Till Time's Last Sand

by David Kynaston

  ‘Men were definitely the favoured species, and women either did filing, typing or counting notes,’ recalled Anne Skinner some four decades after joining the Bank in 1955 as a 3rd-class clerk (woman). ‘I thought that was quite normal.’ That same year, though, saw a significant development, with a Special Committee on Women’s Work (chaired by the director in charge of Establishments, the formidable Sir George Abell) concluding that a ‘gradual integration of the male and female staff of the Bank is practicable and desirable’, thereby ensuring that ‘women should have the opportunity to graduate from [women’s] work to the work done by men and be promoted in competition with men, after an initial period of five years of their service, until age twenty-one or twenty-two, employed on routine work as at present’. It would, emphasised Abell, be gradualist reform rather than sudden revolution. ‘Most of the difficult technical and administrative work would probably always be performed by men,’ he told (reassured?) the male-dominated Council of Directors and Staff soon afterwards, ‘but women would find their own level and there need be no formal limit to their eligibility for promotion’; indeed, ‘until the final run-off of the “hump” the amount of progress which could be made might prove to be disappointing’.

  In fact, on paper anyway, progress was quite swift. In 1957 – at which point still only about one-quarter of female staff were married – a detailed assessment produced an illuminating breakdown of the 3,880 jobs done by clerical staff (excluding shorthand typists) below administrative rank: 500 were properly the domain of men; 1,900 were properly the domain of women; and 1,400 could as well be done by men or women. Crucially, of those 1,400 ‘common jobs’, 79 per cent were currently being done by men. The upshot was the 1958 Scheme of Classification, described by Elizabeth Hennessy (in her authoritative domestic history of the Bank between 1930 and 1960) as ‘the first step towards complete integration of the sexes’, meaning that the highest category – Classed Staff, as opposed to the two other categories, the Staff of Women Clerks and Shorthand Typists – would ‘consist of men and women working alongside each other under similar conditions of service’. For some female staff, even so, the scheme involved a painful downgrading; while on the pay front the only commitment was that women were to receive not less than 75 per cent remuneration in comparison to men of the same age and seniority.

  The issue of equal pay was never likely to go away, notwithstanding Abell’s reported response to the news in 1962 that member-countries of the EEC (which the UK was applying to join) had agreed to implement an equal-pay policy by the end of 1964: ‘Let us duck our heads until the storm is passed and then survey the landscape!’ Britain of course was temporarily thwarted by General de Gaulle’s ‘Non’, but in 1964 a new Scheme of Classification made the first move towards the introduction of equal pay, which from 1968 was phased in over the next four years. By then, there was an exemplar to all women in the person of Aphra Maunsell: the news in February 1967, thirty-one years after she had arrived at the Bank as an eighteen-year-old Irish girl, of her appointment as deputy chief of Establishments, the highest position yet for any woman, received front-page treatment in The Times.10 Nevertheless, few indeed of the 2,700 or so women on the staff in the late 1960s could realistically have hoped for similar promotion or anything like it. The Bank remained, like corporate Britain as a whole, fundamentally a man’s world; while the notion of a female director, let alone a female chief cashier or a female governor, was still strictly for the birds.

  More generally, recruitment was a significant problem through these post-war years, not helped by high levels of employment in the outside world and a growing aversion to working on Saturday mornings (when the Bank still had a statutory obligation to be open). Abell, moreover, pinpointed in the mid-1950s the underlying fact of life at the Bank that the staff ‘in the main is required to do comparatively uninteresting work with practically no chance for women of achieving real responsibility and only a somewhat hazardous chance of doing so for the men’; accordingly, ‘men of the type we should like to recruit are not prepared to run the risk of wasting many years as routine clerks when there are more certain and immediate opportunities elsewhere for advancement to interesting and remunerative work’. Handsome career brochures made some difference, as to a greater degree did advertising in the press, introduced in 1958 after agonising internal debate, but at all levels the problem far from disappeared. ‘Typewriter manufacturers have succeeded in giving a modern image to electric typewriters,’ noted a 1969 report recommending a move away from manual, ‘and there are indications that firms are using them as bait to attract typists in these days of shortage of applicants.’ There was also the diversity – or lack of it – aspect. Of the fifteen boys’ schools visited for recruitment purposes during the year ending August 1963, all were private (apart from two direct grant), ranging from St Paul’s to Chigwell; and it was as late as June 1966, some eighteen years after the Empire Windrush had started significant non-white immigration after the war, that a note recorded that ‘Miss B. Z. Alladin, the first coloured entrant, will be starting work in the Dividend Pay and Loans Office.’11

