Till Time's Last Sand

by David Kynaston

  Throughout these years, the most populous part of the Bank, excluding the Printing Works, was the Accountant’s Department, home of the Stock side, where the already considerable attritional daily workload expanded greatly as a result of the Labour government’s nationalisation programme soon after the war. Between the wars it had largely been based in Finsbury Circus; but even before the nationalisation programme fully unfolded it was clear that extra accommodation was needed, leading to the move in 1948 of some offices to the West End’s Regent Arcade House, quickly nicknamed ‘Spiv House’. In 1951 the decision was taken to purchase a substantial bomb site just to the east of St Paul’s, with a view to housing virtually the whole department there; and in due course this became the Bank’s New Change building, as designed by the veteran architect Victor Heal (who had been responsible for the Southampton branch just before the war) and situated just slightly set back from a new road (New Change itself) running from Cheapside down to Queen Victoria Street. In its way the ambitious construction, varying between eight and eleven storeys, represented the arrival of modernity at the Bank:

  The offices are lit by fluorescent tubes in specially designed fittings [noted the Old Lady in June 1958 three months after the department had taken possession]. There are at present three groups of press-button lifts, to be increased to five groups when Phase 2 is complete; each group is controlled by its own electronic ‘brain’, which sorts out the demands that are made upon the group as a whole and arranges the journeys of each lift so as to provide the maximum service in the minimum time. At first the Staff had some natural scepticism as to the powers of the ‘brain’, but they were soon reassured, despite a few electronic tantrums in the early days. Some of the older members have been a little embarrassed on finding themselves, as creatures of habit, murmuring ‘Thank you’ to a non-existent liftman.

  Architecturally speaking, however, modernity was hardly the mot juste. ‘The designer might have pressed for a skyscraper in which case he would have earned the plaudits of the modernists,’ gratefully noted the Financial Times. ‘But he had a greater regard for the precepts of Wren than for those of Le Corbusier.’ Inevitably, others were more critical. Professor Anthony Blunt of the Courtauld Institute led the attack on what he saw as the Bank’s unimaginative, backward-looking effort, while according to Dr Nikolaus Pevsner the ‘vast pile’ was ‘shockingly lifeless and reactionary’, indeed ‘almost beyond comprehension’. Certainly, once the asperities of contemporary debate had died down, no one ever claimed it was a great building. Updating Pevsner some forty years on, even the measured Simon Bradley wrote of a ‘general stuffiness’, of ‘silly little semi-period balconies’, of sculpture ‘in what might be called the George VI style’, and of ‘a shapeless public courtyard, disastrously bleak despite the plain fountain and lead cisterns, in C18 style but dated 1960, scattered about’. Perhaps so, but the anonymous 1958 writer in the Old Lady was also justified in welcoming the way ‘at New Change the light and colourful appearance of the offices is making its own contribution – impossible to measure but nonetheless real – to the well-being of the Staff’.5

  If Debden was an outpost, and New Change sort of an outpost, so too were the branches. ‘They were formed in the 1820s for the distribution of the note circulation,’ O’Brien explained in 1969 to Colonel Lancaster and his troops:

  We now have eight of those branches [Plymouth having closed in 1949]. Their main function is, indeed, to distribute notes to the local Banks and to recover notes from them, to mill them and send them down to the printing works to be destroyed. They also hold the accounts of the local banks, the local government accounts, customs and excise and so forth, and a certain amount of private business still survives, but not very much. The function which they now perform which they have done only since the last war is to act as centres from which our agents make contact with local industry, get to know local industrialists, visit local factories and help us to have a better view of what is happening in industry.

