It is difficult to find anyone alive anymore who has 50 years of banking experience, and as such the former president and chief executive officer of Bank of N.T. Butterfield Calum Johnston is part of a dying breed of career bankers that worked their way up the ranks with experience as their only tool.

As part of a three-part feature on the man behind the recent success of Bank of Butterfield, Mr. Johnston told The Royal Gazette in an interview before he was due to leave, the story of his rising career.

In this tale he takes us from his days as a 17-year-old filling ink wells in a local bank, to escaping a bloody war through the African swamps in the dark of night in a canoe to the dizzy heights of heading up some of the top banks in the world.

He said: " I got into banking by mistake. When I grow up I'll maybe do something different."

Mr. Johnston explained that he had to go into the army to do national service at a time when it was not a case of volunteering but an obligation every young man in the United Kingdom had to go through.

He said: "I was looking forward to it and I thought I might just stay in the army, I thought that was a good career. I was a kind of outdoors guy, I boxed and I played rugby and went camping and so on.

"I had everything planned, and I knew it would be a few months before I would have to go, and I was going to play tennis all summer, I was a good tennis player, and so I had a whole summer planned in front of me."

But his mother had a different idea and did not want her teenage son moping around their Glasgow home all summer doing nothing.He said: "So she instructed my father to find me something useful to do, and he did what he always did in an emergency, he went to the bank.

"And the next Monday he drove me to the bank. I was the boy. That was in those days the Clydesdale and North of Scotland Bank, Paisley Road, Glasgow. And I was the office boy at the bank.

"My duties were onerous. I had to clean the ink wells and keep the nibs, stoke the fire and all that sort of stuff. But I learned my trade.

"The odd thing was, although I felt insulted, a big he-man like me at 17 sitting in a bank, what a job for sissies. But I found I liked it. I liked the precisssion, I liked the way everything moved through the books, and at the end of the day everything was neat and tidy and squared off, and I enjoyed it."

And he stayed longer than anticipated because it took him longer to get into the army than anticipated because he had chosen The Black Watch, division, which was notoriously difficult to get into .

"I was in the bank for over a year, waiting to get in. When I came out of there, I decided after a few weeks I didn't really want to be in the army. I enjoyed my two years, but two years was enough. Marching along playing soldiers… it was silly buggers."

So when he got out he wangled his way into a London bank using his brief experience in Scotland as leverage. and got a job with the Bank of British West Africa, it was in those days.

He said: "And at the age of 20 I found myself in the Gold Coast, which is now Ghana, and at the age of 21 I was away up country in the middle of no where running a branch, at 21 with six or seven staff.

"I used to lie awake at night worrying. It was the last time in my life that I was important, because if I didn't make the loan to the little village to the little bakery to put another oven in, there was nobody else in the world that was going to do it because we were miles from anywhere, we were just a little town and so I was important.

"Ever since then, if I didn't give the loan, the competition would, so it wouldn't really matter. So that was the last time I was important. I used to lie awake at night worrying about 100 pound loan that I was going to make or I had made… oh my God, am I doing the right thing… now it takes 300 pounds to keep me awake."

And he had seven safes that he used to keep the cash in and would count out the money every night before going to his bed.

He said: "That's how I started. I spent seven years out in Ghana. I knew I had to move on, because of that I was the manger of the third largest bank in the country and I had to wait for dead men's shoes… I had to wait for somebody to die before I could move up.

"In fact the man who I took over from was 10 years in that same branch before he got promoted to the next one so, I got myself moved to Nigeria where we had bigger branches."

He said he spent nigh on seven years in Nigeria, and said they were very happy seven years, where he got married.

"I had met my Dutch wife in Ghana and we got married in Nigeria, although both my children were born in Scotland - she had to go home to Scotland in case either of them turned out to be a football players and they would need to play for Scotland.

"They were both back out in Nigeria at about four or five weeks of age and I guess that was a very happy time in my life." But then along came the Biafran War and he had to send his wife and kids away for their own safety.

He said: "I was running a very big bank there with a hundred or so staff and seven or eight expat families, and I got them all sent home and I stayed behind, but eventually I had to get out of Biafra. I eventually got out of Bifara, and I decided that Nigeria was not the place to have a wife and two kids, even after the war.

"It was a huge civil war, where the East of Nigeria decided to succeed from the west and it was all partly European politics involved… but we got surrounded and cut off. And the whole country got smaller and smaller and smaller as we got pushed.

"The Biafran's made the same mistake as Bonnie Prince Charlie, they got almost all the way to Lagos, and they got nearly there and they got scared and they thought it is too easy, and they started to retreat, and that was the end. Charles could have taken London easily, but he didn't.

"And it went on for two or three years. It was a terrible war. They starved the population and people were dying. It was terrible. And they were bombing us. The only way in or out of the country was a plane that used to land on the road. It was a terrible war, really. It was terribly long suffering. That wasn't pleasant. I was there months, I can't remember exactly, but the war went on for a long time. I managed to get out in a canoe actually, all through the creeks to Cameroon. A big motorised canoe overnight through swamp land and creeks and we ended up at the next country in Cameroon. That was an unhappy end to a wonderful time in Africa. But I had to leave Africa. It clearly wasn't going to be the place to build a career."

And he had the safety of his young family to think of.