The most prestigious organisation active in international development was clearly the World Bank in Washington, established by the Bretton Woods agreement expressly for that purpose. I sent in a carefully drafted application, with Senator Javits as a referee. But I had also heard of good work being done by the Commonwealth Development Corporation, a British public corporation operating under an Act of Parliament, and decided to hedge my bets. CDC replied after a measured interval and invited me for an interview. I found myself confronted by the pipe-chewing but super-canny Financial Controller, who asked me the obvious question, 'If you are so concerned with the world's poor, why didn't you stay in India?' I set out my philosophy, the approach I favoured and the contacts I had made to achieve it. Somewhat unexpectedly, I was offered a job. There had been no reaction from the World Bank, but I felt it would always worry me not to know the answer. I asked my distinguished referee to make a last-minute check. When he found that the Bank had lost my application, I bowed to the hand of fate and accepted the CDC offer.

Rarely can fate have been more accommodating. In time I recognised that the Bank dealt in a completely different species, as do banks, and at an august level which had much to do with economics but little immediately with human beings and their industry.

Tanzania

When I reported for work at the offices in Hill Street one morning in April 1965, I found that I was chosen to act as general manager of the Tanzania Development Finance Company Ltd. TDFL was a consortium of Tanzania's National Development Corporation, CDC and the overseas development agencies in Germany and the Netherlands - in microcosm, therefore, precisely the kind of European co-operation for which I was pleading. The only factor that did not register as an obvious fit was that of transplanting a delicate concert pianist at short notice to live in one of the poorest - even if most beautiful - countries of darkest Africa. Noretta and I had met in 1960 when she was teaching at the University of Hartford, Conn. and she knew me as concerned principally with European affairs. She had an aunt who had lived with her husband in Eritrea, but that was the sum total of her and her family's contact with Africa.

Eternally to her credit, she barely blinked at the prospect. And her reward was to come swiftly once we had arrived in Dar-es-Salaam. Hardly settled into our new home, a lady came to the door and said, 'I hear you are a musician. We have an orchestra and have just lost our conductor. Would you replace him?' They were composed mainly of white expatriates who enjoyed practising together but never found the courage to perform. Noretta accepted on condition that they would strive to give concerts, and the bargain was struck. I had the same timid approach from the local Music Society, so Noretta designed a season of 29 concerts and illustrated lectures on the three types of music - African, Western and Asian - represented there, whilst I strove to market the events. Together we did our best to bring musicians of other races into the orchestra, and offer opportunities to other soloists, sometimes pulling artists out of the sky on their way to more prestigious engagements in Nairobi or Johannesburg. Dar-es-Salaam as a capital was not significant enough to be socially stratified, and Noretta found a great rapport with the wife of the Russian Ambassador, whose daughter was studying piano at the Moscow Conservatory. Their abundant hospitality proved a valuable asset also to the Music Society.

A further reward for Noretta was finding her a worthy instrument. It was a massive pre-first world war Bluethner, elegantly fitted with brass candelabra, indestructible and robust enough to hold its tune. An Indian tuner came down every couple of months from Nairobi, our 'county town', to look after it, though we subsequently found that he was tone deaf in much of the upper register. So it was good that a rumour reached us that a brother of the famous Viennese concert pianist Paul Badura-Skoda was living in Moshi, a small town at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro's twin, Mount Meru. Moshi lay close to several of TDFL's investments in the Game Belt that I needed to visit regularly, so we traced Peter to an electrical firm he was running there. He had also been married to a concert pianist but, not unsurprisingly, she had found the isolation unbearable. One of the most touching gifts Noretta ever received was a tuning key, the only memento of his former wife which Peter consigned to her.

There were other reminders of the Germanic interregnum. Further up the coastal road lay the Opel Plantation, originally founded by that industrial family to supply their car factories with rubber. Even by the late 'sixties one could still find an aged African bent over an anvil, giving a roar of pain when the hammer slipped, accompanied by a rich German expletive. Later on, we were to become great friends with the German Ambassador Herbert Schroeder and his wife. With them we lived through the tense days when President Nyerere seemed on the verge of according full diplomatic status to Dr Lessing, an envoy from the German Democratic Republic (the infamous DDR). To compound the Ambassador's misery came the disappearance of Bongo, his South African ridgeback; after the dog's return to the fold a few days later, a lady caller, habitually received by Bongo at the head of the Residence steps, exclaimed, 'How curious, I just saw one of these magnificent animals at Dr Lessing's house!' The Ambassador was inconsolable, until I explained to him the victory this represented, that even an animal should choose to return after three days and nights in enemy territory. It was not the only misunderstanding: literally as she bade us farewell on our return to London Annelise Schroeder said, 'Maybe back in London you will meet my brother who represents a couple of German banks in the City'. Not having previously known her maiden name, this turned out to be Walter von Halle, already one of our closest long-time friends.