  In answer to another question, O’Brien agreed that for the eight cities themselves the Bank’s local presence was a valued ‘prestige symbol’. ‘Indeed recently,’ he related, ‘we were very strongly pressed by the Corporation of Cardiff to have a branch down there. We examined it with every sympathy, but came to the conclusion it would not be justified, particularly now the Severn Bridge makes it easier for us to look after Wales from Bristol.’ Altogether by this time the eight branches comprised some 334 staff, with the recruitment policy essentially being women locally, men from head office, and no graduates. As for the steady jog-trot of life in the branches, the recollections of B. M. Lahee, who as a young man was seconded from London to Newcastle in 1947, are broadly applicable to the 1950s and even to some degree the 1960s:

  It was a small branch: Agent, Sub-Agent and Secretary, about ten of us in the banking hall – Fairmaner and Folliot usually at the counter, Homfray bustling about behind the scenes, machining piles of cheques (‘Burroughsing’, in Bank parlance) or reading down to find a difference – Philip Smith and a couple of others in the Foreign Exchange room, and, upstairs, a bevy of young ladies who spent their days counting, banking and cancelling used banknotes under the, no doubt, watchful eye of Miss Dick. This was sometimes quite an unpleasant job if the notes had originated in a branch near the fish market.

  No computers, of course, only adding machines. Customers’ accounts were kept by one of us juniors in hand-written ledgers and a young lady would come down from upstairs in the afternoon to type the day’s debits and credits on customers’ statements. The Branch operated accounts for Government agencies, the other banks and a few private individuals. One of the latter was for a single lady who had given standing orders for a number of charities – one called the Fund for Assisting Missionaries to attend the Keswick Convention, and another, the Japanese Evangelical Band, whatever that may have been.

  Included in our duties was a daily ‘walk’ to the offices of the two Newcastle Collectors of Taxes and the Inland Revenue Stamp Office. Two of us – or one with a messenger – would venture into the Newcastle streets carrying a small Gladstone bag to which was attached a chain which we were supposed to fasten round our waist; more commonly we just wrapped it around a wrist. At our ports of call we would count notes and examine cheques, put them in the bag for paying in and continue on our way.

  Every morning representatives of all the banks in central Newcastle would come into the Branch and exchange bundles of cheques in a local Clearing House. One of us would supervise this process and see that the net creditor and debtor positions were equal. We were always glad to be able to announce ‘House agrees’. Just about the last job on a Saturday morning was to enter the total of the week’s clearings on a postcard and send it off to the Clearing House in London.

  As before the war, there was also of course a monthly ritual. ‘A small group would go down to the central railway station to meet a “Treasure” – a large consignment of new notes sent up in a special van attached to the London train. Closely guarded by one policeman, they would be transferred to a road van and taken to the branch’s secure courtyard and we would all lend a hand at getting them down into the vault via a wheezing hydraulically-operated lift.’

  The whole feel of the branches, during these immediate post-war decades, remained largely Victorian. ‘The banking hall, sombre-furnished and heavy with time, tolerates its visitors with a built-in dignity,’ was how the Birmingham Post as late as 1970 evoked its local branch in Temple Row. ‘Elaborate cornices and Wedgewood-blue ceiling; an atmosphere which feels cloistral, even though it isn’t; a murmurous air of purpose which could just as aptly have been a pen-scratched silence.’ Fundamental physical change, however, was already under way. ‘Almost all our branches are about 125 years old, built for a different age than the present one,’ the governor told the SCNI in 1969. ‘Their vault space in particular, due to the growth of note circulation, is entirely inadequate, and the bullion yard space in which vans have t
o come in with massive quantities of notes is very exiguous indeed.’ To this he might have added that the Great Train Robbery of 1963 (£3.5 million in banknotes on their way from Glasgow to London on behalf of the clearing banks) had made a significant difference. ‘Before the Robbery, well over half the notes used by the public were drawn by the clearing banks from the Bank in London,’ observed the Bank’s George Blunden in the 1970s. ‘After the Robbery we had to decentralise the operation further, because the banks wanted to withdraw money from our branches. But decentralisation meant larger security vaults …’

