A Steady and Unremitting Attention
The physical Bank of 1793, whether as a building or as a working environment, was very different to what it had been in its original Threadneedle Street incarnation almost sixty years earlier. In large part this reflected the institution’s growing workload and accompanying rise – steady if not yet spectacular – in staff numbers:1
1734
110
1763
246
1783
345
1793
418
The changing physical character of the Bank, though, was not just down to size of staff. It was also determined by two remarkable architects, Robert Taylor and John Soane.
First, however, there was George Sampson’s Bank, a relatively modest affair surrounded by two churches, three taverns and as many as twenty private houses. ‘The frontage of the new premises was not more than 80 feet,’ notes Marston Acres, ‘extending from St. Christopher’s Church on the west to the Crown Tavern on the east, and the depth of the site cannot have exceeded 300 feet in the direction of Lothbury. The only outside windows were above the main entrance in Threadneedle Street, and at the west end of the Hall overlooking the churchyard of St. Christopher.’ Inside the building, features included a nod to the Bank’s origins, in the form of a life-size white marble statue of King William III erected on 1 January 1735, and the imposing Pay Hall – crowded six days a week by merchants and others converting coins into banknotes (or vice versa), making deposits or withdrawals, and (less often) collecting dividends, with high, grille-topped counters separating these customers from the tellers and clerks. ‘The primacy of the Pay Hall,’ observes Daniel Abramson about what was by far the largest occupied space in Sampson’s Bank, symbolised ‘the paramount importance the Bank placed on its commercial banking activities.’ There were of course other aspects to the new building, not least the directors’ parlours or meeting rooms (‘sumptuously appointed,’ Abramson notes, ‘with fine wood panelling and marble chimney-pieces’) and the Accountant’s Office, the heart of the book-keeping back office and deliberately kept apart from the areas of public access. ‘On the level of spatial planning Sampson’s Bank of England helped instrument the Bank’s trustworthiness,’ reflects Abramson. ‘At the level of architectural style the building also represented virtue. A classically planned and proportioned building like the Bank of England possessed a powerful authority.’2
By the time that Robert Taylor succeeded Sampson as the Bank’s architect in 1764, the need for physical expansion was manifest, even after a certain amount of new building in the late 1740s. Taylor himself in an earlier life had been a sculptor, including creating the figure of Britannia for the Pay Hall, but during the 1750s he had taken off as an architect, specialising in villas and townhouses for the City’s wealthiest. ‘Skillful industry, dauntless self-denial, oeconomy of money and time’ would be the defining characteristics recalled at his death, and in addition to his intellectual and cultural sophistication (including strong Continental influences) he was renowned for his relentlessly detailed quality control over his subordinates. As the Bank’s architect, he designed and saw through a major programme of expansion, mainly between the mid-1760s and the mid-1770s. Taylor’s programme, much of it simultaneously executed, had four main components. On the other side of Threadneedle Street, in front of the main entrance to the Royal Exchange, he erected on the triangular site two four-storey blocks, the Bank Buildings, whose offices were used by other businesses and which was in effect a pioneering speculative development on the Bank’s part; to the north, beyond the Accountant’s Office, he built a four-storey Library, mainly for the purpose of records storage; to the north-west, close to the Pay Hall, he constructed an elegant suite of new rooms for the directors, of which the centrepiece was the Court Room, handsomely decorated and thrice the size of the previous Court Room; above all, on the eastern side of the existing premises, he built a whole new wing that almost doubled the Bank’s overall size and comprised not only the great circular Rotunda for dealings in government stock, but also four spacious and identical new Transfer Offices (including two devoted to 3 Per Cent Consols). Taylor’s was, by any standards, a prodigious achievement. And when the French finance minister Calonne, well known as a patron of the arts, visited these additions to the Bank, he pronounced them to be ‘the first architecture of London’, with the only exception being Wren’s St Paul’s.3
Taylor, knighted in 1783, would remain the Bank’s architect until his death in 1788. The start of the 1780s saw of course the Gordon Riots, a profound shock to the Bank authorities; and in the aftermath of the violent disturbances, they came to the conclusion that the tower of the thirteenth-century church of St Christopher-le-Stocks, situated on Threadneedle Street immediately to the west of the Bank, might well be all too tempting a vantage point for a future mob to storm the Bank from. Accordingly, amid perhaps surprisingly little controversy, the Bank purchased the church in 1781 for the sum of £4,462 4s and then, between 1782 and 1784, had it knocked down and replaced by a new group of buildings – the Bank’s own west wing – reaching as far as the corner of Princes Street. New offices in this wing, with Taylor again to the fore until his death, included the Dividend Warrant Office and the Reduced Annuities Office; but on the site of St Christopher’s burial ground, which the Bank had pledged not to build over, was instead now the Garden Court, under which bodies for a time continued to be buried. Tree lined, and not unspacious, it broke ‘the formality of architectural lines’, observed Thomas Malton in his 1792 Picturesque Tour of the City, adding that the garden provided ‘unexpected pleasure in this busy commercial scene’.
