John Claughton left Oxford in 1979 with a double first in Classics and four cricket Blues. He was just what the City was looking for, and – after a brief dalliance as an “inadequate” professional cricketer at Warwickshire – walked straight into a job at Rothschild’s. Only problem was, he hated banking and was “crap” at it.
One day he was sitting in the Jolly Gardeners pub in Putney with Alexandra, the woman who 13 years later would become his wife. She had been invalided out of the Royal Ballet School with a toe damaged by pointe work, and was suffering enough without having to put up with a boyfriend grumbling about work. If he hated it so much why didn’t he just do something else? “Tell me,” she challenged him, “what have you ever enjoyed?”
