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Typewriters were just being invented, and were so precious that the office locked theirs in the safe each night. The future Governor of the Bank of England discovered the combination, burgled the vault nightly, practiced on the typewriter for hours until he was an expert.
By answering a newspaper advertisement, he got a position with a firm doing business in Russia and the Middle East. At 29 he became vice president of a large trading company, MacAndrew and Forbes, and managed their business in America for eleven years.
Catto became the Admiralty representative of the Russian Commission in America during World War I, later transferred to the British Food Mission. Between wars his career was solid business. He went to India for the great Andrew Yule & Co. (cable address: Yuletide), and in 1930 became a partner in Morgan Grenfell & Co., at that time J. P. Morgan & Co., which still has a large investment in the company. In 1940 he resigned all director ships to accept an unpaid, specially created job as advisor to the British Treasury.
In the Treasury Catto first came into intimate contact with John Maynard Keynes, another wartime Treasury advisor. Chance gave the two men adjoining offices in the old Board of Trade building. To the surprise of all they became fast friends. The gaunt, six-foot Keynes had an unparalleled intellectual equipment. Plump, Pickwickian, smiling Lord Catto had the practical experience which Keynes lacked. Together they made a sure-footed team — Keynes operating in the world of high theory, always able to give three solutions to any problem; Catto insisting that only one could be chosen. When the time came for Britain to propose a plan for the stabilization of postwar currencies (TIME, April 5, 1943), Lord Keynes drew the basic document. But Catto was there at his elbow with advice on the practical details.
The Grand Objective. The fact that Lord Catto, the practical banker, could work so closely with Keynes, the intellectual, was not surprising. Their cooperation grew out of a simple need, the same need which old Montagu Norman had felt at the end of World War I—the need for a worldwide currency and financial system.
That need will be paramount in Lord Catto's mind, just as it was paramount in Montagu Norman's mind a quarter-century ago. The means may have to be new: the grand objective is the same. Lord Catto is the first to acknowledge that Britain cannot exist unless some kind of system of trading and credit can be reestablished at war's end. The paramount question will be: What kind of system?
Lord Catto knows that his country faces profound difficulties. Burdened by debt, faced with the loss of revenues from overseas investment and shipping, faced too with the problems of a Europe in reconstruction, postwar Britain must inevitably maintain all manner of exchange and trade controls for the short run. The temptation will be to let these controls become permanent—to try to enter into a whole series of bilateral "deals" of the Schachtian variety with Europe, with South America, and within the Empire.