Till Time's Last Sand

by David Kynaston

  The Chief Cashier also controlled the Bank’s Treasury. Here, under strong-room conditions, and under dual control, was kept the stock of Notes and coin needed for the Bank’s day-to-day transactions. Under him were the Bullion Office, the Gold Weighing Room, and the Great Hall. Half of the Hall was occupied by the Issue Office, to which the public came to exchange Notes for gold. The other end was the In-tellers Office, where silver, received in bulk from the bankers, was ‘garbled’ [that is, removing counterfeit, damaged or worn coins] and checked.

  ‘The second Chief, the Chief Accountant,’ added de Fraine, ‘controlled all the various Stock Offices and conducted all their correspondence. The most important of these were the Consols Office, the Bank Stock Office and the India Stock Office. Here were kept the “Books” of each stock, giving full details of every holding, and here Transfers were made, to be subsequently entered in the “Books”.’

  In the course of the nineteenth century, perhaps no chief cashier was quite as dominant as Abraham Newland had been until his retirement in 1807, but there were still some notable figures. Thomas Rippon (1829–35) died in harness at his residence in the Bank, having reputedly taken only one holiday (of three days) during his fifty-three years of service, ‘stating’ (explained an obituary) ‘that green fields and country scenery had no charms for him’; William Miller (1864–6) was an ardent advocate of the decimal system, managing to introduce it into the bullion department and informing a parliamentary committee that ‘the use of decimal arithmetic, independently of the greater security for accuracy, would enable the Bank of England to dispense with one clerk in twelve’; and George Forbes (1866–73) was a highly capable Aberdonian who, in a letter to the Economist shortly before his promotion, lucidly explained the annual cycles of bullion flowing in and out of the Bank, largely dependent on agricultural factors. The longest tenure (1835–64) belonged to Matthew Marshall (no relation of William), during which the division of the Bank was made – though on an accounting rather than an organisational or infrastructural basis – into Banking and Issuing Departments, as laid down by the Bank Charter Act. The son of an Amersham solicitor, Marshall had entered the Bank in 1810 at the age of nineteen and would die in 1873 at Amersham House, Beckenham.

  Overlapping as chief accountant for much of the time (1831–58) was William Smee, and the chances are that the two men worked closely together, given that both were founders and trustees of the Gresham Life Assurance Society. Smee himself, who after fifty-seven years’ service died still in post at the age of eighty-one, had three sons: William, the eldest, who lived with his father at the Bank and rose to become secretary to the Committee of Treasury, before a railway smash on the Brighton line in 1852 so severely injured him that he resigned and emigrated to Australia; Frederick, the youngest, who was at the Bank from 1842 to 1876, predictably enough working mainly in the Chief Accountant’s Office; and Alfred, a doctor who in 1840 became the Bank’s first medical officer, soon afterwards invented a new ink (‘Bank Black’) that for over a century would be used for writing the Court minutes, and generally became well known for his work in electro-metallurgy, almost certainly contributing to the 1855 note. The ink was perhaps a more mixed blessing – ‘it was almost as thick as soup, smelled of vinegar, and using it was rather like writing with mud,’ noted John Giuseppi in the 1960s, on the basis of personal experience – but the Smees were clearly among the more remarkable of the many Bank families.9

  What was life like in the Victorian Bank? Speaking to the Genealogical Society in 1949, Giuseppi offered a reassuring perspective:

  While from time to time evidence appears of some dissatisfaction, of complaints that salaries were not keeping pace with rising prices, there was never at any time anything in the nature of an ill-disposed staff. The steady, sober clerk of some fifteen to twenty years’ service was, in fact, by modern standards, reasonably well off. He had his house, usually at a comparatively low rental, a domestic staff of two, occasionally three, trained servants: his children could be educated at ‘select’ establishments where the tone at any rate was high, and usually a sound knowledge of the three ‘r’s’ was inculcated. If he rose to be a Principal he might keep his carriage. A ‘Gentleman of the Bank’ ranked high in the City.