  What about graduates? From soon after the war, four decades after the failed pre-1914 recruitment experiment, a systematic approach was introduced, so that by the end of the 1950s there were almost a hundred graduates – predominantly Oxbridge, predominantly generalists, often Greats men – at the Bank. The training programme they received tended to prove a sad disappointment. ‘Most of the graduates thought it was pathetic and inadequate,’ recalled Pen Kent (who arrived in 1961):

  It consisted really of doing a relatively fast track of what the Bank’s own induction process probably had always been, which was a six months spell doing transfer deeds in registrar’s department, then moving on to something called chief cashier’s school where you learned to do mechanical cash management in an ordinary banking way. It was only after that, that you got posted to a department where you could, if you like, start to use intellectual skills. And that took a whole year to get to, which against graduate training expectations then, was already pretty disappointing and off-putting. A lot of people I think left in frustration. And the senior management of the Bank was not very sensitive to the demands of the new kind of intake that they were having. I can remember having a discussion with Cromer as it happens, just by happenstance that he and I found ourselves in Basle sitting at a coffee table, and he actually said, to my amazement, ‘I spent the first six months of my career counting drawing pins in Barings and it didn’t do me any harm.’

  Things did start to change, though, in the course of the 1960s, partly as times changed and partly because of the impact as it worked its way through of the Radcliffe Report, with its demand for greater economic sophistication giving birth to what has been described as ‘a whole range of new analytic “policy-related” jobs and associated “middle management” opportunities’. In 1966, by when there existed an advanced training scheme, about a quarter of the total intake were graduates; and by the end of the decade the Bank was taking each year some twenty-five to thirty male graduates and some five to ten female graduates – still a telling discrepancy – in addition to fifty to fifty-five boys and twenty to twenty-five girls straight from school with ‘A’ level qualifications. ‘Will a feature of your work in the future be recruiting mature specialists rather than trying to train people internally in the Bank?’ the SCNI asked O’Brien in March 1970. ‘In some spheres undoubtedly,’ he replied. ‘Indeed, we have for some years past increasingly recruited mature specialists, particularly in the economics sphere. The number of economists in the Bank now is large and they come at various stages of maturity. We shall have to do the same, I think, in the computer sphere and in financial control …’12

