The most influential of the public attacks was made in 1957 by Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England. He asserted that ‘Baker’s superstructure is not only oppressive but – which is worse – lacks grandeur’; he deeply regretted the destruction of ‘Soane’s interiors with their infinite variety of domes, every one original and interesting, and several of a very high and exacting beauty’; and overall, taking the first half of the century as a whole, he reckoned that it was, even allowing for the Second World War, ‘the worst individual loss suffered by London architecture’. The centenary of Baker’s birth failed to shift what had become a hostile consensus. ‘Now that Soane is esteemed as one of Britain’s great and original architects, we find it difficult to forgive Baker for his treatment of the Bank of England, Soane’s masterpiece,’ solemnly stated The Times in 1962. ‘Baker was more ruthless than he need have been. He gutted the whole interior, sweeping away all Soane’s and Sir Robert Taylor’s unique, original courts, and he built inside Soane’s peripheral wall a multi-storey block that was self-confidently elaborate where an architect with a true artist’s humility would have been content to be discreet.’8
More recent opinion has been mixed. Simon Bradley, authoritatively updating and revising Pevsner in 1997, was unwilling to retract the great man’s damning verdict (‘Pevsner’s judgement still stands’). In terms of the exterior, asserted Bradley, ‘Baker’s vocabulary generally appears not as a considered response to particular circumstances, in the way of Soane’s restless endeavours, but as a kit of parts to be deployed complacently and regardless of context,’ with ‘the recurrent motif everywhere a singling out of odd principal windows by rather weak aedicules, or by a favourite Baker form with segmental head and foot’, both of them ‘entirely out of sympathy with Soane’s style – as is the gruesome hipped pantiled roof’; as for the interior, he regretted the way Baker, though reproducing the Old Dividend Office ‘almost exactly’, had nevertheless ‘sabotaged the proportions by adding at either end a version of the domed centre bay of the Old Colonial Office’. Admittedly, he conceded, ‘the new top-lit banking halls of the perimeter are more faithful to Soane’s models than is commonly realized’, yet overall ‘the distinction between his architectural personality and Soane’s is a matter not of taste, but of the gulf between talented professionalism and imaginative genius’.
The real reputational recovery came in 2005 with Daniel Abramson’s magisterial Building the Bank of England, which included a sensitive and archivally based appraisal of the actual – often difficult – circumstances in which Baker did his work. ‘Throughout the process of rebuilding,’ he notes, the architect was ‘faced with striking a balance between tradition and modernisation’, with the latter a clear and inescapable competing priority, whatever anyone’s understandable attachment to the former:
Functionally the old Bank of England had become obsolete. The major construction campaigns of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century had culminated more than a century earlier in a more or less public complex housing some thousand staff without electricity, telephones, plumbing and other modern technologies and amenities. The new building, on the other hand, would have to house an organisation that was not only four times larger, but whose work had changed fundamentally, now being much more clerical and less publicly oriented [in the sense of daily customers calling at the Bank], and directed by a professional executive corps.
Abramson further emphasises that during the 1920s and 1930s Baker and the Bank’s directors and public opinion generally were all more or less as one, in that they ‘accepted the Bank’s practical requirement and felt, too, that Baker’s design work and re-creations of some interior Soane spaces represented a respectful enough continuation of the classical tradition, of Soane’s aesthetic and of the Bank’s architectural history’. Moreover, he points out, ‘as eventually constructed the rebuilt Bank contained numerous preserved, altered and re-created “gems” set into the fabric of the new building’ – gems such as Taylor’s sculpted twisting and flowing 1730s figure of Britannia or various of Soane’s transfer hall lantern columns or the replication on the third floor of his Doric vestibule, even as elsewhere in the Bank such thoroughly modern and utilitarian developments were being introduced as its own generating station, engine room and 800-foot deep water well, not to mention, behind the Lothbury front, a high-tech, horseshoe-shaped Bullion Yard able to accommodate turning motorised vehicles.
