Till Time's Last Sand

by David Kynaston

  11 May. Agreed with Palmer the upholsterer for a pair Green Moreen Curtains & Pullies to the Bullion Office for £9.

  15 June. Reprimanded Mr Tudman for taking a Bank Note that was forged, & cautioned the Out Tellers in regard to the inspection of all Notes in Future.

  30 June. Waited on Lord North, who informed the Depy & Myself that the Exchr Bills on the Supplys 1775 £250,000 wou’d be Issued this Year sooner than usual, & desir’d us to take the Sense of our Court upon advancing said sum at 3 p Ct.

  12 July. Order’d Mr Newland to acquaint all the Cashiers & other Officers upon receipt of any Stolen Bank Note, forged Note &c immediately to mark them that they may be sworn to upon any necessity.

  Reprimanded Mr Vickery for misbehaviour to Mr Thomas Bowen & order’d him to make a proper Apology, & bring a Letter from him to that purpose.

  4 August. Mr Pearson and Mr Nowell appeared on behalf of Benj Nowell suspended 2 June last, & said his affairs being involv’d & the Loss of a Wife had brought him to drink, that he had settled all his affairs to pay in three year, that they wou’d continue his Security & pray’d for his being reinstated; Nowell promised to behave well, when I told him wou’d bring it before the Court next Thursday.

  7 September. Order’d Mr Taylor to Color one of the Sky Lights by way of trial to prevent the great glare of light on the Books in the Transfer Offices.

  14 November. Reprimanded several Officers for being concern’d in Lottery Offices, upon promise of never being concern’d again after this Lottery they were pardon’d, but told on any future offence they must be discharged.

  17 November. Order’d Mr Jewson [Charles Jewson, a troubled figure who was briefly chief cashier between Race and Newland] to acquaint the Tellers never to take any Money in Bags by the weight without counting it, & if any person takes money away without telling it to acquaint them it is at their own risk, as we shall not make good any deficiency.

  Beachcroft kept his diary going for the rest of the customary two-year term, and a couple of entries for 1776 nicely convey the ‘low’ and the ‘high’, that timeless contrast in Bank life:

  21 May. Order’d Mr Jewson to allow the Weighers of the Light Guineas some porter & bread & cheese daily at one oClock, but by no means to suffer any ale house boy to attend.

  22 November. The Depy Govr & Myself waited upon Lord North, desiring to be inform’d if any requisitions had been made for money from Lord Howe [in charge of Britain’s North American fleet during the American War of Independence], stating our present situation & if any immediate want to desire some means might be used to prevent it; his Lordship answer’d he shou’d inquire into the matter, believ’d they wou’d not want any till about February, but cou’d not promise, however wou’d do what he cou’d to prevent it.9

  Beachcroft’s diary is suggestive, but even more so is the Committee of Inspection that the directors launched in 1783 to inquire into the Bank’s internal workings. The trigger may well have been the Commission for Examining Public Accounts, in the context of the end of the War of American Independence, but it might also have tied in with internal fraud – especially the case of Charles Clutterbuck, a clerk discovered in July 1782 to have been filling in for his own nefarious purposes the blank forms that were used to prepare banknotes.10 Either way, the following spring, amid temporarily unavailing efforts to bring Clutterbuck (who had absconded abroad) to justice, the Court of Directors established a Committee ‘to inspect & enquire into the mode & execution of the Business as now carried on in the different departments of the Bank’.11 It comprised three directors – Samuel Bosanquet (Soane’s future supporter), Thomas Dea, Benjamin Winthrop – and apart from a lengthy summer break (‘as some of the Committee were going out of Town’) met regularly between March 1783 and March 1784, collecting evidence and writing six reports. The senior of the trio, and probable driving force, was Bosanquet, who for his own purposes kept a running aide-memoire touching on some of their findings and deliberations. Early on, he noted three wants: there was ‘a great want of subordination in the Hall throughout’; ‘a proper Check upon the Clerks who post in the Drawing Office to detect any error that may creep in by posting to a wrong account – is much wanted in the Accountant’s Office’; and ‘there wants a check upon the Clerks of the cash book in issuing Bank Notes’. As for some of the individual clerical staff, his judgements were unsparing. Boult: ‘an old Gentleman almost worn out – not very sharp’. Gardner: ‘a poor hand – obstinate & prejudiced to the old mode’. Bridges: ‘a chattering Fellow’. Wilde: ‘great abilities – but drinks & then muddled & lost’. Hutton: ‘capable but won’t be directed’. Fenning: ‘obstinate’. Gandon: ‘a sulky young man’. Occasionally he offered undiluted praise (Fonton: ‘a very good regular clerk’), but more typical was his brusque verdict on Abraham Vickery, head of the 3 Per Cent Consols Office and the object of Beachcroft’s reprimand in 1775: ‘don’t attend as well as he should’ and ‘lives too high’.