The west wing may not have been Taylor at his best, striking as it did, in Abramson’s disappointed words, ‘a dissonant note with its boxy, disconnected aggregate of parts’. Yet, taking his near quarter-century as a whole, he had played an integral part in (Abramson again) ‘the fundamental institutional and architectural transformation of the Bank of England into a large-scale, public, monumental workplace’. A year before his death, a correspondent of the Gentleman’s Magazine could only express wonder at ‘the amazing rapidity’ of the institution’s ‘modern expansion and extended accommodation to the moneyed interest and commercial world’; five years before that, in 1782, an implicit sense of its daily public importance comes through in The Bank of England’s Vade Mecum: or Sure Guide, a small book written by ‘A Gentleman of the Bank, &c’. Its purpose was made clear on the title page (so that ‘the greatest Strangers to the Bank, may with Certainty and Propriety do all they want, without being obliged to ask any Questions of any Persons whatever’); two helpful copperplate plans showing the Bank’s layout were included; and the main focus was on ‘the hall department’, that is the Pay Hall, described as ‘particularly’ the part of the Bank ‘found to be not sufficiently understood’, but which was ‘certainly the principal Place, where all Money Matters, Notes, Bills, Drafts, &c are transacted’. Most of the treatise was a helpful, matter-of-fact guide to conducting business in the Bank. For example:
If you want Bank Notes for Cash, pay your Money to any one of the Tellers, at their Tables, marked (3) in the Plan and tell him what Note or Notes, you want for it; he then gives you a Ticket, which you present through the little Rails to one of the Clerks, who sit under the Letter A on the Right Hand Side of the Dial, and they will accommodate you. But if you want a Parcel of Notes, take a Slip of Paper, which you will generally find ready, at the Desk marked (1), and write down what you want, and take it to Letter A with the Ticket … Then the Clerks at Letter A will accordingly make out your Notes, which you must be particularly careful to get signed by one of the Cashiers, who sit under the Dial (as before mentioned), before you take them away, and this must always be done with every new Note you receive.
Addenda indicated ‘where to apply to the Gentlemen Stock-brokers, to have Business of that Sort transacted, or where to receive their different Dividends’, in other words in Tayl
or’s eastern wing (‘As soon as you enter the Court-yard of the Bank, from Thread-needle-Street, – you will to the Right Hand see a Door, ascended to by four Stone Steps, with the Words transfer offices wrote over the Door …’). But the anonymous gentleman of the Bank reserved his greatest weight for his ‘General Remarks’:
Let every one please to observe, that when he has paid his Money to the Tellers, and receives a Ticket for his Money paid in, never to take that Ticket away, but carry it to the Place it is designed for.
The Public are earnestly desired to pay due Attention to the above Remark, as it very frequently happens, that people take these Tickets away, for want of knowing better, and give themselves a great deal of Trouble; for if the Tickets are carried away, the Business they came to do, is left undone.