Even as, on first arrival, we had driven through what industrial development there was close to the airport, then into the outer fringe and eventually the crowded centre of Dar-es-Salam, I began to worry that I had got off at the wrong stop. Compared with India, there was little overt poverty, there were rags but no one was starving. Instead of dying in the street, they had at least a banana and the strength to remain upright. Only later did I learn that the suffering lay elsewhere.

CDC had been called into being by an Act of Parliament in 1948, in recognition of the fact that the then colonies needed support in preparing their economies for impending independence.

The war had exhausted the capacities of the private sector which had been responsible for much of their economic infrastructure, and CDC was seen as an alternative investor and driver. Naively, it was set up without a share capital, but simply the ability to borrow from the Treasury the monies needed for its investments. Since without the impetus of a private sector the main opportunities lay in the agricultural sector, where long years were needed for projects to produce returns, this was a hazardous undertaking. Indeed, some of its early projects turned out to be failures, through ignorance or for lack of financial control. After a very few errant years, an eminent accountant, Sir William Rendall, was brought in as General Manager and Lord Reith, who had so successfully established the BBC, as Chairman. They began recruiting from the then rich pool of able colonial administrators to create an unrivalled technical team. Among them was Roger Swynnerton, who became Head of the Agricultural Department when he retired from the Kenya Ministry of Agriculture and was then responsible for the creation by CDC, eventually joined by the World Bank, of a huge Kenyan tea industry.

I learned to have a great admiration for the calibre of CDC personnel, their technical excellence and the devotion and enthusiasm for the complex and challenging tasks entrusted to them. The management structure eventually became decentralised through a system of regional Controllers immediately responsible for the performance and development of projects in their area. They and the head office controllers, as well as the heads of the technical departments, were members of an Executive Management Board which regulated and supervised the operations. Their reach became greatly extended as CDC gained the confidence itself to design major agricultural and forestry operations and to manage these with its own staff. Thus at its peak it had some 600 employees, responsible for tens of thousands employed directly by the companies set up as project owners. Additionally there were large numbers of smallholders, like those who sold their tea crops to the Kenya Tea Development Authority, whose factories processed and marketed their produce.

CDC itself was subject to the supervision of successive Ministries or Departments for International Development who watched its affairs on behalf of Parliament. They needed to respect targets set for overall aid programmes, of which CDC counted as a part. These then determined percentages which had to be earmarked for the poorer countries and, overall, for priority sectors like agriculture and employment creation. And still CDC had no own capital other than repayable Treasury loans and surpluses it had been able to accumulate, and therefore no cushion for failures. Yet, except for the few earliest years, it had been able to combine immensely valuable long-term development with registering a constant annual surplus.

When I joined in 1965, it had created a portfolio of £100m in some 150 projects in 35 countries; twenty years later, that had risen to £500m in 250 projects in 45 countries. Major projects varied from sugar estates and mills in east and southern Africa, huge forests and associated pulp mills in Swaziland, housing finance and flatted factories in Singapore, daring innovations like transplanting west African oil palms to extensive estates in south-east Asia and the Pacific islands beyond. All this had been created by carefully assessing the needs of each country, the kind of production it and its soils could support, and lending CDC's experience and professionalism to its realisation. Schemes by which rural populations of smallholders could become associated with opportunities created by the large estate production centres carried shared benefits widely into surrounding districts. And all this rested basically on CDC's initiative, without exploitation, and carrying governments and authorities with it at every step. Some projects, like the Caribbean electricity companies, had national governments as partners, but within a company structure protecting the undertaking's freedom to conduct its business on commercial lines.

I became associated with CDC's move to come closer to the needs of smaller entrepreneurs, as it had done in agriculture with smallholders. TDFL and its sister companies in Kenya and Uganda were, in fact, the earliest of these local providers of development capital to small enterprises. Like all of CDC, their staffing was lean: a manager and an accountant. Mine was an amiable, highly educated young Welshman, Richard Gethin-Jones, who had enormous enthusiasm also for the personal relations with the investee companies and their mentoring. They were indeed a distinctive group. There was the 6ft 2in Chinese, Mr. Tsu, in his manufactory of cooking utensils; Mr Bustani and his wife, of the B'hai religion, who produced bicycle tyres; and Amir Bhatia, with whose IPS (an undertaking of the Aga Khan's lsmaili community) we jointly invested in a number of projects, and who after emigrating to the UK became a member of the House of Lords.

