I phoned them up and said I haven’t got a cheque for £66000 you will have to take it out of my deposit

General — July 27, 2010 at 7:37

“I phoned them up and said I haven’t got a cheque for £66,000, you will have to take it out of my deposit.” Until then he had paid every demand. All he has left now is a £27,000 bank guarantee letter from Lloyds Bank. “They haven’t called that yet, but they probably will do before July. That will be the last money that Lloyd’s have got in my deposit I have nothing further to give them.

I have lost all my life savings.”The story is the same all over Chobham, although no one is keen to talk about it. Millions of pounds of savings have been wiped out; and, on the whole, they are savings that people could ill-afford to lose. Stewart Monk, who runs the local gift shop, says that the widow of a local Lloyd’s Name came into his shop before Christmas and told him that she was going to have to sell the house. “She was left to pick up the pieces when her husband died last summer,” he says “She didn’t seem bitter about it at all, just resigned I felt incredibly sorry for her. She has not done anything wrong, and her husband was trying to do the best he could. I think when things go wrong to this extent the Government should step in and rescue them. I don’t know how many of these people understood what they were getting into, but I don’t think there’s any difference between them and the Maxwell pensioners.”The Maxwell pensioners might disagree, and with good reason.

Yet it would be wrong to yield to the temptation to dismiss Chobham’s Names as the greedy super-rich, undeserving of sympathy It is a prosperous village, but in a modest way. There are more obviously wealthy towns in the area – Windlesham, Wentworth and Virginia Water in Surrey, and Sunningdale and Ascot across the border in Berkshire – but these seem to have escaped relatively unscathed by Lloyd’s. That seems to be part of the nature of the phenomenon: few of the victims were ever spectacularly rich; most of the money that has been lost is middle-class money.The villagers of Chobham, for example, tend to be accountants, architects and solicitors rather than the more ostentatiously rich sheikhs and City men in neighbouring towns. If you walk or drive around the village, or go to Holy Communion, or sit around in the pub, the people you meet are ordinary, middle-class people, with ordinary Home Counties aspirations. Overheard talk in the 300-year-old Sun Inn is more likely to be about families and football than about spirals, Piper Alpha and Hurricane Hugo. Villagers support their church, and their local branch of the NSPCC.