Polly's press & media appearances
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Self-flagellation and the City
Rediscover your Passion - Go It Alone
Finansmiljøet i London - et Jobbhelvete
Fear and Loathing in the Heart of the city
My Glittering City Career Turned into Golden Handcuffs
Do Women Really Get a Raw Deal in the City?
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31st October 2006 by Ismat Abidi Back in 2001, Polly Courtney was about to embark on the final year of her Engineering degree at Cambridge. She had spent the summer interning at one of the major investment banks, so when they rang to offer her a high profile position on a full time basis she was understandably elated. She was living her dream. But now, just five years later, she is sat with me on a wet autumn morning, in a Camden café, casually revealing scandals of cocaine use, extramarital affairs and all the other dark, depraved secrets that the investment- banking world would rather keep hidden from prying eyes. Her dream had turned out to be nothing but a tawdry illusion, a hollow fuck-around. When she was at university, Polly, along with a host of scrupulously hand-picked students, had been invited to lavish dinners and wine-tasting sessions, laid on by investment banks. “I got a little posh invitation in my pigeon hole and I was thinking, ooh how nice!” It goes without saying that Polly already had a stellar academic record, and recruiters headhunted her, along with a like-minded crowd that had all been sent invites. Speaking of this time, Polly says, “It was generally good fun, they starting talking about the fast moving element of the work which was very exciting because it was opposite in terms of the slow paced work of engineering that I was used to.” The recruiters sold her and her fellow students on the image of rubbing shoulders with high flying CEO’s and earning enough to live in Sloane Square by their second year. Who wouldn’t want to apply? The thought of coming from a non-financial background briefly concerned Polly, but the investment bank dismissed her worries. One application and two interviews later, Ms Courtney was offered eight to ten weeks of training, spreadsheets, dinners and clubbing, not to mention £7000 in the bank. Let the games begin… “A whole week of training and technical skills from Excel to PowerPoint was actually quite rigorous. The atmosphere was bizarre; suddenly I was in a world of high finance, wearing suits. The first week was quite tough.” Although the internship intake was from quite a wide variety of educational - including the LSE - ethnic and class backgrounds, there was a noticeable divide between those who had studied finance and those who hadn’t. Polly says that the average finance student took a laid back approach to training, “flicking around rubber bands...cocky rugby boys”. Meanwhile Polly was trying her best to concentrate on getting her number-crunching up to scratch. The group were thrust into the department of corporate finance, notorious for its long hours, but the lavish perks remained. “They put us up in a hotel for a week while we found accommodation…to begin with I remember thinking, what a waste of space I was! I wasn’t really earning my £200 a day.” Why do they pay so well? Her answer is unequivocal,“To tempt you.” Polly soon felt the competitive edge of her fellow interns kicking in. Some would use their wit, others their contacts, whilst some relied on more base charms.“One girl was very clever, very sweet. In fact, she is still working there today. She didn’t ‘push herself’ on anyone per se, but she got away with leaving at seven and so on, just by using her cleavage. There was resentment from other boys, but mostly flirting.” It wasn’t long before Polly realised that her personal life was being forcibly sacrificed “With hindsight, I should have seen it coming. I would be miserable, but other people had it worse than me. My boyfriend was doing the internship as well, and he was often there until three or four in the morning.” Other colleagues had even less time for recuperation. “There were these guys who were pale faced and had red rings around their eyes,working three days non-stop…there is only so long you can sustain that lifestyle on natural ingredients.” So it is here that the spectre of cocaine use began to enter the young bankers’worlds. The first time that Polly saw someone return from snorting cocaine should perhaps have set off warning sirens in her head – a glimpse into the chasm of hell that was waiting just around the corner. However, when the summer internship came to an end Polly was happy to receive, along with most of her fellow interns, a graduate job offer. “I thought, I’ll do this for a few years, definitely!” Thirty six of the three hundred odd fresh faces to the bank were being recruited for the London Branch. Before being whisked away first class to New York for a seven week training holiday, everyone was presented with a ‘Golden Hello’. A ‘Golden Hello’ is a £7500 welcome bonus which hits your bank account as soon as you join. But there’s a catch coming; “If you left within the first 6 months, you would have to pay it back. You pretty much have to stick it out through the year.” Once the team had landed on American soil, they were well taken care of with a luxurious mini-apartment at a top hotel.“It was like being in halls of residence, but with loads of money…it was a bit like freshers’week! Once the training began, it was very hard work. We had to travel to Wall Street every morning and we would pick up a bagel on the way to work…very American. It was so intense, in a good and bad way. There was so much work during the days, but at night it was intense partying with hardly a night off. We would finish at eight and stay out until four in the morning; we tried every club in New York, it was such a funny world…a ridiculous lifestyle but hard work…it was hard on my liver and kidney too!” Back in London the new recruits were “working on a mixture of things that felt at the same time worthwhile and absolutely futile.” The first cracks started to appear during Polly’s first term at the investment bank when she realised she was constantly letting her friends down.“I really resented that. I split up with my boyfriend within the first term and that was quite typical. Lots of people had relationships from uni and after the first year, pretty much all relationships ended. You’re grouchy because you’re so tired and you don’t have an objective view on the world. I was becoming so unfit…I didn’t even have time to go for a run.” On the other hand, Polly says that “there was a real kind of bond in the year group. There was a free meal in if you stayed after half-seven so everyone would call each other and meet downstairs. Company emails could be monitored, but there was still a bit of emailing around the office” I ask if the partying was still going on? “Not so much, the chances of us all being free at the same time was just so minimal.” Cocaine was about to re-enter Polly’s world.“A workmate of my boyfriend was about four years into it. He slipped out of the office and took something. I think he admitted it. He was a bit of player but didn’t really get time to do much playing. He had given up his athletic passion and he just wanted to perform and needed something to keep him going.” Though Polly was shocked at the time, she says that in time it became part of the landscape.“You just had to accept it. It was a real performance culture. It wasn’t the junior people who tended to take it, they were on ProPlus, Neurofen and Red Bull.” Drugs, she says, were a performance related abuse. It was far from recreational or glamorous, it was simply a symptom of the pressure. Drug use was not the only scandal Polly encountered. “There were affairs too but not the sort you get with MPs. There were more emotional affairs which are actually more damaging to marriages than sexual affairs. People spend so long in the office together and don’t actually see their wives, or their husbands or their children at all. One particular man in the office who got along well with this woman, would often spend late nights over the board room table eating pizzas. People could see it wasn’t an affair as such, but if I was his wife looking in, I’d be extremely hurt.” But many emotional affairs progressed to a sexual stage, often with massive age disparities. Polly tells me about a “senior banker, he was a forty-two year old managing director sleeping with a second year analyst.” This vicious, back stabbing playground also had its fair share of bullying. “Everyone’s intelligent” she says,“everything that’s done is deeper than ‘commenting on your tits’. There was a gradual undermining of capabilities. Your self esteem just fell and fell but from the outside it looked the opposite. In that environment, when you’re in it, you think it’s normal. My view of what was normal wasn’t normal at all... especially if you go straight from uni… it’s a little bubble.” Polly had accepted that she would be seen and not heard. Years later, after leaving the investment bank, it shocked her when she was in a meeting and people would listen. “During the period just before Christmas, I hadn’t even been there for six months, everyone was pretty much getting tired of it. At Christmas my friends back home in Sevenoaks saw that I wasn’t really myself; my family knew that I wasn’t myself.” Polly decided that now wasn’t the time to leave. The Golden Hello had become Golden Handcuffs, as she couldn’t afford to pay back the money she had been given. She had to stick it out until the end of the year, and she began counting down the days. Her novel was born during late night taxi rides from, and to, the office. “Whenever things frustrated me, I wrote it down. Once I got a knock on my door really late. They had sent a cab to take me to the office in the middle of the night. Sometimes I would feel lonely. They didn’t understand family, the atmosphere was so competitive…It was always at times like 2am in the morning, no one was really around to talk to so I poured out my frustrations as a load of bullet points.” At the time, Polly didn’t dream that anyone would reading these notes, let alone that she would one day publish a book based on her experiences. It was just a way of venting out her angry fumes until leaving day. Polly waited until immediately after her bonus day to leave. As soon as the money was in her bank account, she walked away and her senior colleagues closed the door behind her. She has not spoken to them since. Instead, she has used her experiences to inform her novel, Golden Handcuffs. She says that “it’s something students and graduates can relate to because it starts from their university years”. Her message about investment banks is not necessarily negative, but it certainly doesn’t trumpet the virtues of the ‘glamorous world of investment banking’. It is simply realistic.
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Polly's TV & Radio appearances
From Engineer to Investment Banker to Novelist
Berliner Zeitung Magazin, 2007
I Know the Pressure Matthew was Under
I Sold My Soul to the City - then Wanted it Back
Banker Novel Shows it's not all Success in the City
Taste of High Life in City can Seduce Interns
City Woman who quit City over Sexism admits Lapdancing
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