The Bank during the mid- to late nineteenth century may in a commercial banking sense have been increasingly dwarfed by the giant joint-stock banks, which were willing (unlike the Bank and many of the long-established private banks) to pay interest on deposits. Even so, its own range of activities and responsibilities, whether for its ‘private’ purposes or in the larger ‘public’ interest, continued to grow. In 1864 the Bank entered the Bankers’ Clearing House, which meant, noted a report three years later on the Private Drawing Office, that henceforth the Bank was ‘enabled to offer the same advantages to Customers as those afforded by the other Clearing Bankers’; while, in terms of acting as the bankers’ bank, typical figures in the late 1860s showed London bankers’ balances at the Bank running at over £7 million, amounting to one-third of the Bank’s private deposits. Soon afterwards, in 1871, the Bank’s assiduous secretary, Hammond Chubb, itemised some significant indicators since 1853: Bank notes issues annually up from £9 million to £13 million; ‘a considerable increase in the number of gold coins weighed in the Weighing Office, and in the amount of silver counted in the Tellers’ Office’; the number of accounts in the Drawing Office up by more than 600, with the average balance nearly doubled; securities deposited by customers up from £4.9 million nominal value to £19.9 million, ‘the greater part bearing Coupons for half-yearly collection’; and ‘the management of all the India Stocks and Promissory Note Loans has been undertaken, as well as a great part of the Banking Business of the India Office, formerly managed at the East India House’, not to mention the printing of India currency notes, stock certificates and so on being added to the work of the Printing Department. Indeed, there was from the late 1860s, as Clapham notes, ‘a steady access of colonial, municipal, and other business for bodies corporate’ – business that was ‘safe and certain’ and of a sort that the Bank was ‘well qualified to handle’.2
Despite the overall increase of activities, the size of the Bank’s staff (including at the branches) remained notably constant: 908 in 1832, 883 in 1854, 899 in 1880. Chubb, writing in 1871, had no doubt about the key role played by ‘the introduction and use of mechanical labour’, citing as examples ‘the system of “Surface Printing” in Bank Notes, the printing signatures to Bank Notes and Warrants, the employment of mechanics in the Accountant’s Bank Note Office, an increased use of printing in special forms and cheques; and, latterly, the application of printing to the Dividend Books and Warrants’. His detailed case-study, in which he took manifest pride, concerned the Accountant’s Bank Note Office:
There was first in 1860 the introduction of mechanics as ‘posters’, and subsequently in 1861 as ‘ledger examiners’. These were aided in their work by the simple ‘stamping pen’, with moveable dates. In 1862 the system of employing uncovenanted [in effect apprentice] clerks as sorters of Bank Notes was commenced. By degrees the system was extended, and a further step was taken in 1863 by the use of stamping and numbering machines, and finally by the abolition of some duplicate work in 1868. But this is not all. The Inspectors of notes still stand at the number fixed in 1853, notwithstanding the larger number of notes – a result which has been obtained by a better organization in the Inspectors’ Department, but chiefly by the arrangements made in recent years, under which the clerks in several of the Banking Offices inspect the notes passing through their hands. The system was first applied to the Private Drawing Office, and ultimately to the Pay Hall; a slight payment being made to the clerks in these Offices to cover the increased risk.
