RE: Charlie Nunn interview in the Sunday Times16 Apr 2023 17:44
Lloyds Bank boss Charlie Nunn: I know what it’s like to be hard up.
Charlie Nunn is telling a story. The chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group turns the clock back to the early 1980s when, while living in Warsash, near Southampton, his mother and psychiatrist father split up, prompting her to seek a bank loan to start a business.
“My mum left school at 16, had not taken her O-levels, got married at 17 and had her first child at 18. She had four kids, no education and was not sure what to do. She went to the local bank branch and was given a loan to start a business,” says Nunn, now 51, who was the youngest of the four and just ten at the time.
“We set up a business,” he adds, describing how they sold souvenirs, often with a nautical theme given their base near the Solent, including coins made from the Holland 1 submarine, which sank in 1913 and was salvaged in 1981.
We were also spending all of our time tying ribbons on bears, putting earrings in boxes,” says Nunn, who is no longer in touch with his father. In his mid-teens, they started printing T-shirts.
He recounts this in his first profile interview since taking the helm of the group — home to Lloyds itself, the Halifax, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, and other well-known brands such as Bank of Scotland, Scottish Widows and Black Horse — in August 2021 not as a sob story. “I had a brilliant upbringing,” he says. But Nunn wants to explain why he has been “excited about economics and financial services” from a young age.
The bank loan opened the door to the new business and as he reminisces about what he describes as a “normal childhood” he reveals that his experience in his mother’s business also played a part in him getting a place at Cambridge.
He arrived at an interview at Downing College with a briefcase stuffed full of the souvenirs following a sales pitch at a museum.
“The professors started quizzing me on economics. About ten minutes in, they said, ‘What’s in the briefcase?’ There were two or three teddy bears with different coloured ribbons, and pencils and rulers from all the different museums across the south coast. And so we got into a whole discussion about how business operates, how you make money.”
Educated in the local school, Nunn’s education ended at 1pm each day because of the disruption of the 1980s teachers’ strikes. “I just had the afternoon to myself to go do sports work in my mum’s business,” recalls Nunn. He does not complain about his education — along with classmates he even won a national competition predicting interest rates — and says the importance of learning was one of his father’s influences.
Due to the strikes there was no homework, so by the time he went to do A-levels at sixth form college, Nunn was not in the routine of studying outside school hours, unlike some of his new classmates, and not that surprised when his teachers predicted low A-level grades. He did not apply to university and embarked on travels in Asia.
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