  In Bristol there was already a new building – the controversial, unfortunately proportioned Wine Street building, opened in 1963 and described in the Architects’ Journal as ‘an architectural disaster of the first order’; in Liverpool, Charles Cockerell’s greatly admired 1848 building was much modernised inside between 1961 and 1965; while in 1967 designs were displayed in Threadneedle Street’s Oak Room for completely new and on the whole uncompromisingly modernist buildings in Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester and Birmingham, all of which were duly erected and opened by the early 1970s. ‘There is, no doubt, an enormous change in atmosphere between the two offices,’ reflected Newcastle’s D. J. Baker somewhat regretfully in 1971 shortly after the closure of the old building in Grey Street and the opening of the new one (‘pretty dreary and noisy’, thought O’Brien) in Pilgrim Street. ‘I think that not many of us realised the extent to which the lofty ceilings, polished floors and mahogany fittings affected all who worked within or visited the Branch,’ continued Baker. ‘This atmosphere at least ensured that the inconveniences of using, for present-day note handling, a building designed for small issues of gold were passed over with courtesies appropriate to an earlier age. The new arrangements are so secure that there is very little possibility of face-to-face conversation with one’s cash-handling customers …’6

  Everywhere, an obligatory aspect of the modern was computerisation. ‘I remember exactly when it started,’ Peter Edgley told the Old Lady half a century later. ‘It was in 1955, when Ron Middleton and I were both working in CCO [Chief Cashier’s Office]. Ron was summoned to see the Chief Clerk and emerged with a bemused expression on his face. “I’m off to America with the Deputy Chief Accountant next Monday, to learn about computers,” he told us. Whereupon his audience – supposedly a cross-section of the Bank’s finest – turned to each other and chorused: “What’s a computer?”’ Middleton would be the go-to computer person through to the mid-1980s, with the Accountant’s Department to the fore during the pioneer years. In 1959 there began on the fifth floor at New Change the Powers-Samas experiment – named after the British company that merged that same year with British Tabulators to form ICT, later ICL – and essentially involving each holding of stock being stored on the system’s 160-column punched cards; the following July, the first ‘live’ (as opposed to ‘dummy’) dividend was paid, on 2 Per Cent Consols; by October 1962 cards had been punched for one million accounts (one-third of the total); and in the course of that decade, following the purchase of two powerful and appropriately huge 1301 computers, the process began of putting the stock registers themselves on to tape. ‘Computerisation has been undertaken by the Bank on its own initiative and entirely under its own control,’ O’Brien told the SCNI in 1969. ‘We can claim, I think, that in this sphere we were in the van.’

  What about computerisation for the Bank as a whole? ‘The first steps were being taken to computerise staff records and payments, much of the processing of statistics, and even our banking operations,’ recalled O’Brien of his time as deputy governor in the mid-1960s. ‘It was urged by some that a centralised computer service for all departments was the obvious next step, but the Chief Accountant [‘Billy’ Bardo] was resistant. He had long had a large and efficient computer operation which was vital to the management of the enormous government debt in gilt-edged stocks. He did not want to lose control of this operation and very likely get caught up in teething troubles of more sophisticated computers which the work of other departments would require. This made sense to me …’ Even so, March 1968 saw the official opening by the Queen Mother of the Head Office Computer Centre, as she pressed the button of an ICT 1904E computer and thereby produced a print-out of Britannia. Already in general the savings through computerisation were considerable; but, quite apart from the obvious manpower implications, not everyone enthused. ‘All was fine until the advent of the computer,’ was David Harris’s wry memory of being superintendent in the Drawing Office at about this time. ‘A selected few were sent on courses but on return considered themselves an elite race apart, unwilling to impart their new-found electronic expertise to the old sweats, who were simply told “you will just have to pick it up as you go along”.’7