The concept of an investment fund to support projects benefiting the labour movement had also occurred to Abdu Faraji, an African entrepreneur based in the northern 'capital' Arusha, where he owned a biscuit factory. He came to TDFL in his early days with his first project, Mwananchi ('Comrade') Ocean Products, a prawn and fisheries enterprise. Some twelve years on, when Tanzania had passed to a socialist economy and I returned to find it as poor as it had been at the outset, he joyfully invited Noretta and me to a party on his wife's farm in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. They had also returned, from Paris where in the meantime he had served as Ambassador. In the midst of the surrounding austerity, the champagne flowed freely, as did the friendship. In front of the assembled company he raised his glass to me and said, 'To my friend John Leech, who gave me my first loan!'

Other notable friends were lddi Simba and his wife Khadija and son Abdu. Many years previously, I had helped the well-prepared and thrusting young lddi with his application to head the office of the new East African Development Bank in Kampala. This gave him good insights into the investment business, to the extent that afterwards he set up a private finance company and helped his wife to become a successful entrepreneur in her own right. Inevitably, he was drawn into politics, becoming an MP for Dar-es-Salaam and then Minister of Industries. But his ideas were not sufficiently to the left for a career in politics. He and Abdu progressively became more practising Muslims, but not before he had supported John Meadley and myself in building up Rural Investment Overseas Ltd when I retired from CDC in 1985. He is now Chairman of PRIDE, the largest micro-finance company in the region. The whole family was among our dearest friends, not just at the time, but even as I write this.

Other firm memories and affections remain: Gideon, our houseboy, whose heartfelt 'Memsahib, You well well, I happy!' cheered Noretta daily during an attack of malaria; Jonas, the cook, who had acquired an unsurpassed secret for making scrambled eggs; and Dismus, the gardener, who saved us from extinction by a green mamba sliding silently as we admired the glorious white orchid on our mango tree. But also our French friends, the economist

Jacques Faudon and his wife Colette with whom we often played the only card game we ever learned, 'Rikiki'; and their delightful baby who spent her time on the beach ingesting handfuls of sand, as well as her three-year old sister who, whenever she heard Tom Jones went into ecstasies crying, 'Viens, viens Cheri, pour toi je fais descendre mes culottes!'

Another close colleague was Edwin Mtei. Shortly after I arrived in Tanzania, CDC's then Chairman, Lord Howick, an aristocrat from a long line of British public servants, paid a visit to East Africa. Aside from his formal meetings and inspections, I arranged a reception to introduce him to the local dignitaries, including Edwin Mtei as the Governor-elect of the Bank of Tanzania. Lord Howick at once engaged him in a lively but somewhat technical conversation; having posed Edwin a question which he realised too late as surpassing his knowledge, he immediately sought to put him at ease, saying offhand, 'I don't really know what it means myself, but my nephew the Governor of the Bank of England keeps talking about this.' Later on, Edwin's successor Dr Rashidi and I sought to work together on a scheme to lure clandestine offshore funds to bolster Tanzania's foreign currency reserves.

The country's main revenues were from tourism. Hence TDFL had invested in projects in the North of the country, close to the game parks and the wondrous Serengeti where herds of animals migrated seasonally in their thousands. Lake Manyara regularly receives swarms of flamingo, providing a resting place on their biannual passage. The lake becomes pink, broken only by the underwater assembly of hippos and reflecting the stately passage of gazelles along the shore. TDFL had helped to build a tourist hotel at the edge of the lake, discreetly designed neither to affect the landscape nor impede the animals. It lay on the prime tourist trail from Arusha to the Ngoro­ Ngoro Crater, formed by a prehistoric volcano and peopled by animals that found secure grazing protected by the steep and unbroken cliff, among them rare rhinos and other large species too heavy to escape. This and a string of more commercial projects required quarterly visits which were a high point in the calendar. The road outside Dar soon lost its paving and became a dusty highway with a washboard surface. The six-hour drive until one reached the asphalted road connecting Moshi with Arusha to the West and Mombasa to the East was a scene of bush, beauty and adventure - and not infrequent mishaps. But it provided unparalleled insights into the state of the land on which more than ninety percent of the population struggled to feed itself.