‘Thus, by the adoption of these measures, which followed one another as circumstances would admit,’ concluded Chubb in his report to the governor about ‘the Expenses of the Bank’, the office ‘has been brought to its present condition, in which its arrangements are more simple, the performance of the work is more efficient, and the cost is far less than it has ever been in modern times.’3
Banknotes themselves were of declining relative importance during the second half of the century – rivalled by the growing use of cheques and the ever-greater popularity of gold sovereigns and half-sovereigns – but they still mattered hugely, while remaining to the world at large the most visible symbol of the Bank. Increasingly, as intended by the Bank Charter Act, the Bank’s notes enjoyed a near-monopoly of the note issue in England and Wales, hastened from the late 1870s by the remorseless takeover of country banks by the large, non-issuing joint-stock banks – so that by the end of the century provincial banknotes accounted for only 7 per cent of the circulation of banknotes in England, with the rest being Bank of England notes. Those notes themselves were of a new type from 1855: printed by letterpress, with a shaded watermark; on distinctively thin, crisp paper; payable only to ‘the Bearer on Demand’; on and featuring a spear-carrying Britannia of somewhat Pre-Raphaelite mien, as depicted by the artist Daniel Maclise. Forgery now became significantly more difficult, though in 1862 there was a major scare with the discovery of the theft of a large quantity of banknote paper (and paper for printing rupees) from Messrs Portals’ Laverstock Mills in Hampshire, which had led to forged £5 notes, all printed on genuine banknote paper, being presented at the Bank. The main culprits were eventually identified, leading to a trial at the Old Bailey in 1863 and heavy sentences; but never tracked down was the woman, invariably dressed in black, who would wait at Waterloo Station for the packages of stolen paper, before disappearing with them over Waterloo Bridge in a horse-drawn cab. ‘We need to write a novel,’ commented the Bank’s solicitor Henry Freshfield, with a nod to the recent Wilkie Collins bestseller, ‘and call it The Woman in Black.’4
A decade later came another fraud, another trial – and considerable embarrassment.5 An American called George Bidwell, aided by his brother Austin and two accomplices, managed in the early months of 1873 to sell to the Bank’s Western branch in Burlington Gardens over £100,000 worth of forged bills of exchange. The branch’s manager was Colonel Peregrine Madgwick Francis, who had previously run the Hull branch, and he was undone by some highly accomplished fraudsters and no doubt a significant element of negligence. ‘It appears as if the bank managers,’ recalled George Bidwell, ‘had heaped a mountain of gold out in the street and had put up a notice, “Please do not touch this,” and then had left it unguarded with the guileless confidingness of an Arcadian.’ The fraud was eventually discovered; at the ensuing trial that summer at the Central Criminal Court, all four were found guilty; and they each received a life sentence, though in the event being released between 1887 and 1891. The Bank itself recovered almost all the money lost, but The Times estimated the cost – borne by the Bank – of pursuing, capturing and prosecuting the offenders at as high as £46,000. As another paper commented, ‘If the Bank of England can be so easily misled there is no question that minor establishments may be victimised.’
It was a more innocent scene in G. E. Hicks’s wonderfully detailed and characterful painting Dividend Day at the Bank of England, a popular hit of the 1859 Royal Academy Exhibition if less esteemed by the critics. Until 1869, when postal transmission was reluctantly authorised by the Bank following political pressure, it remained the inviolable practice that all dividend warrants on stock inscribed in the Bank’s books (whether government stock or the Bank’s own stock) had to be physically handed across its counters in the Dividend Office to the individual stockholders or their authorised representatives, who could then present them for payment in the Rotunda; and even after 1869, until in 1910 the receipt of dividends on personal attendance was almost entirely abolished, the practice still continued in some considerable numbers, as remembered in the 1920s by Arthur Rowlett, a veteran clerk:
The Dividends were paid from 9 till 4, the great bulk of the public attending on the 5th and two following days of January, April, July and October, when the principal public funds became payable. On arrival at the Bank at 8.45 a little crowd of people were found waiting, the precursors of ‘all sorts and conditions of men’ and women who steadily thronged the counters till closing time. Withi
n all was ready in the Dividend Office, freshly cut quill pens and new blotting paper laid ready for the motley crowd which soon filled the Office. Two Scotland Yard detectives were in attendance all day in case of pocket-picking or any other delinquency. The costumes were mostly of the Sunday best, and many ancient and venerable beaver hats were in evidence. Many quaint characters one calls to mind. Here we see the communicative stockholder who retails all his family history and ailments. There is the mysterious individual who whispers into the ear of the paying clerk his name and amount of Stock. On the one hand is the forgetful person who can only remember that he wants ‘a pink paper for five pounds.’ On the other hand is the stupid man who on being asked his name says ‘Two ’undred Consols,’ and when required to state the title of his Stock says ‘John Jones.’ Here is the family party with a luncheon basket, evidently making the occasion one for a joy-day in London. There we see the joint Stockholders who, suspicious of each other, come together and never let one another out of sight. And, most unpopular, the man who takes about five minutes to sign his name, and always arrives at five minutes to four for ten years’ arrear dividends which take nearly an hour to pay …
Or as the Comic Almanack had put it back in 1841, almost twenty years before Hicks painted his warrant-chewing dog, unnoticed amid all the jostle:
What a crowd! What a crush!