  A final functional aspect during these post-war, post-nationalisation years was the opaque matter of the Bank’s own finances. Asked in 1950 by the Treasury about the possibility of introducing a procedure to vary the fixed half-yearly payment of £873,180 that the Bank made to the Treasury under the terms of the 1946 Bank Act, Cobbold was adamant that he was ‘entirely opposed’, insisting that he ‘did not see how any such discussions could take place without going into the accounts as a whole’. As for the annual report that the Bank was now compelled to publish, the comforting fact that it need not involve a profit and loss account allowed the chief cashier, Percy Beale, to observe in 1953 that ‘the Report is as dull and free from controversy as usual – rightly in my view’. Retrospective examination by Forrest Capie reveals the Bank enjoying what he calls ‘a very comfortable level of profits’ – mainly derived from interest earned on bankers’ balances – with gross annual profits steadily rising from somewhat under £5 million in the early 1950s to around £13–14 million during most of the second half of the 1960s. Fielding a question from the SCNI in 1969, O’Brien explained how things evened out:

  The Bank’s work as bankers to the Government is much less profitable than its work as bankers to other customers, because of the Government’s low balance with the Bank of England, but in fact you do not lose money by being bankers to the Government, I take it? – Yes, we do. In agreement with the Treasury we keep the Exchequer balance at the Bank to the lowest figure compatible with efficient operation of those very large accounts, and certainly that balance does not provide sufficient remuneration to cover the cost of those services to us. The banks’ balances, on the other hand, are very substantial, and the services we provide for the banks are very small in relation to those we provide for Government, so it could be said that the cost of the work we do for Government in part comes from the banks’ balances.

  The following year, in its report, the Select Committee successfully recommended not only that the Bank publish full annual accounts, but that it charge the full cost for services performed for government and pay a variable dividend to the Treasury, with that dividend comprising the entire profit apart from agreed provision for reserves and working capital.8 Less than thrilled by the dawning age of transparency, the Bank had no alternative but to go quietly.

  From 1940 onwards, women outnumbered men in the Bank. ‘We must be prepared,’ reflected an executive director (Dallas Bernard) towards the end of the war, ‘to cater for women who are able to and desire to do more important work than has been allotted to them hitherto. It is a grave reflection on the organisation of the Bank that there is no scope for really intelligent women in any capacity other than administration.’ Progress after the war, however, was at best patchy, not least because of the continuing deterrent, in terms of recruiting and retaining those with potential, of female staff often being compelled to spend up to five years in the Issue Office examining and counting used notes – tedious, much disliked work. Tom Courtis, in charge of exchange control at the Bank’s Glasgow office, saw the bigger picture when in April 1946 he wrote to the chief of Establishments in London:

  By adding up various opinions and conversations heard from time to time I get the impression that many g
irls regard the Bank merely as an interlude (pleasant or unpleasant according to taste) between school and matrimony and that this state of mind arises because of the relatively few good jobs open to women in the Bank by comparison with the numbers employed.

  Do you think perhaps that the application to some extent of the doctrine of equality of opportunity as between men and women might be in the best interests of the Bank?

  Specifically, suggested Courtis, ‘if more good jobs were available, then a large majority of the women in the Bank would do better work’.

  In practice, the most positive step taken in these immediate post-war years – during which the existence of the Hump, by now an almost ludicrously big middle-aged cohort, largely blocked progress for everyone else – was the removal of the marriage bar in 1949, three years after the Civil Service had done so but ahead of most of the clearing banks. The change was broadly welcomed, at least among the women, with some 75–80 per cent of female clerks at the Bank having in a recent internal ballot voted for removal ‘because they considered that the individual should have the right to choose whether she should continue to work after marriage’. The main dissenting voice, in public anyway, came from L. J. Filewood, who was secretary of the Midland Bank Staff Association and whose daughter was a probationary clerk at the Bank of England – which, he claimed in a letter to the Manchester Guardian, ‘has taken a step which benefits the exceptional minority presumably on the grounds of current theories of sex equality’, despite such theories being ‘psychologically and biologically mischievous’. No doubt he would have taken some comfort from statistics produced in 1952 about the three years at the Bank since the removal of the bar: 723 female staff had married, of whom 252 had left the Bank immediately; while, of the 471 staying on, 279 had done so for less than a year – and all but six for less than three years.9