Few of today’s ‘cashless generation’, tapping their cards just to buy a coffee (oh yes they do) will know they have Leslie Priestley (and a few others) to thank for the banking revolution that evolved over the last 50 years. Picture ‘Swinging London’ in 1966 (Twiggy named as Face of the Year and Britain about to win the World Cup). Barclaycard (Britain’s first credit card) was launched that summer to a TV advert (WARNING: SEXISM ALERT) showing a young ‘blonde about town’ with a Barclaycard peeping out of her bikini bottom and the voiceover: “All a girl needs to go shopping”. Behind the scenes, Leslie was the man from Barclays tasked with touring high-street shops across Britain, trying to persuade them to accept “this little piece of plastic” instead of cash. Within twelve months, Barclays had a million card-holders who could use it at over 30,000 retail outlets. The rest is history, as they say.

Leslie was born in Eltham, south London and attended Shooters Hill Grammar School, where his careers advisor sent him to Barclays Bank. During National Service he was shot-at (on a golf course in Egypt) during the Suez Crisis. Surviving, he returned to banking where his CV reads like a ‘how to succeed in business’ book: including Secretary- General of the Committee of London Clearing Bankers (1979), Chief Executive (and later Director) of TSB (1985), and latterly becoming a Board Member of the CAA, and a member of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.

Of particular relevance to the RSA, he was also Chairman of the Trustees of the CAA Pension Scheme, and helped to ensure its survival after the privatisation of NATS.

Leslie was one of the few people in banking able to withstand the demands of newspaper magnate Robert (Captain Bob) Maxwell, who came looking for a loan: “I see you own boats and planes,” he told Maxwell. “You can sell them before you come asking me for money.”

In retirement, Leslie read, gardened, travelled, played golf, and was most generous with advice (when sought) to RSA members.

We offer Audrey Priestley and their children our sincere condolences.

Early days

Anne was born in Northampton in 1940, the only child of Bob and Mollie Hurrell. Anne’s father worked for shipping line Elders & Fyffes, but more importantly was a capped county rugby player. “Bob was such a handsome young man when were courting” Anne’s mum later recalled “but then he broke his nose in a rugby match, just before we married. It was never quite the same afterwards.”

After her dad was called away to war, Anne and her mum went to live with family in Bristol “to be further away from the bombers”. With hindsight, that was probably not the wisest decision, but they survived anyway, later moving to Plymouth and then on to Liverpool.

Like many of his generation, Anne’s dad was reluctant to talk about his war service, but he was certainly part of the D-Day landings. He told me “my first task each morning was to get the troops out of the barns where they’d been sleeping. I was welcomed by the newly-liberated farmers in Normandy, invariably with a large tot of Calvados… sometimes getting everyone back to base took a bit longer than planned…” Bob later recalled being shot-at by a sniper from a rooftop in central Paris as the allies liberated the city in 1944.

The Liverpool years

Growing up in Liverpool in the 1950/60s must have been great fun, and Anne made the most of it: travelling to school by tram, with occasional trips on the Liverpool Overhead Railway (known as the Dockers’ Umbrella) until it was closed and dismantled in 1957. Anne remembered being taken on a school trip to see the charred white hull of the liner “Empress of Canada” which had caught alight during a re-fit and collapsed onto its side at the dock. It was there for more than a year before being refloated and scrapped in 1954.

At grammar school, Anne discovered a love of writing and opted to go in for journalism. “We’ve never had a girl going for that profession” Anne’s headmistress told her father at a PTA meeting. He told me later “she seemed to think I was putting my daughter on the game!”

Anne secured a trainee reporter post with the “Liverpool Echo” group of newspapers and spent the next couple of years doing “hatched, matched and dispatched” columns – and reporting on local amateur drama productions. All fairly harmless we might think – not so, as Anne related: “In one production I reviewed, the ‘juvenile’ male lead was well into his fifties and you could almost hear his knees creaking. I made a passing reference to that in my review, but it turned out that he had a ‘fan-club’ of elderly widows and my paper was swamped by letters of complaint. I had to do a lot of grovelling to keep my job, so I was very careful after that!”