  Even so, as Giuseppi intimated, it was not all sweetness and light. Punch in 1842, with presumably some exaggeration, reckoned the Bank’s clerks to be ‘the hardest worked’ and ‘the worst paid’ in all of London; when two years later the salaries of the younger clerks were significantly increased, this was done at no extra overall cost, through the simultaneous abolition of the additional £30 after thirty-five years of service. For a long time the rising cost of living was a constant gripe, typified by the 1865 memorial to directors in which 558 members of staff declared that they had ‘much difficulty in meeting their unavoidable expenses and maintaining their social respectability, in consequence of the very high price of provisions, the advance in house rents, and the generally diminished value of fixed incomes’. That did the trick, resulting in a substantially improved pay scale (ranging from £70 a year for eighteen-year-old clerks to £280 for clerks of forty-five and upwards), although in 1872 the Court was less convinced by a similar clerks’ memorial, with a director (apparently residing in Kensington) producing a detailed report. ‘Potatoes,’ he found, ‘are certainly dearer than they were in 1865 and 1866, but perhaps next year they will be as cheap as ever.’ He was a little more generous when it came to washing: ‘I cannot find out that there is any increased charge under this head. I pay precisely the same now as I did in 1865. The wholesale price of common soap is rather less; but as the wages of the servant-of-all-work class are rather higher, I will allow an increase of 10 per cent on this item.’ Meat was another matter. ‘Since 1865, beef, mutton, ox and sheep tongues, of excellent quality, have been introduced from Australia, and retailed, without bone, at 6d to 7d per lb., and nothing can be nicer for occasional use.’10

  Nevertheless, taken as a whole, pay and conditions were reasonable enough by the 1870s. Following a bleak period between the mid-1830s and the mid-1840s, when the Bank’s traditional ‘holy-days’ were virtually abolished, a system of annual leave was gradually put in place and expanded, in due course varying from fifteen to twenty-one days depending on length of service. A fixed scale of pensions, meanwhile, had been in place since the 1830s, broadly comparable to those operating in government departments; and in 1870 the retirement age was formally set at sixty-five. More generally, there was an increasing awareness during the third quarter of the century that, for the Bank to operate to maximum efficiency, its ‘higher duties’ would, as Chubb explained in his 1871 report, require ‘an increase of Salary to those to whom the higher duties were entrusted’ – to which policy, he added, ‘may be attributed many of the advanced additional salaries now paid, especially to the several classes in the Drawing Offices, the Security Clerks in the Bill Office, and certain positions in the Bank Note and other Offices’.

  Chubb in his 1871 report also focused on an important change that had taken place around the middle of the century in the Bank’s day-to-day working methods:

  Prior to 1850, an enormous mass of almost mechanical work was performed by Clerks; and, under the system then pursued, correctness was insured, as far as practicable, in large branches of the business by a duplicate system of account-keeping. The old method of entering cancelled Bank Notes in the Cash Book Office, is a fair instance of the mechanical duties then performed; and the Ledgers in the Drawing Office will serve as an example of the method of check referred to. One Ledger was kept by the Cashiers, and another by the Accountants, and a periodical comparison of them enabled a mutual correction of errors to be carried out. It is, perhaps, needless to say, that this system permitted a minimum of intelligent exertion on the part of any Clerk …

  It was, in short, ‘a cumbrous system of checks’ that had been ‘relied upon for the general correctness of the work in many of the Banking Offices, rather than, as no
w, the efficient performance of their duties by intelligent and carefully selected Clerks’. Writing in 1898, a retired clerk, William Shand, agreed that the mid-century ‘reformation of the Bank’ had been ‘not before it was needed’, likewise adducing the condition of ‘the P.D.’s’ (the Private and Public Drawing Offices), and specifically the ‘very queer’ and ‘abominably managed’ system of book-keeping in the Public Drawing Office, that he had got to know in 1842 before being transferred for some years to the Newcastle branch:

  The Cash Books were ill-kept. Great piles were slumped together and posted to the ledgers in accumulations, to which the letter ‘P.S.’ were affixed, meaning ‘part side’, or part of the side of the cash book. The alterations were numerous in the figures, and consequently in the additions and totals. The figures of the totals sprawled over the page and became sometimes so illegible that to make them readable they must necessarily be big. Blotting paper was insufficient; of sand there was plenty – so much so that the backs of the ledgers were often split by the leverage of the boards operating on a fulcrum of silica lying within and about the sewing, so as to tear away the covers.

