Phil Beard has had a successful international career as a stockbroker working in the City of London.
Before that he was one of Australia’s leading finance journalists working in London as an overseas correspondent for the Australian Financial Review.
He is an alum of Heatherhill High School (now Keysborough College), in Melbourne’s outer east. Class of 1972.
What were your favorite subjects at high school and why?
PB: Economics and social science. We were lucky, because we were one of the first suburban high schools in Victoria to have economics and social science offered as subjects. Australian history and literature were also favourite subjects.
What was so good about studying economics in high school?
PB: We had a lot of teachers who’d been fast-tracked into teaching and had studied overseas. Alec Robbins, my economics teacher, had been to Canada and had seen how they taught economics in high schools in Canada.
Your parents migrated to Australia in the 1960s. Were you the first in your immediate family to go to university?
PB: Yes, not just my immediate family. I’d say all my family, even going back generations in the UK.
What did you do once you graduated from Heatherhill High School?
PB: Only a handful of my Sixth Form went on to university. I went to Monash Uni to do an Economics and Law degree, which was to take five years.
After three years, I’d secured the economics part of the degree, so I took a gap year, travelled around England and around Europe. And then I came back to earn some money to get me through the last two years of university to complete my law degree.
On the way to a fill in job in a greeting card company I bumped into a teammate from my cricket club who was installing computers at the Herald and Weekly Times – then Australia’s largest newspaper company. It published the Sun News-Pictorial, which sold 650,000 copies every morning.
I had always fancied journalism, but I had no idea how you got into it. I loved the idea of working for the Sun because my family were always readers of the paper.
And as it turned out, one of the big names in the Sun’s finance section was crossing town to work at the paper’s rival, the Age, leaving the Sun shorthanded. The Sun decided it needed a cadet, or trainee, journalist in the finance section.
I applied for that position and luckily enough I got it. Because I’d done economics, the people at the Sun thought that approximated to me being knowledgeable about finance.
In many ways economics and finance are miles apart but luckily for me it was good enough for The Sun. It was a great stroke of luck because graduate cadets tended to be put into specialised posts, as management tended to prefer training their own cadets.
You rose quickly through the ranks as a finance journalist, eventually working in London as the Australian Financial Review’s London correspondent. Then you left journalist and became a stockbroker in the City of London.
PB: After a couple of years in finance at the Sun, which included a spell on police rounds, I was posted to the Canberra bureau as economics correspondent for the group. From there I went to Sydney where The Australian was expanding its finance section with a guy called David Koch who went on to have a massive career in morning TV.
In the Eighties the introduction of new technology meant newspapers had money to invest and The Australian decided it needed a European business correspondent.
I got that job, based in London, and after a while I moved to the Australian Financial Review to do the same thing. Eventually, that came to an end when the new editor of the Financial Review, Alan Kohler, wanted to bring me back to Melbourne and I couldn’t see much point in that.
Fortunately for me, this came not that long after the so-called Big Bang, when the Thatcher government deregulated the financial markets, sparking much greater activity on the London stock exchange.
There was a shortage of people with a good, broad working understanding of finance. As a journalist, I’d developed that, so I was part of a group of journalists who went from journalism into stockbroking, or as a mate jokingly described it, from face up to face down in the career gutter.
You’ve had two very successful careers, one in journalism and one in finance, operating at an international level in both. How do you think your state high school education contributed to your success as a journalist and then as a stockbroker?
The great thing about high school was you weren’t spoon fed. My education gave me the ability to get on with people with different backstories. Navigating the school yard in high school wasn’t always easy, which proved great preparation for what was to come.
It’s really good training for what life is actually like, rather than experiencing the sort of rarefied world that the people I first met at university came from. I think that was the biggest thing. It was actually a pretty good education in life skills.
You’ve lived and worked in London for decades now. So, what inspired you to become a donor to Ourschool?
PB: I caught up with a mate of mine from high school who reached out to me on Facebook, and she told me about Ourschool. It led me to think about how there was a general feeling at school that because you went to a high school, your horizons were necessarily limited, and life might be just our part of Melbourne and getting a job in Springvale or Dandenong.
If that’s what you want, that’s fine, but it doesn’t have to be that. I remember when we used to learn French because we had to and the thinking was ‘Why do we need to learn French? When will we ever use that?’ To me, that’s what kids shouldn’t think. Kids should think the world can be anything, and the school should inspire them to think that.
That’s why I got involved with Ourschool, because talking to Deb, my high school friend, it reminded me what I thought about the world as a kid, what we thought school was, and how it shouldn’t be like that.
Do you think alumni programs for state high schools can broaden horizons for kids beyond their immediate neighborhood and family?
PB: For sure. Looking back at high school, I had some teachers who probably indulged me because if you were interested in the world, they were happy to engage with you.
We were lucky. The teachers we had were young. They were, I think, still a little bit idealistic. They never tried to block us. They were happy to give up their own time after school to help you.
