When Howard Flight arrived at NM Rothschild in 1970, with a Cambridge degree and a US MBA under his arm, an older colleague took him to one side. “He asked why on earth I was coming to work for a merchant bank,” recalls Flight. “The City was in decline, he said. It was now only serving the domestic market and it was far too big for that. So pay was going to be poor for a long time.”

The 22-year-old Flight ignored the warning – which was lucky, as the City soon staged a dramatic comeback. And the pay turned out to be very good indeed. “Within 20 years we entirely regained our pre-first world war position as the leading financial centre of the world.”