Disclosure: I am PR manager for one of Northern Rock’s competitors.

It’s not been a good week for those of us who work in Britain’s financial services industry.

The sight of a good old fashioned run on a bank shocked everyone who thought that Britain led the world in the banking regulation and management.

The fact that Northern Rock had to ask the Bank of England for an emergency loan need not have led to disaster. But the way thousands of savers immediately flocked to take their money out destroyed any hope chief executive Adam Applegarth might have had of saving his bank from takeover and dismemberment.

Some may think the British aren’t easily frightened. Blame all those war films, and the image of the stiff upper lip. The reality is rather different. Roll back to another September weekend, seven years ago. We had mocked the French at the end of that Millennium summer for allowing their farmers to blockade the channel ports, causing havoc to British holidaymakers returning home. Yet two weeks later, British fuel protesters brought Britain to a standstill. Drivers made for the nearest petrol station, regardless of whether they needed the fuel, running them dry in hours. The only difference between the 2000 and 2007 queues was that this year’s were literally a pedestrian affair.

I don’t want to give the impression that the Northern Rock savers were acting foolishly or irrationally. Britain’s compensation scheme for savers is inadequate. Savings over £2,000 are not completely protected. Any deposit over £35,000 in a bank or building society is completely unprotected. And after the failure of company pension schemes such as Allied Steel & Wire, and the Equitable Life saga, Northern Rock savers could be forgiven for not trusting calming words from politicians and regulators. Those queues forced the Government to offer to guarantee Northern Rock customers’ savings and to improve the compensation scheme.

Few will remember that Britain’s biggest building society, Nationwide, owes its current name to a mass panic by savers. Almost 40 years ago, the society, then called Co-operative Permanent, was an unwitting victim of a financial crisis hitting Britain’s co-op stores and related businesses. Savers in the building society wrongly thought that Co-operative Permanent was affected and took their money out. The society’s chiefs decided a name change was the only answer. Ironically, it was a report on the the BBC news magazine Nationwide that precipitated the crisis.

I worked for Nationwide for five years in the late 1980s as a management trainee and press officer. I experienced one saver’s panic at first hand in the summer of 1988 after the Daily Telegraph reported that the society had lost millions on its then estate agency business at the height of the Eighties housing boom. I was asked to reassure a pensioner that her money was safe with Nationwide.

Finally, talk of Northern Rock’s reliance on the money markets to fund its mortgage lending reminds me how different things were 20 years ago. Building societies relied almost totally cash coming over the counter from savers to lend to homebuyers. If that cash dried up, anyone looking for a mortgage would have a frustrating wait, which could mean losing the house you’d set your heart on. In Nationwide in Newport, we’d get a call from our Wales office at the end of the month saying head office had released more mortgage funds. We then had to go through the list of people waiting for a mortgage and choose the lucky ones to offer home loans. The old days weren’t necessarily better, regardless of the events of the past 10 days.