Altogether, while not denying Baker’s ‘seemingly gratuitous fiddling with his predecessors’ work’, typified by ‘the alterations to his replica of Taylor’s Court Room’, and rightly critical of his ‘claims to be respecting Soane’s real intentions’, it is a persuasive defence; and Abramson quotes with tacit sympathy Baker’s own comparative verdict in relation to the newly built (1921–4) Federal Reserve Bank of New York: ‘It was a veritable fortress of wealth. But its interior had none of the welcoming appearance of a house of city merchants, which is the tradition of Threadneedle Street.’ Perhaps that was a stretch – Baker’s Bank was also a deliberately formidable, unyielding symbol of the financial power at the very heart of what was still the British Empire – yet over the years a certain domesticity, epitomised by the new Garden Court, would even in its twentieth-century garb help to make the Old Lady an institution capable of commanding affection as well as respect.9
What was life like in the Bank between the wars? It certainly did not start on a harmonious note. On a Saturday afternoon in February 1919 a crowded meeting of the staff was held in the Court Room and addressed by Wilfred G. Bryant, a 1st-class clerk in the Branch Banks Office. He began by thanking the governors for their ‘magnanimity and kindness’ in allowing ‘the use of this beautiful room’; and he emphasised ‘the gratitude we all feel for the very many privileges and blessings we enjoy in the service of the Governor and Company’. But his tone soon darkened: ‘It has come to pass that because we are in the service of the Bank, the Bank claims the right to commandeer, if it thinks fit, the whole of our waking life and to recompense us for the sacrifice of all our leisure on its own terms. Is it any wonder that human nature has rebelled against this worse than slavery?’ And: ‘For years past the whole system of promotions has caused comment and disaffection. Men are passed over without a cause assigned and are barred accordingly from legitimate advances.’ And again: ‘How many men in this room could give a complete list of our Directors? Or tell aught about their personalities? Not one in ten. Yet they are our masters …’ Strong words, yet Bryant (speaking as a member of the self-styled ‘Committee of Delegates’) was just as harsh on those gathered around him:
We have not received from you, although we have been fighting your battles, all the sympathy that we deserved. There is a terrible amount of snobbery in the Bank. There is an extraordinary ability to sit upon fences. There is a remarkable shrinking from compromising your dignity or your fancied position with the authorities. There is the strangest aversion to putting your names to documents. There is an appalling lack of brotherly feeling among you. There exists a most utter callousness to any sort of esprit-de-corps.
Suitably stung, the meeting agreed to send a memorandum, ‘respectfully addressed to the Governor and Directors of the Bank of England by the staff of the same’, demanding the establishment of a standing committee of directors and staff, on the grounds that ‘in no other way does it seem possible that difficulties can be brought to light and alleged grievances ventilated’. The deputy governor was unsympathetic – Norman in his diary calling it a ‘Grumblers Meeting’ – but the Court as a whole responded by appointing a Special Committee on Grievances.
Over the next few months it heard many grumbles. No doubt there was a self-selecting and not necessarily representative element to those who spoke up; but cumulatively the eloquent evidence was of a far from happy workforce:
I am of opinion that the men who were promoted on the Stock side last October were very largely in one particular clique and that undue influence was exercise
d. (William Challis, 1st-class clerk in the Dividend Accounts Office)
I was eleven years in the 4th-Class, which was most disheartening, and I thought that once I got out of that Class things could not be worse; I have, however, been 13 years in the 2nd Class and I am still there. I am nearly 54 … I believe my case is the worst in the Bank. (Henry Onyon, 2nd-class clerk in the Dividend Pay Office)
I may say that there are many men who would like to come before you but are afraid to do so, partly because they are not sure what their reception will be, and partly because they fear that a black mark would be put against them. (Frederick Rumsey, supernumerary 2nd-class clerk in the Dividend Pay Office)
Since I was demobilised on the 12th December last, my average time of leaving on Saturday has been 3 o’clock … I used to play Rugby football and often I did not arrive on the field until half-time. (Arthur J. F. Bond, 4th-class clerk in the Private Drawing Office)
May I say that I am loath to be thought a man with a grievance … I think the Class system works unfairly in that men have to depend largely on chance for their promotion. If promotion is stagnant at the head of an office it means that through no fault of their own the men in the office are kept back. (Wilfrid M. Acres, 1st-class clerk in the Branch Banks Office and future historian of the Bank)
I may say that I came into the Bank in 1882 and since then I have not spoken to a Governor or Director. (Henry H. Lempriere, 1st-class clerk in the Dividend Pay Office)
A man never knows his character in the Bank. If a man wants to know his character he has to ask his Principal, who may or may not tell him. Any secret system is liable to abuse, as it places the Principal in an autocratic position … (James R. Sugars, 3rd-class clerk in the Accountant’s Bank Note Office)