  Much of the evidence presented to Bosanquet’s Committee was essentially descriptive. Newland, for instance: ‘Whatever Gold is purchased by the Bank & taken in at the Bullion Office is the next day brought to the Chief Cashier’s Office, weighed, the Account examined & the Gold placed in the Warehouse ’till finally deposited in the Vaults.’ Or Cowper, the principal Clerk attending the Exchequer, on ‘the Mode in which they pay away the Bank Notes’: ‘One Clerk has charge of the Notes & another keeps a book in which the number & other particulars of them have been previously entered in numerical order, under the several heads of Tens, Twentys, Fiftys & up to a Thousand; the Clerk who has charge of the Notes looks out such as are demanded, & then calls out to the Clerk who keeps the book their number & Value, who seeing that they agree with the particulars in his book, marks them off, adding the name of the person to whom they are paid.’ Or William Watkins, principal gate-porter, explaining how the fifteen watchmen under his direction ‘assemble at the Bank at 6 o’clock in the evening in the Winter & at 7 in the Summer’, whereupon:

  The Watch is immediately set for the night, 5 being allways on duty in the following stations –

  Fore-yard.

  Passage looking into the Mid-yard by the Bullion Office.

  Back-yard by the Library & passages near it.

  Old Church-yard under the Windows of the Great Parlour.

  They are relieved every 2 hours, & the 10 not on duty accommodate themselves as to Rest or refreshment in the best manner they can, within the Bank.

  Quite often the Committee went to look for itself, for example going twice into the Accountant’s Office, where on the second occasion its members

  saw the whole process of entering & posting the Bills & Notes discounted, & the manner of writing off the payments as they become due: The labour being very great occasions its being carried on to a late hour before finished, as the enterers can seldom begin to journalize the Bills ’till near 2 o’clock. Each Bill or Note discounted, being journalized, is afterwards posted in Discount Ledgers to the Account of the person by whom it is payable: At the same time, the Warrants from the Discount Office are journalized in another Journal, & then posted to the Account of the Discounter in the same Ledgers – being the books that are brought in every morning & laid upon the Table in the Parlour.

  In order to subtract from the Accounts in these Ledgers the sums that go off daily, the Article book, kept by the Clearers in the Hall, containing an Account of all Bills & Notes discounted sent out every day for payment, is (as soon as done with by the Clearers) brought into the Accountants Office; & all the Bills & Notes sent out that day are collected from it in a book, under the name of each discounter; which is a most laborious operation …

  Occasionally there were grumbles. John Payne, chief accountant and a friend of Dr Johnson, ‘took occasion to represent that all the Transfer Offices, through their not having any chimnies or other apertures for the admission of fresh Air, are so unwholesome as greatly to prejudice the health of the Persons employed in them’;
Walton, a supervisor in the 3 Per Cent Reduced Office, drew attention to ‘the confined State of the Office, so inadequate to the business carried on in it that the Clerks are obliged to put the Books upon one another, there not being space sufficient in the Office to lay them separately’; and Padman of the Library complained that it was ‘very cold & damp’, that ‘there will very soon be no convenient room for an addition of more books’, and that ‘there is a vast number of files of money tickets & other apparently useless papers’. Next day the Committee inspected the Library, where having ‘examined the State of the Books in each Story, which they found by no means to be in a perishing condition, but the paper very dry’, they ‘took notice that the Windows were all shut close, although it was a fine day …’

  Bosanquet and his colleagues had much on their collective mind during a year of pretty intensive work, with perhaps three aspects in particular being at or near the top of their agenda: banknotes; gratuities; and clerks acting as stockbrokers.

