Introduction

Abstract

My friend David Whitby died in the late spring of 1999 in Somerset, England. Left unfinished was his manuscript on British banking regulation, or more often non-regulation, called The Blind Old Lady. David had laboured long and hard on this project and had asked me to work with him in 1996. I was desultory, he was not. I did finally give him a rather long chapter dealing with certain bankers who were also oil traders, members of what I dubbed the "Serious Crime Community." However, I was of the opinion that David's work was unique in style and tone, and that mine jarred with his. Nonetheless we kept at it for a while. My wife, Constance Weaver, and I stayed with David in his place in Devon several times. He stayed at our home in State College, Pennsylvania, for five weeks in the spring of 1997. He was the most extraordinary man — funny, irreverent, kind, interesting, wordly, tough and generous.