Going back to Alec Robbins, he wasn’t just an economics teacher. He gave me confidence in myself. He turned me into a runner, a sprinter. He showed me how you can develop an air of confidence, even if you didn’t have it.
Frankston High School turned 100 this year. Sue Robinson, a former student and then a teacher at the school, volunteered to write a book celebrating the school’s history.
In a Q&A with Caroline Milburn, Ourschool’s CEO and co-founder, Sue describes the fierce community campaign that led to the school’s establishment in 1924 and what motivated her to write the book.
Sue, you’ve called the book, ‘100 years, 100 voices’. It reveals a different person’s story for each year of Frankston High’s history. How did you track down the former students featured in the book?
The school suffered bad fires in the 1990s, when an ex-student tried to burn the place down. School records and memorabilia were lost in the fires.
So, a group of past students got together after the fires and said, ‘Let’s form an ex-students Association and try and get some of the school’s history back’.
Over the years, they put together a magazine that was published three or four times a year. The magazines contained lots of stories of past students. That’s where I went to find the people who were no longer with us.
To find alumni who were still alive I started off by asking the current school staff who they could nominate, and then the wheels got going.
I got emails from all sorts of people nominating others. Then it became a matter of how to whittle it down to 100 people because I could have easily written about 200.
Did you discover any common themes from your interviews?
A theme that emerged was how grateful people were for their time at Frankston High and how the school didn’t spoon feed them. It taught them that they had to believe in themselves.
People spoke about how the school had set them up for a good life, not just a good career, but a good life.
Apparently, residents in the 1920s campaigned to persuade the government that Frankston needed a high school. Mothers protested the government’s slow response to the local campaign by blockading the Nepean Highway with their prams, when the education minister, Sir Alexander Peacock, was returning from his holiday in Portsea.
Yes, that’s true, it was an amazing community campaign. In our school museum we have a beautiful little black and white badge that’s about the size of a dollar coin.
It’s got a picture of Oliver’s Hill with a picket fence going up the side. The badges were distributed as a fundraiser to raise money to get the school built.
The overriding impression I got from the history I read was that the government at that time was dragging its feet because it didn’t see a need for educating working class kids beyond year eight.
It’s unusual for a public high school to have a museum on campus. How did it start?
We opened the museum in 2014 for the school’s 90th anniversary. I was teaching there at the time. The school’s original building, the senior campus and the old science buildings were being rebuilt.
Stuff was getting thrown out, left, right and center.
One of the Assistant Principals said to me, ‘Look, this is sacrilege, we’ve got to start saving some of the things being thrown out’. So, I got on board with the idea of saving items at risk of being thrown away or, in the case of the old school magazines, would have been housed in cupboards in a room somewhere and wouldn’t have seen the light of day.
At the time I had a wonderful group of about half a dozen boys who were really interested in history. We used to run a history club that met one day each week at lunchtime.
I remember one day in the club one of the boys in year seven or eight, stood up and did an amazing PowerPoint presentation on Operation Market Garden, which is when the allies took back Western Europe in World War Two.
He was a kid who didn’t like attending school. But history was the thing that pushed his buttons.
That group of boys worked with me and the Assistant Principal to get the history museum off the ground.
What’s in the museum?
We’ve got old honour boards, school magazines, uniforms, sports cups and old photos.
Once the museum opened, word spread, and I started getting other items. I recently got an email from a woman in the UK who then sent a post pack containing some marvelous sporting pennants from the 1970s.
You run the museum voluntarily and it’s open to the school’s students and the public. What do you hope the museum achieves?
It’s important for the Frankston community but I think it’s probably even more important to have current students at the school going into the museum.
When I was still teaching, I would take kids into the museum on a regular basis, and I saw the impact it had on them.
I saw kids coming in, looking at beautiful old photographs of school sporting teams from the 1920s and saying, ‘Wow, this school goes back a long way’. It had a real impact on them.
I want kids at the school to feel proud that they went to Frankston High.
What advice do you have for other public high schools about valuing and displaying their history?
It’s important for kids to see that they’re part of something much bigger than the six years they’re at their school. To be proud of where they’ve come from. To feel that connection with role models who’ve gone through the school and succeeded.
We’ve been lucky because we’ve got a room at school that’s been set aside for a museum.
But if you’re at a school that doesn’t have an available room, you can still find a space somewhere in the school to display school photos and school history. In this digital age, it’s easy to put up some rolling displays on a screen somewhere.
It’s important for the kids who are attending that school now, because it’s one of the things that might make them feel more engaged with their school.
You can’t divorce celebrating a school’s history from the current students because there’s a connection between them.
It’s what private schools have been doing for a long time – making kids feel they’re part of a good institution, and that they feel proud about being part of it. That sense of belonging makes a difference in how they perform. It’s as basic as that.
Copies of the book are available via Frankston High School’s website: https://www.fhs.vic.edu.au/centenary-celebrations/