The self-published treatise, sold by booksellers who included Messrs Richardson and Urquhart at the Royal Exchange, cost 1 shilling, and within a year was running to a second edition.4
Taylor died on 27 September 1788, and only three days later the Committee of Treasury noted that eleven people ‘were offered for his place of Architect’. On 15 October the Committee of Building reached its ‘unanimous’ choice: John Soane. Aged thirty-five, and youngest of seven children of a journeyman-bricklayer, he had trained under George Dance (architect of the Mansion House) and over the previous ten years had been involved in the post-Riots rebuilding of Newgate Prison, had started to become known for his country-house designs, had married the niece of a wealthy builder, and – perhaps most significant of all – had become friendly with one of the Bank’s most influential directors, Samuel Bosanquet.5 It was a bold but inspired choice. ‘The underlying dynamic of Soane’s career,’ considers Abramson, ‘involved his attempts to conjoin the two divergent strands of his early education, one favouring conventional classicism and the other poetic picturesqueness. The force of Soane’s best designs derived from his unwillingness to allow one tendency to triumph over the other.’ The new man soon got to work across a range of projects – as early as December 1788 successfully laying before the Committee of Building ‘a plan for taking off part of the Room designed for the Cheque Office, to be converted into a safe place for depositing the Transfer Books of the £3 p Cent. Reduced Office’ – but undoubtedly his crucial early achievement, calling on some assistance from Dance, was the Bank Stock Office, situated just to the north of the Bartholomew Lane vestibule and completed in 1793. ‘This was one of Soane’s most remarkable interiors, the prototype of his other banking halls and of many of his other interiors,’ Giles Waterfield would write in 1989 in celebration of its re-creation. ‘Its use of a thin, highly stretched Classical vocabulary, its avoidance of mass, and its ingenious employment of new material epitomise the novelty of the architect’s approach.’ Monumental, austere, Roman: it spoke of a company proudly poised to celebrate its first centenary.6
To be a clerk in the eighteenth-century Bank – possible in the first place only through being the son of a Bank clerk or being nominated by a Bank director – was not on the whole to find oneself on the road to riches. Salaries began at £50 a year, barely enough to live on, though extra work during busy periods, or in connection with the administration of public lotteries, was remunerated, while the pay was reasonable enough for the older clerks. Pensions tended to be on a grace-and-favour basis (though usually granted), and in any case there was no set retirement age; as for holidays, the notion of mandatory annual leave was not yet in place. What the Bank did provide, however, was security of employment and, for the senior clerks anyway, relatively short working hours (often 9 to 3), enabling them to find additional paid work later in the day in City shops or businesses. How hard did they work when they were in Threadneedle Street? ‘I am sorry to find you met with difficultys in setting your last day’s work,’ one clerk, Thomas Ormes, convalescing in Waltham Abbey, wrote in 1762 to another clerk, Thomas Hulley. ‘Indeed I do not wonder at it, as its expected that one person must do the business of two, and I am inclined to think the Fates have doomed us to be slaves to the Bank, our state being very little better. How often have we complained of this our hard lot, and still have the mortification of expecting no relief.’ There is some evidence that Ormes may have been one of life’s grumblers; but the probability is that the policy of deliberate overmanning – so that at times of pressure or crisis there would always be sufficient experienced clerks at hand – had not yet come into play.
