The Scotsman - Business - How a high-stakes poker game stoked a bitter banking rivalry

This is a companion piece to the Royal Bank story to which I linked yesterday. (That's another nice thing about The Scotsman's business section - it will run related articles, to provide more than one perspective or more than one focus. You know - background, depth, those old-fashioned things.)

This also is by Martin Flanagan and Bill Jamieson:

SIR George Mathewson does not recall the Battle for NatWest in the clipped tones of a stuffy businessman. Reminiscences are punctuated by scowls and an occasional fist in the air, as if the events happened only last week. This isn’t a banker’s tranquil recollection of balance sheets, it is Marshall Zhukov reliving the Battle for Berlin...

I tell you, if you don't read business news, you're missing out on a great deal of drama and action. I didn't know that until recently. But I have had quite an education reading business news like this.

Here's the history bit I want to keep in my files, though:

...The Battle for NatWest was brutal, a combination of a fist-fight and a high-stakes poker game played out by Scotland’s two banking leviathans. It was a civil war which had been coming for more than two and a half centuries, as Royal Bank faced old adversary Bank of Scotland.

The animosity runs deep. The Royal was founded to counter the Jacobite links of the Bank of Scotland and the very different traditions were well illustrated in September 1745. As Prince Charles’s Highland army crossed the Forth, John Campbell, the Royal’s chief cashier, moved the bank’s cash, securities and plate into Edinburgh Castle, only to find Bank of Scotland had moved in its assets the day before...