Of course, there was wildlife to be found much closer to Dar-es-Salaam. Directly behind the Port there was an inlet known as the Creek, shallow water with muddy banks on which numbers of hippos did their wallowing. The northern side rose fairly steeply, providing good land for local farmers; on the crest were a few large houses built decades ago to benefit from the fresher elevation. One of these belonged to the Austrian Consul, named Gebauer, who invited us to a Saturday lunch. As we neared the end of the meal, we saw him check his watch a few times. 'No, no', he apologised as we made to rise from the table. 'I am just waiting for Hugo. He usually comes punctually at two o'clock.'

We were led to take our coffee on a large terrace overlooking the Creek and there heard the moving story of Hugo. It seems that the placid-looking hippos go on nighttime excursions and wreak havoc on the nearby farms. When Gebauer was a boy, the local farmers became so desperate seeing their livelihood destroyed that they begged his father to shoot the hippos. Father and son went off and did as asked, killinga large cow hippo. 

'It was the first time I had seen such an animal dying,' said Gebauer to us, 'The horror was that, with an almost human plea in her eyes, she gazed into the bush behind her. We left her corpse for the villagers, but I insisted on searching the bush she had seemed to commend to us. And there we found her baby, for whom we cared according to her silent wishes. So he became Hugo, and to this day he comes back to greet us.'

We lined up by the stone balustrade to look down over the Creek. After a short while one began to see two circular ripples in the water, As they approached, they became larger and more distinct, until one could plainly see that they were made by two ears; and then the head broke surface. Gebauer called out to him, 'Habari, Hugo!', and Hugo's huge nostrils snorted. It was ten past two o'clock.

Return to Hill Street

Since then, CDC has weathered many changes, whilst steadily increasing its growth and girth. The first came in 1969 when Parliament decided that its benefits should not be denied the poorer countries outside the Commonwealth. This was to open up new opportunities also for me, as my superiors - in the mistaken belief that the second language of Thailand was French - selected me to open up this wondrous  country  for operations. It proveda glorious opportunity and won us many remarkable new experiences and friends; none dearer than Sumet Jumsai, a brilliant young architect (and gifted painter), his wife Ting Ting and their equally able children. But it also enabled me to establish my qualifications for the task of rapidly assessing a new country economically and politically, identifying projects that CDC could usefully undertake, and then to negotiate with the host government the terms under which it would operate there. That brought me the great good fortune of being tasked to do this in quick succession also in the Philippines, Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroun, Madagascar, Ghana and, just before my retirement, India and Pakistan which, though Commonwealth countries, had become independent before CDC's remit was widened.

Entry into such countries also increased the scope for co-financing with other development finance institutions. In order to smoothe this process, my friend and colleague Wolfgang Lehmann from the Deutsche Entwicklungs-Gesellschaft and I organised 'Interact', a forum in which the European bodies could consult on policy matters as well as propagate joint projects. The Heads met once a year, a senior staff working group more frequently. Today the group has a membership of some 14 institutions, sharing experience and bringing meeting in Munich. together their financial and technical resources. In parallel, I also nursed relations with the World Bank group's International Finance Corporation which were material to CDC and the others in several important respects.

In these ways, I was achieving in Europe much of what I had promised myself on leaving India more than twenty years earlier. CDC was and has remained the doyen in the field of financing non-governmental development. Its path has not been unveering, especially when the Government decided it should be 'privatised', so that the funds it was still constrained to borrow from Treasury would no longer inflate the sensitive target for the government borrowing requirement. CDC was so solid, it was argued, that it should have no difficulty in selling its shares if it were to be set up as a company. The irony was that the very merchant bankers who had sold Government that advice, then demanded that the lilly be gilded by axing the high-risk projects which had given it its character and outstanding record. So out went agriculture (together with its unique staff resources) and local development financing; and in came huge power projects and venture capital. It was a pruning that literally went to the roots.

A sanitized CDC has now begun to re-examine itself and search to recapture some of its former identity. As of yore, strengthening the private sector and creating jobs, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises, together with stricter developmental targets have returned to prominence. To make its impact more effective, it has decided also to resume greater flexibility in the ways it makes capital available and is now offering the full range of equity, loans, mezzanine financing and even microfinance.

From the early years' resetting of its compass to the four decades of growth and geographic expansion, through 20 years of politically imposed 'privatisation' and mimicking private sector 'lean banking', CDC is now entering its fourth cycle by returning to its virtues. It does so with a portfolio of£ 3 billion and total net assets of£ 3.7 billion throughout 74 countries. That patrimony has finally allowed it to recall its own singularity and to concentrate its new investments on job creation, and predominantly in Africa and South Asia where 80% of the world's poor are living.

As it set out on that long road, its early Chairman Lord Reith - a Scotsman - described its role as 'Doing good without losing money'. It has certainly remained faithful to that ideal - and more.