I’m relieved that I won’t have to learn about the new Registers of Moveable Transactions, as these days my interests lie in other fields (perhaps waters would be a better term as I contemplate the approach of the sailing season) but the news reminded me of a story that my father told. Circumstances forced him to leave school at 14, but he had an ambition to join the profession and managed to secure a job as the office boy in Dunlop Gibson & Mair. The firm had two offices: Dunlop and Gibson were based in Glasgow and Mair in Newmilns, where he was also for a time the town clerk.

The Glasgow office acted for a bank who financed Albion Motors, whose buses and lorries, with the well known Rising Sun emblem, were ubiquitous on Scotland’s roads until the early 1970s. To secure their advances, the bank took a sublease of part of Albion’s yard at Scotstoun, and the area was surrounded by a security fence with a locked gate. When a vehicle was completed, father would take a tram to Scotstoun, armed with the keys and a register of pledges, to open the gate, observe delivery and take a careful note of the vehicle number, the procedure of course being reversed when the bank confirmed that payment had been made by the purchaser. A strange process, but with an element of publicity that is lacking with floating charges.

Ewan Kennedy