Spare a thought for the young Sir Fred Goodwin.
I went to school with him – Paisley Grammar in
the early 1970s, and then onto Glasgow University where I developed a peculiar bond with him.
I enrolled at uni aged 16 - a year earlier than most. For the previous year Fred, a same age Paisley Grammar classmate of my brother Ian, and Paisley Grammar’s lone Trot, John "Paddy" Adams, were in Fred’s car pool from Paisley. I was a new class of ‘76 back seat recruit. It was a smart gold
Rover 200 – quite a set of wheels for a student.
These were the days of the Pistols and, yes, The Eagles,
Hotel California being THE album!
And in the dispute over what radio station (
Radio 1 or
Clyde) played in Sir Fred's Rover as we crawled along Paisley Road West, Fred was for commercial Clyde and The Eagles. It might surprise you to learn that, as a young radical, I was on Fred’s side, loving the Eagles more than he did, as opposed to the noisy “trash” of the punks, favoured by Paddy, the staple of Radio 1 -
God Save The Queen aside, banned for just being too right on
Indeed at 16, with most of my own classmates still a school doing a sixth year, Sir Fred was a bit of a mentor, almost father figure to me. Whilst I was political enough - a party member since the age of 12 - I was never too keen on the ideological debate which raged between the 3rd ( Paddy) and 2nd ( bro) Internationals in the car, and then into the
Men’s Union smoking room ( surrounded by a bunch of public schoolboy neo- fascists, plotting Maggie and Michael Forsyth’s soon to be launched counter revolution)
Me and Fred had ambitious plans of our own, and together we became the unofficial pinball champions of the Union basement, my mentor Fred being both proud and disappointed when I took his crown sometime mid 2nd term.
And all closely watched by The Union’s "
Eddie the handyman", who in the juvenile homophobic mind of Sir Fred, was "a poof" eyeing him, me and everyone else up ready to whisk us away to his workshop if one dropped one’s guard
Of such stuff is the most successful and then most spectacularly disastrous banker in world history made.
And if he losses that £650k a year pension, who knows he might once more be my chauffeur
But I did like Fred, was proud of his success whilst it lasted. Maybe he will do a
John Profumo and use a personal disaster to tun his life around, serving the poor rather than livimg off the backs of them.
I hope so. Fred has a better side. I can vouch for that.