  Banknotes had been at the heart of the recent Clutterbuck scandal, and one of the Committee’s earliest steps was to call in a cashier, the ‘almost worn out’ Boult, and elicit his opinion ‘on the practicability of a plan, which they had thought of, of accommodating the Public with Bank Notes ready made out’, by which means ‘the business of issuing Bank Notes in the Hall would be transacted with a much greater degree of security as well as facility than at present’. Sadly, ‘Mr Boult did not seem clearly to comprehend how such a plan was to be executed.’ Next day, the Committee tried out their scheme on another experienced cashier, the ‘obstinate’ Gardner; he ‘at first made some objections’, but ‘did not state any one which seemed well founded; his objections arising principally from the apprehension of having so considerable a Charge committed to his care’. By happy contrast, the Committee gained support from the official who really mattered, the chief cashier, with Newland a few weeks later reiterating his view that ‘the Scheme was a very good one, very practicable, & in his opinion not liable to any objections’. Accordingly, the Committee successfully recommended the use of ‘ready-made’ notes, while at the same time strongly urging that all notes should be printed within the Bank, which duly became the case from 1791.

  As for gratuities, these seem to have been common in most departments. Etheridge of the Bullion Office, for example, explained that in most years they varied between £40 and £130, adding that ‘the money so received is divided, three quarters between the two Chiefs equally, the remainder to the Junior’; while in some departments they could total as much as several hundred pounds a year. Payne for his part took the high moral ground – ‘he has allways refused them, conceding it totally inconsistent with his Station to accept of any, as it is undoubtedly his duty to do the business of the Publick with the Bank, without receiving any emolument from them for so doing’ – but cumulatively it was clear that tips from customers were generally welcome. And the Committee plausibly concluded not only that these gratuities led to ‘dissatisfaction & heart-burnings amongst the Clerks themselves, from the unequal distributions in some of the Offices’, but also, ‘what is a matter of much more serious consequence’, a disturbing pattern in staff behaviour of ‘partialities & unjust preferences, towards the Publick’, in other words a natural favouring of those customers who were the big tippers.

  The question of clerks in the Transfer Offices doubling up as stockbrokers in the nearby Rotunda (or Brokers’ Exchange) had been a thorny one since the early 1770s, when the practice was explicitly forbidden but seemingly continued nevertheless. The Committee of Inspection was determined to get at the existing truth of the matter. Robert Browning, an irascible Dorsetshire man who was second in charge at the Bank Stock Office and the poet’s grandfather, stoutly denied that any of the clerks in his office ‘act as Brokers in their own persons’, but did accept that they ‘buy & sell Stock for their friends through the means of a Broker who generally allows them ⅔ds, & sometimes a larger proportion, of the Commission’; Bibbins of the same office stated that the clerks employed brokers to buy or sell stock for their friends, explaining that ‘most of them are upon such good terms with the Brokers that they rarely, if ever, charge them any brokerage’; while Turner, head of the 3 Per Cent Reduced Office, conceded of his clerks that ‘some of them do act as Brokers & may be likewise concerned in Jobbing’. The next key witness was that high liver Abraham Vickery. ‘Common rumour says Mr Vickery & Mr Salmon [a Stock Exchange broker] are partners – that Vickery makes out many of the Tickets himself – that there is a little boy of Salmons who is always stationed in front of Vickery’s Seat, & carries about his Tickets,’ privately noted Bosanquet, adding that ‘he acts improperly & over rough with the Clerks’. Certainly Vickery was rough enough when on New Year’s Eve 1783 he gave evidence, pronouncing that he had ‘informed all the Clerks under him that, when called before the Committee, he should openly & candidly declare all he knew concerning their conduct’ – a threat he proceeded to fulfil, telling the Committee that, in terms of his clerks acting as brokers, ‘he believes several of them do to no inconsiderable amount’. As for himself, however, he was adamant, baldly stating that he was ‘in no ways concerned in partnership with Mr Salmon or any other Broker’, and denying that he had ever acted as a broker or a jobber himself. So it continued into 1784. ‘He does not act as a Broker, but takes care to be always at his book & never goes into the Market, nor does he job,’ declared Francis Fonton of his own impeccable behaviour in the 3 Per Cent Consols Office; his colleague Poppleton ‘acknowledg’d that he acts as a Broker, but said he does not often go into the Market’, promising that he would not do so in future; and several clerks from the 4 Per Cent Consols Office admitted that they sometimes acted as brokers, though usually in ‘a very trifling way’. The eventual upshot was a resolution, passed by the Court of Directors in August 1784, ‘that no clerk of the Bank should act as a Stockbroker under pain of immediate dismission from his employment’, while if any clerk was still in partnership with a stockbroker he must ‘immediately discontinue the connexion’. Notices to that effect, painted in large letters, were accordingly posted in the Rotunda and each of the Transfer Offices.