What a row! What a rush!
What screaming, and tearing, and noise –
Of cabmen and footmen, policemen and bus-men,
And poor little run-over boys! …
Oh! It’s Dividend Day!
Oh! It’s Dividend Day!
And all sorts of queer incongruities:
Old men and young maids, deaf ears and bright eyes
Are coming to claim their annuities …
It’s Dividend Day at the Bank.6
The overwhelming majority of the Bank’s staff occupied a clerical position, with up to one-sixth of vacancies being reserved for sons of those who had been clerks at the Bank for more than fifteen years. Otherwise, the main criteria for election to a clerkship were character and capacity (though it still remained necessary to find a director willing to exercise the power of nomination), as well as of course being male. ‘The general behaviour of the candidates, the nature of their testimonials, and their replies to the questions put to them regarding their habits and occupations’ were identified by the Court in 1844 as indispensable considerations; as for capacity, the examination procedure in place from the early 1850s comprised writing from dictation about thirty lines of an article taken from The Times, performing two reasonably simple interest sums, and (in the presence of the Committee for Examining Clerks for Election) working out a further sum in interest. ‘Although the system has unquestionably tended to raise the standard of Clerks,’ observed an 1865 memo almost certainly by Chubb, ‘it has, on the other hand, failed to keep out some who have proved very ill-fitted for the Bank service’; and henceforth would-be clerks were also to do a test simulating the most common work of junior clerks, namely ‘entering Warrants in the Dividend Books, or entering Cheques in the Cash and Bill Books’.
Three years later, in 1868, an internal report on the clerks and their departments gives us some names and some flesh. Starting with the Accountant’s Bank Note Office, where the individual verdicts by its Principal, Daniel Hill, suggest a more mixed picture than that model of modernised efficiency soon afterwards drawn by Chubb:
A valuable officer, but afflicted with lameness. (George Reynolds)
Indefatigable, zealous, conscientious. (George Betts)
Persevering, intelligent, speaks German. Ideas rather contracted. (Richard Baily)
Clever, useful, excitable, ready at figures. (Charles Earles)
A good conscientious clerk, negligent in appearance. (Alfred Appleton)
Excellent moral character, a promoter of ragged schools. (Edward Gribble)
Gentlemanly, intelligent, considerable ability. (Edmund Gill)
Conscientious, exemplary, useful in training young clerks, but too timid for anything beyond routine business. (Lewis Mayer)
Author of ‘Laing’s Theory of Business’. His talents might be more usefully employed than at present. (John Laing)
Industrious, attentive, illiterate. (Edward Oliver)
Well conducted, but very weak & nervous. (William Bawtree)
Gentlemanly, wants energy. (Daniel Reid)
Good clerk, not brilliant. (Charles Williams)
Average. (Henry Halsey)
Gentlemanly, attentive. (Francis Langford)
Good abilities, but liable to be careless & uncertain. (Charles Edis)
Moderate ability, conceited. (Richard May)
Well meaning, but remarkably thoughtless. (Thomas Critchett)
Average abilities, lethargic. (Frederic Stretton)
Elsewhere, to take some examples of clerks almost at random, Henry Dixon junior in the Consols Office was ‘quick, active & clever’ but ‘apt to make mistakes by too rapid a discharge of his duties’; Henry Rennell in the New £3 Per Cent Office was ‘steady, attentive, & regular’; John Bawtree in the Power of Attorney Office was ‘very careful and assiduous’; Thomas Hill in the Chancery and Exchequer Office was ‘better educated than the rest, but unfortunately very incorrect in keeping the Accounts’; Herbert Crickmay in the Branch Banks Office was ‘rapid’ with ‘good abilities’, but ‘somewhat too off-hand’; George Grey in the Private Drawing Office was ‘a medium clerk’ who ‘has not maintained his character’; Secundus Pryce Jones in the Public Drawing Office was of ‘average ability’ and ‘rather nervous’; Alexander Goudge in the Bill Office was ‘a hard working plodding Clerk and well conducted’; Gilbert Allum in the General Cash Book Office was ‘slower than formerly – says he does not feel so able for a heavy day’s work’; and so on.7 But of course, what was going on in their heads, as to a great or lesser extent they fulfilled their duties, we shall never know.