Soon after Anne started work at the “Echo”, her father was posted to London. Anne told him: “I’ve just got my first job and I’m not leaving here.” Eventually, a room was found and Anne left home at 17. “It was hard work” she said: “I’d grown up in a home where there were always loo rolls and soap in the cupboard – and food in the fridge. Now there was nothing, unless I went out and bought it!” But she loved her little room: “The walls and ceiling were decorated with beer mats and record sleeves – me and my friends thought it was really smart. Then my dad came to see me, took one look at my room and said ‘Good God, what a dump’. I cried for days.”

Anne’s interest in music centred around ‘Trad Jazz’ ‘Dixieland’ and ‘Swing’. In post-war UK that evolved into ‘Skiffle’, then led by Lonnie Donegan (‘The King of Skiffle’). Anne would see Lonnie quite often at Liverpool’s famous ‘Cavern Club’ (where her ex school-mate Pricilla White – later Cilla Black – was the hatcheck girl). Anne told me: “I persuaded Lonnie to let me interview him for the ‘Echo’ – which was quite a coup as he was so famous at that time. I went round with my photographer and Lonnie answered the door fresh out of the shower – with not a stitch on! He wasn’t tall but he was ‘well put together’ as they say, and the photographer made us a full size poster of him for the office, until his agent got to hear about it and made us take it down.”

Then one day everything changed:

Anne continues: ”the Cavern Club only had a coffee bar, so at the interval everyone streamed across the road to the pub. When we came back one night, there was a new local band playing a new style of music. Skiffle died almost overnight and ‘The Beatles’ as they were later known, became the ‘Cavern’s’ house band. They were lovely guys and I certainly remember chatting with them over coffee, but I became closest to their manager Brian Epstein, who would literally cry on my shoulder whenever he’d had a row with a (then illegal) boyfriend.”

RW adds: I had the great privilege of taking Anne back to Liverpool a few years ago. We stayed in the city centre, visited the (replica) Cavern Club, the (genuine) pub across the road and rode the ‘ferry ‘cross the Mersey’. I know she enjoyed the trip.

Later, Anne worked for her father, who was by this time a director of Elders & Fyffes. Anne said: “Working for my dad was a terrible mistake. I was earning more money, but whenever anyone made a mistake, he’d blame me. So I left.”

But before then…

Motherhood??

With Anne’s looks and sociability, it was (probably) no surprise to friends and family when she became pregnant at 19 to a boyfriend who promptly went AWOL. In September 1960 Anne was returning to Liverpool on one of her dad’s banana boats when she went into labour off Land’s End. She and baby son Tim were rescued and brought ashore by the RNLI’s newest lifeboat the “Solomon Browne”. In fact, it was that lifeboat’s very first launch.

Anne’s mum and dad promptly adopted Tim so that he would grow up as a member of their family. Although that wasn’t without the occasional trauma: Anne’s dad told me “The next day, I went to my barber at the Mayfair Hotel. He said ‘Well sir, I’m sure you’re relieved not to be involved in that banana boat rescue off Land’s End yesterday.’ I just shrank into the chair…”

21 years later the Solomon Browne was lost with all hands in what we now know as the Penlee Lifeboat Disaster.

RW adds: Anne was a staunch supporter of the RNLI – and they are beneficiaries in her Will. Looking back many years later Anne said: “It was a tricky operation. Tim was lowered to the lifeboat in a fish-basket, then I was stretchered over. I was pretty scared but the lifeboat crew were very reassuring. When Tim was 50, we gathered at Penlee to pay our respects as guests of the RNLI - accompanied by several reporters. Tim laid a wreath at the memorial then we visited the current Penlee lifeboat.” While Anne and Tim were being interviewed, I was below decks with the ambulance crew who’d taken them to hospital 50 years before. One of them said “well, it’s great to know they got on OK – but he wouldn’t fit in a fish-basket now, would he?” You can find the story on BBC/Regions/Cornwall/Penlee lifeboat.

