Long before the credit crunch, Brian Greenwood made his mind up about bankers, or some of them.

He calls them “loathsome swines”– at least those who called in debts and were partly responsible for wiping out 95 per cent of his family’s fortunes, built from the historic Greenwood’s chain of menswear shops and related property interests.

And some fortune it must have been. As he acknowledges, for several years Brian and his family lived in ducal splendour with a stately home near Kirkby Lonsdale and a much larger shooting and fishing estate in Scotland.

These were just two of the benefits of being part-owner of a business empire that included the UK’s biggest privately-owned menswear and tailoring chains and a related property investment and development company.

Crossing the Atlantic in staterooms aboard the old Queen Mary and later travelling by Concorde, together with first-class cruises to South Africa, were a regular part of his earlier life.

Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, Purdey shotguns – you name it, Brian had it.

It was a lifestyle funded from being joint managing director with elder brother Denis of the Greenwood’s Menswear business which had been founded by a forbear in 1860 and built up either side of the Second World War by their father, Walter.

Then, in 1982, a difference of opinion on how to take the business forward led to a division of the empire, with Denis keeping control of the Greenwood’s chain and Brian taking the Shop & Store Developments property business and another menswear operation called Hodges, based in South Wales.

Brian said: “I was responsible for the property side of the business which owned Greenwood’s branches and other premises. I had arranged £4m-worth of long-term finance on extremely low interest terms.

“The nature of the property business means that you can’t wait to save the money before doing a deal, so is based on high levels of borrowing. We’d spent the £4m and I had a chance to raise another £1m on equally good terms.

“But Denis was more cautious and wouldn’t agree to it, so we referred the matter to our father who also turned it down. It was a couple of years after that when Denis and I agreed to split the business – which proved to be a fatal mistake in the long run.”

His business world finally fell apart in 1996 when the bank called in the debts of the Dunn’s retail clothing chain, which had merged with Hodges and in which Brian and his family had extensive interests.

Brian pulls no punches. He said: “To me, this was a classic case of greedy, unthinking bankers taking a callous, selfish and short-term view. What the company really needed was some patient support which would have meant some fairly modest additional borrowing.

“Instead, some loathsome swine chose to destroy a century-old business and throw dozens of long-serving and hard-working people out of a job.”

The term ‘shopkeeper’ is not adequate for describing.

After all, at their peak both Greenwood’s Menswear and the Hodges-Dunn’s chains each had more than 100 branches.

But, it’s how he refers to himself at the end of his recently-published memoirs which tell a fascinating tale of extreme highs and shattering lows.

By most people’s standards, Brian remains a wealthy man living in comfortable retirement near Harrogate with his wife of more than 60 years, Enid, after a career spanning more than half a century.

His converted farm even includes his own private golf course created from an adjacent field.

Now a sprightly 82-year-old, Brian has moved on to the next phase of his varied life – as an author of thrillers. The plots are based on his own experience in business wheeling and dealing, as a keen participant in field sports and as both a pupil, and then for more than 50 years governor, of Woodhouse Grove school at Apperley Bridge.

He only recently retired as chairman of the governors and they created the post of president to keep him involved.

Brian said: “It was through my granddaughter that I came to write my memoirs. I was always telling stories about what had happened to the businesses and what I had done and she urged me to write it down.

“I found it very easy to recall different aspects of my life and also enjoyed the writing experience.”

Brian counts his blessings. While he still has pangs when he passes a Greenwood’s shop – now owned by China’s largest clothing company Bosideng International Ltd – and properties he once owned, he remains philosophical. He displays no bitterness for having lost a business empire. Indeed, he is keen to take lessons from the experience.

He says: “One of the lessons I learned from all the pain and grief is that there’s not much point in fretting over what might have been. Instead, it is far better to look back with pleasure or amusement on the good and happy parts of what proved to be a long and extremely interesting life.”

Brian has read the Bible from cover to cover. He takes as his maxim Ecclesiastes, Chapter 9, Verse 10, which reads: “Whatsoever the hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”

* Brian Greenwood’s book of memoirs, Shop! is published by The Memoir Club, price £18.95.