Rtn Keith Otter: Fond memories of insolvency

It seems strange to have fond memories of insolvency but understandable once you know that today’s speaker, our own member Keith Otter, spent 35 years working in insolvency, sorting out the affairs of insolvent businesses.

His fond memories date back to the late 1960s, when he had just started his insolvency career in what was then the Liquidation Department of Cooper Brothers & Co, where he remained throughout those 35 years. When he joined, Cooper Brothers were the world’s third largest firm of accountants. He nearly resigned straightaway, he was so taken aback by the contrast between Coopers and the small firm of chartered accountants where he trained. As a newly qualified chartered accountant, he was also dismayed to realise that Coopers regarded him as a very junior member of staff.

On his first day he was warned against upsetting either of the firm’s two senior partners, although he had already worked that out for himself. Three other people he was told he should no upset were the manager of the Print Room, the chief maintenance man and the switchboard supervisor. Upset one of them and somehow anything you wanted done would always get stuck at the back of the queue.

The switchboard supervisor was Mrs Trotter. Occasionally a caller would ask for “Miss Trotter” by mistake. The telephone equipment used at the time meant that the switchboard operators found it difficult to distinguish between that and “Mr Otter”. Keith had some rather strange telephone conversations!

When Keith joined the firm he thought that he was pretty good at insolvency, having studied it particularly thoroughly while revising for his final examinations. He soon had to admit to himself that he hardly knew anything. There are things the books don’t tell you and the examiners don’t ask, such as:

• How do you close a business down?
• Do you need to close it down?
• How do you make sure you have all the assets?
• What do you say to the staff?
• How do you deal with the irate creditor who storms into the office demanding a payment you can’t make?

Keith didn’t tell us the answers to those questions but he did warn us that he knew from personal experience that the last situation was one you definitely did not want to mishandle.

Among the people he remembered with affection were the building’s maintenance man, whom Keith got on well with. Like Keith he worked with the firm until he retired. At one reunion he reminded Keith of the time he had made some new internal doors and mentioned that he had made them all 6 inches too short! He and a colleague worked late one night adding six inches of wood to the bottom of each one.

Another person Keith mentioned was the department’s filing clerk, who had previously served in the Royal Marines. Apparently he was full of stories about his times serving with the Marines overseas.

Keith didn’t retell any of those but a story from the ex-Marine’s time back in the UK. He had been walking down Oxford Street with his wife when they stopped to look into the window of a shop selling ladies’ clothes. He spotted a bikini, said to his wife “Gosh, I bet you would look good in that!”, then discovered that his wife had walked on and he was speaking to a complete stranger!