London beckons

With Anne’s parents and Tim settled in London, Anne moved south, taking what she loved to recall as “four sordid rooms in Chelsea” (the phrase actually came from our favourite musical “Cabaret”) that she shared with a flatmate. This was around 1962, so with two ambitious young ladies – in trendy Chelsea – there were plenty of party invites. At one, Anne recalled “we met Dr Stephen Ward, who’d just become embroiled in the ‘Profumo Scandal’. He was very charming, but seemed rather sad, so it was no surprise when he took an overdose…”

Anne worked for a PR agency in Fleet Street. “My boss was fond of the booze”, she recalled. “Well, that was normal at the time, but he drove a bright yellow Lotus Elan convertible, which drew police officers in like a magnet. One evening we were stopped in Park Lane and he was found to be over the limit. The policeman invited me to drive the Lotus home, but I said ‘I’ve had a drink too, so I’m getting on the bus. Goodnight’”.

Then, the CAA came along…

“OK, but I’m only going to stay for six months…”

By the mid-1970’s, Anne was married (to Alan Noonan), living in Sutton (close to parents and son Tim in Banstead, Surrey) and looking for more reliable work than her PR agency could provide. She responded to an advert from the CAA offering editorship of the Authority’s monthly ‘house journal’ with ‘oncall’ Press Office duties within the CAA’s PR team.

When the CAA was formed in 1972, it brought together four separate organisations, so a ‘house journal’ was a way to bring separate teams together. Contracting-out the writing and publication hadn’t worked and Anne became the first ‘in-house’ editor of “Airway” in the late 1970s.

“Airway” was really Anne’s dream job: She made the newspaper her own and was involved with it until she retired more than 20 years later. I joined the “Airway” team in 1985 from CAA Airworthiness Division and Anne was the most inspiring teacher any trainee could want. She told me: “if you can make a link between something interesting and what the CAA does, then go out and get that story.” She recalled an air-sea rescue exercise in Scotland where she was a volunteer ‘victim’, being winched up into the helicopter: “It was freezing cold and I don’t like heights so my eyes were tight shut. Later that night in the hotel some guests were saying ‘did you see that guy being rescued from the sea?’ I didn’t tell them it was me.”

Over the years, we’ve both escaped from burning aircraft (cabin water spray research), flown with the red Arrows (Anne) blown up a jumbo jet (explosion research) - me, and many other things you wouldn’t normally get to do on an office job… including interviewing a team of Morris Dancers…

Anne’s ‘let’s just do it’ approach was infectious and we became friends as well as colleagues. We were both single and sociable, and with an office in the heart of London’s West End “any plans for tonight?” was a frequent question. Many’s the time we’d arrive for work in the morning asking “what do I owe you for last night?’ or “have you booked our tickets for that show yet?” much to the chagrin of our more home-focused colleagues. Actually, we enjoyed winding them up…. and it worked every time.

Then, there were the “Airway” parties, over which Anne presided: Because our job involved calling staff at any time to help us respond to media issues, we had a lot of people to thank every Christmas – and so we did. But imagine mixing chairmen, senior and junior staff, national journalists and a generous supply of booze? We wouldn’t be allowed to do it today! No stories ever ‘leaked’, but we did bring at least two couples together who later married; one boy-girl, one boy-boy. Hope you’re all still happy together.

Have passport – will travel

Anne’s parents had introduced her to European travel. Subsequently, her favourite plan was to fill a car with friends and clothes and “see how far you can go for the money”. Anne and I first travelled to southern France in 1989, which was (a bit) challenging because when she was driving, I was navigating, but when I was driving, I was still navigating… We arrived (eventually) but I recall Anne saying en-route “…and the robins will cover us with their leaves.”

Once we’d both retired, we took several foreign trips each year. On one of our many visits to the Middle East, with the coach climbing impossibly steep and narrow roads, neither of us wanted the window seat, “…I’m sure it’s your turn…” preferring to look at the floor, rather than the view….

There’s a life after work

By the time Anne retired in 2000, she was living in her own flat in the City of London’s iconic Barbican Estate. She joined CAA-RSA and was quickly appointed a member of the RSA’s Central Committee. Then she was invited to ‘help out’ at a bookshop in Hampstead owned by friend Keith. Over the years, this grew from one to four days a week (including looking after Keith’s elderly mother) until she quit – eventually - in 2010.

By that time, Anne had been elected Chairman of the RSA – ironically while we were away on holiday, so she didn’t know until afterwards! But she was always a great supporter of the RSA, and helped to steer it though difficult times. We all owe her a huge debt of thanks.

In conclusion… Anne’s looked after me, and I’ve looked after Anne. I’m really sad to have lost someone who’s been my ‘best mate’ for more than half my life, but my task now is to ensure that her wishes – and her memory - are respected. Anne said: “I don’t want anyone to mourn my passing – but I’d like my friends to raise a glass to celebrate my life.”

So, I suggest: “Here’s to you, Anne, thank you for being in our lives and it was great to be your friend. Cheers.”

Brian Morgan, Captain, formerly a CAA Flight Ops Inspector/Principal Flight Ops

Inspector at Aviation House in High Holborn until 1988, passed away in February this

year.

My beloved late father, had joined the Board of Trade Civil Aviation Department Flying

Unit, CAFU, in 1968. However, his flying career had begun on volunteering for the Royal

Navy in 1944 while at school in Wales. His early flying training was in Canada, though he

didn't have the 'opportunity' to fight, and was de-mobbed in 1947. Having acquired a

taste for flying and service life, he went on to join the RAF, becoming a Meteor pilot on

No. 263 Squadron and then an instructor. This latter nearly finished his flying career as

to the repeated dives, to teach recovery from engine failure, led to inner-ear problems. The solution was a posting to RAF

Defford to undertake flying duties supporting the development of radar at nearby Malvern. He went on to be a Hastings

pilot at RAF Colerne from 1963 to 1966 and was fortunate not to be at the controls of the fatigued aircraft involved in the

Toot Baldon accident of July 1965 (all on the flight perished, Ed).

After he joined the Civil Aviation Flying Unit at Stansted in 1968, I remember visiting as a young boy and being shown

over the CAFU HS125 aircraft in the hangar. Mostly Dad didn't discuss his work, though I’m aware of a certain Minister of

Transport who was firmly encouraged to leave the flight deck despite the HS125 being ‘their’ aeroplane – but not when

airborne! His log book also records a flight from Aberdeen to Heathrow with a certain Rt Hon Edward Heath, Prime

Minister, in 1970, though this was a one-off and the more regular passengers were ‘just’ Ministers or Ambassadors.

At CAFU he was also heavily involved in Instrument Rating Tests (IRTs) for trainee pilots and calibration of groundbased radars (flying prescribed tracks to confirm the coverage of newly installed or refurbished radars, Ed). When

conducting IRTs, his log book records that in May 1973 he failed four out of five candidates. I do wonder if this prompted

him to grasp the next opportunity, which was to the Flight Operations Inspectorate in 1976, at the old Aviation House in

High Holborn. He very much enjoyed his work in this CAA branch. He was proud of his achievement in establishing and

licensing Extended Twin Operations (ETOPS), including taking the HS125 to conduct appraisals of airports in Iceland

and Greenland, assessing their suitability for diverted ‘big twins’. He also set down the procedures for the carriage of

racehorses by air – animal lovers please look away!

On retirement from CAA in 1988, he went on to be Flight Ops Director at Paramount Airways, in Bristol, and then to

Airtours in Manchester. When these adventures ended so too did his involvement in commercial aviation and he then

enjoyed spending time with his wife Dorothy and friends in Great Malvern, and at Tenerife. He supported his old school,

the Vulcan To The Sky project, Paddle Steamer Waverley, Help for Heroes and a range of ex-service organisations.

Dad, wait for us, we’ll see you in Arrivals.