Ben Millington Buck : a/k/a " The one that got away "
I went to Sandhurst because my father was a regular army officer ( Lt Col Green Howards and ex POW ) ) and whilst at Dean Close School in Cheltenham I sat for and gained an army scholarship to the RMA , thinking that was what I wanted to do.
Only later after our first year at the RMA did I feel that I had made the wrong choice .... incidentally Tim Holmes also felt misgivings at the same time as well , but he hung on ..thanks to his father buying him a sports car as an inducement to stay !
Accordingly I wrote to my former headmaster at school asking his advice about going to university .. ( I had also done well in my A level exams ) ..he responded that with my academic qualifications I stood a good chance of getting into his old alma mater ..Trinity College Dublin . ..he duly wrote them a letter and lo and behold I received a reply offering me a place for the following academic year.to study for a new degree called Business Studies ( which covered Finance , Law and Economics )
I should add at this stage that it turned out that my Headmaster .. The Revd Douglas Graham was on intimate terms with the lady admissions officer of TCD .. having " stepped out " with her when they were both undergraduates at TCD many years before .. he was also an ex wartime RNVR Chaplain and was not at all keen on the Army , having served in the " Senior Service " and so was very happy to push my case.
My exit by the way from Sandhurst was not pain free .. my family had to pay back a big chunk of the scholarship money to the Army .
And so commenced four wonderful carefree years as a student in Dublin where more pints of Guinness were sunk than ever before or since in my life...a "rare ould time " indeed !
The world of overseas finance beckoned and I joined the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation ( HSBC today ) as a graduate trainee and was sent to Hong Kong , which in those days was their head office. ( HSBC tended to recruit young men who had a connection to the far east ..mine was that I had spent part of my childhood from 1947 to 1954 in Singapore and Malaya when my father was posted there after the war during what was then known as " The Malayan Emergency " ).
I spent 7 years in Hong Kong as a banker, towards the end specialising in shipping finance and travelling around the S East Asian region including South and much later North Korea.
Upon my return to London I switched to stockbroking specialising in far eastern shares which were then all the rage thanks to the
growth of the " tiger economies " in Asia . .. I was then working for Morgan Grenfell , a London merchant bank dealing with fund managers , pension funds etc .. Morgan Grenfell then sent me to New York to develop business with American institutional clients who were very keen to invest in the Far East . By this time I was married with two small children.
I spent 7 years in New York but travelled all over America on business. Morgan Grenfell had by then been taken over by Deutsche Bank and I returned to London where I became a fund manager for a while.
In 2005 I officially retired and bought a small farmhouse in southern Portugal. .where I spent my time between there and London .
I sold the Portuguese property in 2017 and now live permanently in London., though my wife , Mary , ( also at TCD ) and I still have many friends in Portugal and travel there frequently ... when we can !
Of our two sons , one lives in Sydney and is now an Australian citizen and the other lives in Hong Kong , working as a stockbroker.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had stayed in the Army ..but I suspect that I would have left quite soon anyway as it was not until after 1969 when I was leaving Dublin and the N Ireland troubles were starting that any interesting active overseas service took place ..It was mostly a UK / BAOR Germany peace time Army during the years from 1965 to 1970 .AND it was also the period of post Elvis ..sex, drugs , rock and roll long hair , flared trousers , the pill , Hippies , The Beatles , Rolling Stones .. who could resist that when you were in your twenties !
May 2021