I have to work late on every possible occasion in order that I may be able to give my family the bare necessities of life … The Bank have always been particular as to the type of men they elect into the Service; they come from decent homes and have the habits and tastes of gentlemen and I think the Bank should put them in the position to gratify those tastes. (Cuthbert Pearce, 4th-class clerk in the Dividend Accounts Office, aged twenty-nine and married with small twins, on a basic salary of £290)
We don’t want the Bank run on the lines of a factory and we fully appreciate the benefits we enjoy in the Service. We don’t expect anything unreasonable. We don’t want to be paid double for half the work or anything of that sort. But if the Staff are treated with sympathy and consideration you need have no doubt whatever that they would respond to that treatment … If the Authorities will endeavour, when considering problems connected with the Staff, to put themselves in our places and think what they would feel if they were in our position they need have no fear as to the result, nor need the Staff. (James Harrison, 4th-class clerk in the Private Drawing Office)
Reassured by what Bryant described as ‘the extreme repugnance among our men to have anything to do with Trade Unions’, the Court in July set up an Advisory Council of Directors and Staff.10 The Bank would remain for a long time a decidedly hierarchical organisation; but the old days of seemingly arbitrary autocratic rule had gone for ever.
The end of autocracy did not mean the end of paternalism – far from it. Even before the war, in 1908, the Bank had provided the eighteen-acre ground (off Priory Lane in Roehampton) for a staff sports club; and in July 1919 – only months after the ‘Grumblers Committee’ and amid rising industrial tension in the country at large – the visiting Ben Strong, following lunch at governor Cokayne’s Roehampton home, went on to the ‘field day’ at the nearby Sports Club:
They have a cricket field, bowling greens, tennis courts, etc, all in beautiful order and in every way a desirable adjunct to the Bank. There were nearly 6,000, each man taking some lady friend and each of the girls in the Bank taking some man. The entertainment consisted of cricket games, tennis, bowling, a band concert and dancing in a big open air tent. I was very greatly impressed with the general appearance of the people, resembling in many respects the type which we employ in New York. A number of the directors of the Bank were there with their families, and, as in America, the dancing proved a great attraction.
‘Cokayne told me,’ added Strong, ‘that steps were being taken by the bank employees in London, including the Bank of England, to get up some sort of a general protective organization, not quite along the lines of the labor union, but, I gathered, with the expectation that ultimately it will amount to the same thing. He viewed the movement with some concern.’ In the event the recently formed Bank Officers’ Guild failed to secure a meaningful foothold in the Bank, but directors like William Douro Hoare and Cecil Lubbock now started to spend significant amounts of time on matters of staff welfare, with Hoare’s cricket match against the Bank 1st XI remaining the centrepiece of the annual summer garden party until his death in 1928, when a governor’s team took over, usually fielding a Test star or two. Other indications of the enhanced paternalism between the wars included the start in 1921 of the Old Lady (albeit seldom a forum for the venting of grievances), the establishment in 1934 of a Superannuation Fund for pensioners (replacing the old system of pensions being granted ‘at the pleasure of Court’), and, especially valued by current staff on a daily basis, the creation in 1927 in Tokenhouse Yard of the Bank of England Club, featuring a bar, a coffee room and a meeting room as well as dining rooms – ‘Every stick and stone of which,’ reported the Old Lady, ‘has been ungrudgingly given by the Governor and Company.’11
The third floor at Tokenhouse Yard was reserved for women clerks, while at Roehampton the women had from 1921 their own separate Sports Club. What there does not seem to have been – in the early 1920s anyway, and probably throughout the inter-war period – was parity of esteem. ‘Experience has shown,’ declared a January 1920 memo about the Secretary’s Office, ‘that although Women Clerks perform straightforward work very satisfactorily they are unable, with rare exception, to carry out any intricate work without supervision and they suffer from a lack of adaptability …’ Moreover: ‘Women Clerks cannot be employed on the work of the Bank Provident Society, or the Income Tax, which involve private affairs of members of the staff, as the staff will not consult them. The work of the counter, involving as it does on many occasions criminal questions, is also unsuitable for women.’ A memo later that year from the principals of the Correspondence Department was if anything even less enthusiastic:
We are of opinion that a given number of men will get through considerably more work than an equal number of women; & that speaking generally the standard of their work will be higher … The value of the work of Women Clerks is lessened because of their frequent absences, because they are emotional & easily upset & also we think because there is a tendency amongst the younger ones not to look upon their work as their career in life.