  The only purpose these ledgers served was to show how much money was at credit of the accounts, so that any overdrafts might be avoided. But this was a rare chance in the public accounts and, in fact, we were allowed to keep the books as we liked. The Principals never interfered.

  The real books of the Bank, for permanent use, were kept upstairs, in a dismal place, and there the pass-books were written up the day after the transactions had taken place. So it happened every morning that a messenger was sent down to us, to come up with our ledgers to agree the totals. We got our messengers to take them on their backs, and I well remember following a snuffy old porter in livery along the garden walk towards a staircase which led up to the galleries in the roof, which were dignified by the name of the Back Drawing Office – where the men belonged to the Accountant’s side. They were a rum lot. Ragged, if not dirty, with sleeves sometimes turned up to the elbow, in an appalling atmosphere …11

  Inevitably, the post-1850 approach was uncomfortable for some, especially in certain areas after the Bank’s entry to the Clearing House in 1864. ‘There is no doubt that the work of the Drawing Office has undergone a radical change both in its nature and extent, and that more intelligence and activity are required on the part of the Clerks,’ noted an 1867 report on the Private Drawing Office. ‘Many of them under the old system performed their duties with satisfaction, but now are manifestly unequal to the strain which the more pressing requirements of the day demand …’ Accordingly, the recommendation was that eleven clerks be removed ‘to less onerous positions in quieter offices’. For most clerks though, certainly most younger ones, it was surely a reformation for the better, with Hill the following year in his report on the Accountant’s Bank Note Office gratified to identify ‘more direct individual responsibility on the part of the clerks, who feel deeper interest in their duties from conviction that nothing is demanded of them which is not of real importance’. All that said, one should not exaggerate the pace or ubiquity of change. At this stage, Chubb’s vaunted mechanisation still had strict limits; huge, unwieldy ledgers – often of over a thousand folios, enclosed in half-inch-thick cardboard covers decorated with green sailcloth – remained for many years yet the staple of the Bank’s permanent records of transactions; in 1874 there was a celebrated episode as the Drawing Office launched an investigation, lasting four or five weeks, into a difference of threepence on the Private Accounts section; and when de Fraine entered the Bank in 1886, his first task was to deal with Bank notes returned from circulation – some 60,000 a day, involving clerks standing at desks and manually dividing them, one by one, into two sections, the ‘Fives’ and the ‘Tens and High Sums’, before they were then sorted, again one by one, according to date and number.12

  In reality, moreover, the Victorian Bank was never, whether before or after 1850, as orderly and purposeful as those in charge might have wished. Between 1837 and 1845 alone, at least three acrimonious disputes between clerks were noted in the Court minutes: in one, an argument about the quality of the food led to post-prandial blows and a nosebleed; in another, the hurling of a large bill case, accompanied by ‘very gross & low abuse’, resulted from the refusal to part with an inkstand; and in a third, the tussle over an office stool led to a severe blow in the face, rendering the recipient ‘incapable of resuming his work for the remainder of the day’. Or take the formative impressions of W. Courthope Forman and C. H. Goodman, both of whom started work in 1866 in the Private Drawing Office. A ‘busy hive’, indeed, found Forman, but with ‘a good many quaint insects’:

  There was a youngish gentleman on the ledgers, who made remarkably clever caricatures and sketches in pen and ink, sometimes even upon the covers of the sacred books. There was a little rotund, elderly gentleman, with a short temper and a colossal skull, who frequently murdered the Queen’s English in a manner that was a real delight. There was a middle-aged gentleman who ran a sort of farm in the suburbs, and brought a whiff of country to the Drawing Office, with the produce he offered there for sale; and yet another (said to have a connection in the hosiery line), who brought ties, and handkerchiefs, and fancy socks, and sold them to the highest bidder. Then there was a nice, rosy, bald-headed old gentleman, still apparently doing junior work, who dozed over his books on summer afternoons, then, leaning over a glazed partition behind him, one or other of us would gently tickle his bald spot with the feathers of a quill pen, till at last, wide awake and goaded to desperation, he would smite his ‘mighty dome’ with his palm, exclaiming, to our delight, ‘Oh! damn those flies’! Our mission accomplished, like red indians, we would steal quietly away. Then there was an irate gentleman on a waste-book, whom we thought mad, and who eventually became so. Behind him it was an entertainment to stand as he cast up the columns of his book aloud, at a terrific pace, sandwiching the most profane oaths between the figures. And, lastly, I must not forget that curious character that seemed to have stepped from the pages of Dickens; that lugubrious looking person, in tightly buttoned, ill-fitting frock coat of shiny black, with wrinkling trousers to match, who presided over the Pass Books. He wore a rusty chimney-pot hat, but ill kept, which he never took off; indeed, tradition said that he slept in it, or even, that like a caul, it was born with him.

  Goodman for his part was struck by the lack of decorum of his new colleagues (‘not only were some of them rather rough but the tone of conversation of many was very coarse’), as well as by the amount of drinking that went on (‘in at least one desk was a wine bin where you could get accommodation’). Nor seemingly was the prevailing atmosphere any more prim and proper by the early 1880s, to judge by the experience of Allan Fea, a young clerk who would eventually become a full-time writer:

  In those days [he would recall almost half a century later] the Private Drawing Office, to which I was handed over, was more like a big school play-ground than anything else. From the fossil cashiers down to the callow ‘unattached’, all seemed to enter wholeheartedly upon the game of enlivening the passing official hours: universal chaff and merriment, with little or no heed of the ponderous contents of weighty ledgers or the balancing intricacies of ‘Waste Books’. Balancing feats on more acrobatic lines, however, demanded a certain amount of thought and concentration when those formidable volumes were called into requisition as handy tests of muscular fitness, or proof of boasted sinew. Other mild sport was improvised in the way of ‘cock-shies’, wherein somebody’s ‘topper’ was offered up for sacrifice for want of a genuine cocoanut. Wrestling matches, also, were popular, those contesting usually involving considerable wreckage of official furniture and fittings, including the glass chimneys of gas-jets, ink-pots, and sundry such accessories. Those endowed with histrionic skill held forth, providing a varied programme modulating from a solemn pulpit sermon to an Adelphi hero’s soliloquy broadcast to the ‘gods’ more eloquently far than the aerial transmission o
f these times. A faithful rendering of the chairman at The Oxford [music hall] also was usually greeted with rapturous applause …

  Presumably, in the Bank as a whole, it was not a case of overgrown schoolboys having jolly japes the entire time; yet, given that most other parts of the Victorian City (above all the Stock Exchange) tended to be inward-looking and ultimately conformist, for all the surface eccentricities and ‘characters’ it was probably true across the Bank as a whole that, in Fea’s words, ‘any marked peculiarity or pedantic inclination about a fellow was soon spotted, and very much brought up in evidence against him for ever after’.13

  As usual, there was no shortage of rules and exhortations from above, almost all of them aimed at greater regularity of conduct. In 1847, any clerk ‘appearing at his office in a state of intoxication’ was to be ‘dismissed the service’; in 1850, immediate dismissal was also laid down as the punishment for ‘all clerks who are henceforth found to be engaged in betting, in subscribing to sweepstakes, or in gambling transactions of any kind’; in 1851, the ‘Heads of Office’ explicitly forbade ‘the admission or use of Beer, Wine or any Spirituous Liquor by the clerks throughout the Bank’ (though with an exception made for porters and ‘the Mechanics on weekly wages’); in 1853, the governor ordered that ‘in future all the clerks in the House in signing their names or initials to any book or document relating to the service of the Bank will do so in a plain, distinct, and legible hand and without any flourish’; and that same year, ‘the Authorities’ let it be known that ‘having seen a disposition upon the part of certain Bank clerks to wear moustaches, they strongly disapprove of the practice’, adding that if necessary ‘measures will be resorted to which may prove of a painful nature’. Or take the coda that followed the detailed ‘explicit regulations’ contained in the 1884 version of ‘Rules and Orders to be Observed by the Clerks of the Bank of England’: