Pat McClenaghan

Life’s little ironies are not lost on former banker Pat McClenaghan. Shoulder-tapped for compulsory military training in 1952, during the Korean War, young McClenaghan sweet-talked a full Colonel into commuting his training from an ordeal spread over several years into a single three-month stint as an orderly in the officers’ mess. Years later, as a senior member of the Howick RSA in Auckland he found himself taking salutes during parades from veterans of battles in Europe, North Africa and the Mediterranean.

“There they were, these grand old soldiers, parading past and saluting a bloke who’d washed dishes in the officers mess!” he said. “That was quite something.”

That wasn’t the only lesson the army taught him about respecting experience over rank. There was another far more salutary and potentially deadly incident.

“We trained on anti-aircraft guns using ammunition that had been made in 1938, during the early days of World War Two. It was nearly 15 years old and we would frequently have misfires when a shell would fire some time after it had been detonated.

“As a result there was a procedure to be followed if a shell didn’t fire immediately. On one occasion I fired a gun and there was such a misfire. A young lieutenant ordered the gun to be unloaded. The gunnery sergeant refused the order and insisted that the gun be left for 20 minutes before unloading, which was the procedure.

“Well, the young lieutenant repeated the order and again the gunnery sergeant refused it. Disobedience of this sort simply didn’t happen in the army and we were all wondering how it would end when, out of the blue, there was a terrific roar and the gun, at last, fired. If it had been unloaded as ordered that shell would have killed half the gun crew.

“That taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten about the value of experience and the importance of procedure.”

Pat’s pretty scathing about the inefficiencies he experienced as a young soldier. He remembers clearly being part of a 16-truck convoy sent to a firing range. Eleven of them broke down at some point during the trip.

This kind of ineptitude is like a red rag to a bull for the career banker who joined the BNZ in 1951 with nothing to his name but his school shoes and socks, second-hand trousers, a new shirt and a borrowed sports jacket. By the time he left the bank in 1988 he was the most senior lending manager for the Auckland area, controlling the lending activity of 109 branches from Taupo north and with a ‘discretion’, otherwise known as a lending limit, of $10 million.

Pat chuckles at the memory. “For the first six or seven years I was scared I wouldn’t make the grade and would be fired. I think that’s why I worked really hard and was so determined to make a name for myself early on.”

Life was pretty nomadic for a career banker in the 50s and 60s. You went where the bank sent you or that was it, your name went to the bottom of the promotion list. Pat had been in BNZ’s Hamilton branch for just over a year when he received a letter saying he had to move to the bank’s head office in Wellington by the start of the following month.

“It was alright for me because all I had to do was switch from one office to another. But it was hell for my wife who had to deal with all the stresses of supervising the move, settling the kids into new schools and all the other things that went with uprooting a family.”

Pat had three children with his first wife, Coral, who died in 2001. One daughter now lives near him in Kerikeri, another lives near Christchurch, and he has a son who lives in Russell.

He became pretty good at reading people, fairly early on in his career. Existing or prospective customers would come into his office and he would ignore their documents and credentials and simply observe.

“I got to a point where I could make a gut decision about whether I should lend money to somebody – and that intuition was usually spot-on.”

He remembers a case where, on first impression, every instinct screamed at him that he should deny a loan application. But, 30 minutes later, the applicant walked out of the meeting as a customer - with a loan worth three times what he had come in for.

“He was a good guy, despite first impressions, and he was worth backing. My gut told me that. And so it proved. He was a great customer and our relationship spanned many, many years.”

“The guys I trusted least were the ego merchants – the ones who told me what a great banker I was and about all the business they were willing to throw in my direction.”

Banking taught Pat even more life lessons than the army did. One of these is the importance of remaining true to himself. With barely concealed glee he tells the story of arriving at a new branch and being asked by the middle managers if he liked to play golf. He didn’t and, anyway, he couldn’t afford club membership fees. So he said so.

“Oh,” his colleagues said, “the bank manager won’t like that. You’d better pretend that you do.”

But when the manager did ask, Pat couldn’t bring himself to utter the lie. “No, and I can’t afford it,” he mumbled nervously.

“Quite right!” barked the manager. “And I don’t know how those boys downstairs can afford it either, they must have their priorities wrong.”

For Pat, the bank was like a family. He left the Hamilton branch in 1969. When Coral died 32 years later, in 2001, he got a card from the wife of the man who had been his manager there. “That was astounding,” he exclaims. “Just astounding. How many other organisations do you know of where something like that could happen?”

Pat married twice. His second wife, also Coral, died in May 2019 and his voice catches with emotion as he speaks of both women who captured his heart.  

Some of his fondest memories of both women revolve around travel, which remains a passion. He has left New Zealand 35 times to travel on organised tours or cruises through Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean, Asia and Australia.

“It’s been magnificent,” he said. “It’s expensive but I don’t regret spending a cent of it. It was the least I could do for the two magnificent ladies who supported me in my career for all those years and we had a ball. We notched up so many magnificent memories together and that’s what’s important.

“Those memories now make me feel that they’re still with me, somehow.”

Onya, Pat – you’re an absolute pleasure to spend time with and I’m sure they loved your company. Keep those fabulous memories fresh and close, and the stories coming.