  These three areas of concern were not the only ones. The Committee also demanded that current Bank ledgers should no longer be left out all night open on desks; that the lockers that generally kept the Bank’s books should be much less flimsily constructed; that access to vaults containing bills and notes should be much more tightly controlled; and above all that the senior men should raise their game. ‘Very extraordinary’ was the Committee’s verdict on the disturbing revelation that the chiefs of the departments and the heads of the offices were usually the first each day to quit the Bank, ‘leaving the charge of everything to the vigilance and honesty of junior clerks’; and the Committee insisted that henceforth those at the top were to be ‘held accountable for the conduct of those immediately under them’. Altogether, it was a commendably root-and-branch exercise that Bosanquet and his two fellow-directors undertook in 1783–4. And their sixth and final report ended with all due sonority:

  When we contemplate the immense importance of the Bank of England not only to the City of London, in points highly essential to the promotion & extension of its Commerce, but to the Nation at large, as the grand Palladium of Publick Credit, we cannot but be thoroughly persuaded that an Object so great in itself & so interesting to all Ranks of the Community, must necessarily excite care & solicitude in every breast, for the wise administration of its Affairs, but principally & directly in theirs who are entrusted with the immediate management of them.

  ‘We deem it therefore superfluous,’ they concluded, ‘to say a single word to the Court with a view of inculcating a religious Veneration for the glorious fabrick, or of recommending a steady and unremitting attention to its sacred Preservation.’

  All too soon, however, there was another scandal, another committee. Samuel Bosanquet may have judged Francis Fonton ‘a very good regular clerk
’, but in September 1790 he was found guilty of forging stock receipts for his own financial gain, leading to his hanging in November. That same month a Special Committee was appointed, resulting in March 1791 in the promulgation of seventeen ‘Rules and Orders’ relating to the daily conduct of every clerk. These included much more rigorous attendance requirements; an injunction that each clerk should conduct himself ‘with zeal and activity to the business allotted him’, paying ‘implicit obedience to the directions of his superiors in office’; a similar exhortation to behave to the public ‘with the utmost civility and assiduity without giving a preference to any, but serving each person in his proper turn’; and a series of specific demands, such as not to move freely between offices, not ‘on any account’ to employ a non-Bank person on Bank business, not without permission to ‘allow any person to have access to books or papers belonging to the Bank, or to furnish extracts thereof, or information of any kind relating to the business of the House’, not to make unauthorised erasures in Bank books (ledgers), and not only to report to the chief cashier or chief accountant knowledge of any ‘unfaithfulness, fraud, error, or any indirect practices against the interest of the Bank committed by any person whatever’, but to ‘use every endeavour to prevent or detect the same’. There were also similarly stern injunctions for the Bank’s senior men; in addition the Special Committee successfully recommended both the recruitment of at least eight day porters to enhance internal security and the taking in hand of the Library, still ‘encumbered with much useless lumber’ in the shape of cancelled banknotes and redundant old books. This task, sensibly added the Committee, was to be undertaken by ‘a few active young men’, for the three existing librarians, all long in the tooth, were ‘seldom disposed to spend any great part of their time in a building where at some seasons they must expect to find it cold and damp’.12