of their poorest people having a medium of exchange of any use to them. In India they had had to give up their low value aluminium coins because people melted them down to make kettles. Their need for elec-troplated coins was paramount. The early steps of Royal Mint Services led to a revival of a mint building contract which Dennis had initiated years before in Morocco. It had to be renegotiated in Rabat, an unexciting capital. French-trained Moroccan civil servants abounded with their self-conscious grid-thinking French, every syllable, every comma. This involved a number of visits.