Inevitably there were breaches of discipline or cases of unacceptable slackness: a clerk, Edward Stone, discharged in 1736 for habituating a tavern with a gaming table ‘at which he used to play’; another, Thomas Dowdeswell, suspended in 1747 for arriving at the Bank ‘disordered with liquor’; or in 1782 the seven Consols Office clerks who dined too well in Lime Street, failed to return to the Bank, subsequently explained that it had been raining and were lucky to get away with a reprimand. Irregularities, meanwhile, ranged from the relatively mild to the wholly grave, with the latter category including two particularly egregious cases during the middle decades. In May 1741 it was discovered that John Waite, a cashier who had been a ‘servant of the House’ (as the phrase went) for almost twenty years, had absconded with 133 East India Company bonds for £100 each. ‘About five foot eight inches high, well-set, round visaged, small grey eyes, very light eyebrows and eyelashes, and of a most remarkable fresh complexion’ was the description at once posted in the London Gazette, with the Bank’s reward for the successful apprehension of Waite soon raised from £200 to £500. Eventually, a year and a half later, he was arrested in Dublin; and though at the subsequent Old Bailey trial he was acquitted on a legal technicality, his inexorable former employers managed to get him rearrested for a debt of £13,300, leaving him in due course to spend the rest of his days in the Fleet Prison. The other case concerned William Guest. The son of a Worcestershire clergyman, he secured a clerkship in 1763 through the recommendation of the director Peter Du Cane, soon becoming a teller in the Pay Hall. Unfortunately for him, a fellow-teller, John Leach, noticed that, for no apparent good reason, he had the habit of separating recently minted coins from older ones; and it quite soon transpired that Guest had been systematically extracting gold from new guineas and using an ingenious machine of his own invention to make a fresh milled edge on those coins. Reported to the Court of Directors in July 1767 as being in custody ‘on a violent suspicion of diminishing the current coin of the Kingdom’, he was summarily dismissed from the Bank’s service. And three months later, after a trial at the Old Bailey, he met his end at Tyburn – where at the public hanging he was, recorded the London Magazine, ‘dressed in decent mourning with a club wig on’, and ‘his whole deportment was so pious, grave, manly, and solemn, becoming the gentleman and Christian, as to draw tears from the greatest part of the numerous spectators’.7
It would be wrong to dwell overlong on the miscreants, for the probability is that at any one time the overwhelming majority of the Bank’s staff were honest and more or less conscientious. Two men above all showed the way, becoming in turn, through their long service and through their dedication, the very heartbeat of the Bank. The first was Daniel Race, who entered in 1719, became joint chief cashier in 1739, then sole chief cashier in 1759, which he remained until a few months before his death in October 1775 at his house in Clapton. He was buried at St Luke’s, Old Street, where his memorial tablet (written by a Bank director, Thomas Plumer) warmly praised ‘a man of plain appearance’ who was ‘in every respect the man of business, the gentleman, the philosopher, the Christian’. He had, Plumer went on, ‘the clearest ideas and soundest judgement, most unblemished integrity, singular diligence, attention and regularity in every branch of his department: wonderful calmness of temper, affability of manner, unruffled by times or persons; himself always composed, and by his candour composing the most troublesome: remarkably correct, and in a manner faultless himself, yet indulgent to the faults of others, as far as consisted with his own duty …’ Or in the words of one of the lines of
verse on an engraving of the portrait of Race commissioned by the directors shortly before his retirement, he had ‘the coolest Reason allied to keenest Wit’. The other exemplar was Abraham Newland. One of twenty-five children of a Southwark miller and baker, he entered the Bank as a seventeen-year-old in 1748, rising to become chief cashier in 1778, and like Race remaining so until shortly before his death, which in his case was in November 1807. In his position, over the course of almost thirty years, he slept every night in the Bank, though after business hours he would sometimes retreat to his semi-rural Highbury cottage to take tea and perhaps play the violin, before returning in the evening to Threadneedle Street. After his death, a journalist would call Newland’s ‘a life less marked by enterprize than by enduring patience and plodding perseverance’, adding that ‘the progress of a horse in a mill is but a faint type of such an existence’; but Newland himself, remembered by intimates as a cheerful companion not averse to a glass with friends, would never for a moment have doubted the high and serious purpose of his unwearying daily round.8
The year of Race’s retirement, 1775, is not an especially notable one in the Bank’s history, but it is the first time we get any real sense of how things looked from the top. Becoming governor that year was Samuel Beachcroft, a merchant whose father Matthews Beachcroft (also a merchant) had been governor in the 1750s. He started a working journal, mercifully legible, and a selection of entries between April and November 1775 speak for themselves about the mixture of diverse concerns that seem to have occupied much of his time:
13 April. Read the petition of Jno Sharp, & Giles Collins for advance of Gratuity – Rejected.
14 April. Appointed Mr Le Gros to serve the Bank with half their coals.
2 May. Reprimanded Mr Smith, partner of Smith Wright & Gray, for misbehaviour of His House by sending bad Silver, & giving other hindrances to our Clerks. He promised in future to alter their method & behave better.
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