Two partial exceptions are clerks who have come down to us because of their sons. One was Robert Browning, father of the poet as well as son of the long-serving, ill-tempered Bank clerk who rose to be a department head – with all three unhelpfully having the same Christian name. Born in 1782, the middle Browning was probably still in his teens when he was sent to St Kitts in order to help manage the plantation holdings of his dead mother’s family, with the chance of a substantial inheritance. What then transpired was related by his son in 1846 in a letter to the future Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
If we are poor, it is to my father’s infinite glory, who, as my mother told me last night, as we sate alone, ‘conceived such a hatred to the slave-system in the West Indies, that he relinquished every prospect,’ supported himself, while there, in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father’s profound astonishment and rage … My father on his return, had the intention of devoting himself to art, for which he had many qualifications and abundant love – but the quarrel with his father, – who continued to hate him till a few years before his death, – induced him to go at once and consume his life after a fashion he always detested. You may fancy, I am not ashamed of him.
So the Bank it was, which he entered in 1803 and where he stayed for a full half-century (mainly in the Dividend Room of the Consols Office), but devoting most of his energies to his many sketchbooks and his extensive library, as well as apparently becoming an authority on sermons. ‘Not a very able Bank official but clever and much liked’ would be the verdict in the 1880s, some twenty years after his death, of the chief accountant of the day.
The other father of fame was William Marshall, whose son Alfred became a major economist and an inspiration for John Maynard Keynes. He was born in 1812; managed to enter the Bank in 1830 despite being the son of a downwardly mobile financial failure; started his own family life near the tanneries of Bermondsey, before moving to suburban Clapham; and in the Bank eventually rose in 1870 to become a cashier (though never chief cashier) before retiring
in 1877. ‘A tough old character, of great resolution and perception, cast in the mould of the strictest Evangelicals, bony neck, bristling projecting chin,’ recalled Keynes less than affectionately. ‘The nearest objects of his masterful instincts were his family, and their easiest victim his wife; but their empire extended in theory over the whole womankind, the old gentleman writing [before his death in 1901] a tract entitled Man’s Rights and Woman’s Duties.’8
At any one time, there was never any doubt about who – below the level of governor, deputy governor and directors, but often just as important – were the two kingpins: the chief cashier and the chief accountant, usually in that order. The chief cashier, explained Herbert de Fraine in his recollections of the late-Victorian Bank (but broadly applicable to the nineteenth century as a whole), ‘controlled all the Cash Offices, and his own office conducted all their correspondence’:
It looked after the Charity Commissioners, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, the National Debt Commissioners, and so on and so on, dealt with Treasury Bills and handled the issue of public loans. The offices under this Chief were the Discount Office, which discounted bills for the public, and the Bill Office, which collected bills as they became due, and dealt with the ‘Clearing’ and the Out-tellers. Then there was the Private Drawing Office, which kept the accounts of private firms and individuals, and the Public Drawing Office, which kept the accounts of all Government Departments, such as the Paymaster-General, the Post Office, etc.
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