The key report was that of March 1921, as the House Committee submitted to the deputy governor its views on ‘The Future Employment in the Bank of England of Women Clerks’, in other words in the larger context of men’s post-war return to work. After noting that ‘the disparity, under existing conditions, in the absolute efficiency of the two sexes is sufficiently obvious in our opinion to justify the relegation of women in the mass to the work for which they seem specially adapted’, the report went on:
Without expressing an opinion upon the abstract merits of Equality of Service, we do not consider that the service of the Bank admits the practical application of a principle of equality because the continuity of the subordinate and administrative careers implies eligibility for either, but the woman’s eligibility for the administrative career is qualified by uncertain duration of service: a disqualification, in fact, that we would make apparent during her subordinate career by restriction to a particular class of work and render perhaps less objectionable by segregation from men. Nor although there may be women whose capacity equals or exceeds that of the average clerk do we think that it would serve any useful purpose under present conditions to
engage such women exceptionally upon the work which we propose to confine to men.
‘Shorthand and Typewriting; Currency and Bank Note work; Machining and sorting dividend warrants and coupon work; General Card Index work’ – such were the functions, concluded the report, to which women in the future were to be confined, with of course the rule staying in place that a woman had to leave at once if she married. Nor was there significantly more freedom sartorially. Hat and gloves on arrival and departure were compulsory for all female staff; a notice was issued forbidding make-up, especially lipstick; and when in the 1930s a female clerk in the Dividend Office dared to wear a blouse with a bow at the neck showing above her stipulated dark-navy overall, a superintendent in the War Stock Office took exception and formally complained.12 Women may have comprised over one-third of the workforce, but in all essentials and outlook the Bank remained – as Janet Hogarth had realistically anticipated – almost as male-dominated an institution as it had always been.
First impressions can be the sharpest, and a trio of male reminiscences evoke the flavour of a place that was still, in many other sorts of ways as well, traditional and unchanging:
The twenty young hopefuls who made up my ‘Election’ [in 1921] were paraded in the Court Room and subjected to the usual scrutiny before being walked round the Bank and dropped off in ones or twos in various offices. My destination was the old Private Drawing Office, which in those days faced north and overlooked the old Bank Garden … The Superintendent of the G-O section, on which I worked, was Charlie Butterworth. Clad in a frock coat and wearing elastic-sided Victorian boots he seemed to me to be a very old gentleman … The Drawing Office then was a noisy, busy place. Ledgers, cash books, pass books and waste books were all hand written and at around 3.00 pm and again after 4.00 pm there were furious rushes to enter the ‘Town Clearing’ and then the bundles of Bank cheques … The countermen were noisier and used louder and coarser language than in later years. Especially I remember a couple named Troughton and Olivier, the latter said to be the son of a bishop. Olivier had a habit of leaving the counter and passing through the office, pinching or annoying some woman clerk on his way, to bait an inoffensive colleague named Grugeon who worked on the Bankers counter. (C. D. Garton)
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