Hello and thank you for downloading the Witness Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Susan Hume.

Today I'm taking you back to October 1986. London's financial heart, the stock exchange was about to undergo one of the biggest

shikups in its history, the so-called Big Bang. In Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's

Britain, old structures and barriers were being swept away in nearly every industry and finance was no exception.

At a ball in the city on the eve of the big day, young stock stock brokers considered their future.

It's going to change.

Stock market will be a car park in five years time.

I'll have made a fortune and that's what I want.

And the Japanese will take over and the I have made a fortune and that's what I want.

And the Japanese will take over and the banks from America will swarm in, so be careful.

That's what I got to say.

Old-fashioned practices were about to give way to new ways of working and to the computer.

It was all a long way from the stock exchanges origins.

300 years earlier, stocks and share deals were carried out in Jonathan's coffee house in Exchange Alley and later face to face on the floor of the stock exchange with quill pens and leather bound ledgers. Things hadn't changed much for centuries.

You have to get into a time machine to go back to life pre-Big because it was very very different indeed.

Justin Erkert Stewart, remembering the days when stockbroking was very much a club for the right sort of chap.

It was really very divided because it depended where you came from.

If your father had gone to the right college, then you could get yourself into a job with one of the stockbrokers.

It didn't mean you would necessarily very bright at finance. That wasn't necessarily prerequisites at all.

It's probably who you knew.

And social class was not the only divide.

It was divided by religion, because you had Protestant houses, Catholic houses and Jewish houses.

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