  For many years, against a background of the Hump and the general policy of overmanning in order to cover against emergencies and seasonal fluctuations, the opportunities for promotion were relatively limited. ‘We had the regular pantomime called “Black Thursday�
�� aka “The Feast of the Passover”,’ remembered J. D. W. Raimbach, mainly in the Accountant’s Department from soon after the war. ‘The Court of Directors assembled on the first Thursday in the month, when promotions, if any, would be announced. This was a sure trigger for the disenchanted to repair to the bar and drown their sorrows, or go sick, or break down in tears … and that was just the men!’ Was the Bank a meritocracy between the 1940s and the 1960s? Leaving the Court aside, as well as gender, Forrest Capie argues that it was, citing the examples of O’Brien and Hollom as evidence that it was ‘possible for any male clerk to rise to the top’. Some support comes from the recollections of John Taylor, according to whom most staff were interviewed at least once a year in the Chief of Establishments Office, told about their reports (following consultation with the principals who had signed them) and ‘asked from time to time which parts of the Bank appealed to them most’ – though naturally ‘they were not always sent there’. But according to another witness, Tony Carlisle, the reality was rather different, mainly because of the division of responsibility between Establishments and individual departments. This was fine if they co-operated but pernicious if they did not, in which case, ‘by denying movements in or out, a department could frustrate the development of its own staff and at the same time, or on other occasions, staff of other departments’; more broadly, in terms of career development, it was not until the 1970s that (in Carlisle’s words) ‘people were for the first time told frankly how they were getting on and what the future might hold for them, and were consulted about their careers and not merely told to report to a new office on Monday’. As to how objective assessments were (whether secret or revealed), it is impossible to know. In September 1963 four teenage girls on probation were being considered for the permanent staff. One, ‘alert and resourceful’, did not ‘allow herself to be put off by difficult work’ and attended ‘meticulously to the mechanics of filing’; a second was ‘interested, keen and remarkably sensible in her approach to the more advanced work’; a third had ‘a tendency to get flustered when pressed’. The fourth, ‘employed on Certificate and Fanfold typing’, was on the plus side ‘enthusiastic and keen’ and ‘a very fast worker’, but against that with ‘accuracy inclined to suffer at times’. Still, as a daughter of Lord Kindersley’s chauffeur, perhaps she had the edge.13

  That same year, as the Beatles became a national phenomenon, a future chief cashier arrived. ‘What a strange place, looking back, the Bank of 1963 was,’ recalled Graham Kentfield. ‘In some ways it was like stepping back into what I imagine the world in general was like pre-war: stiff, hierarchical and of course heavily dependent on clerical labour. But at the same time, it was a very easy life, with offices staffed up for peaks which only rarely occurred.’ Relevant here is the American social psychologist Douglas McGregor, who had recently identified two distinct management styles, Theory X and Theory Y: the former was authoritarian and assumed that people, with their inherent dislike of work, require a combination of carrot and stick to do it; the latter, assuming the existence of a psychological need to work, was participatory. No one could doubt which style of management the Bank traditionally practised. ‘I am sending this to you,’ began Courtis’s postscript to his 1946 letter to the chief of Establishments, Eric Dalton, about the limited motivation of his female staff, ‘because I conceive that it is a Principal’s job not only to work on orders from his Chiefs but also to convey to them his impressions of the trend of thought of his own subordinates.’ Dalton’s reply was to the point: ‘I much appreciate your continued desire to help. I hope you will not weary in well doing but on this occasion you have added nothing to the knowledge of this Department …’14

  If one figure exemplified the Bank’s continuing adherence (if unconscious) to Theory X, certainly the stick aspect, it was perhaps Percy Beale, chief cashier during the first half of the 1950s. ‘A rather unpleasant and authoritarian man who could make or break a man’s career in the blinking of an eye,’ recalled Guy de Moubray:

  This happened whilst I was in his office. Every Friday there was a strange ritual of the Treasury Bill tender. Accepting Houses, or indeed anyone with £5,000 cash in hand, could apply for Treasury bills. If one bid £5,000 for a £5,000 bill one was obviously going to get no interest when the bill was paid off 91 days later. So tenders were invited with the highest bidders receiving their application in full. Tenders had to be received at the Chief Cashier’s Office no later than 1 p.m. on a Friday. The Chief Clerk, in his case, would ring the recorded time number on the telephone and when it said, ‘At the third pip it will be one o’clock precisely,’ he would wave his hand to a clerk standing at the door of his case; this clerk in turn would wave to another clerk standing at the office door who would then with a flourish close the door and lock it. On this occasion, however, a messenger from Hambros Bank had still not reached the door when it was locked. So Hambros were denied any bills in that week’s tender. But the Chairman of Hambros, Sir Charles Hambro, was the senior non-executive Director of the Bank of England and immediately rang Percy Beale in a fury. Beale not only caved in and allowed their application to be accepted, but sacked the clerk on the door from his office instanter. The poor man had until then a promising career. Now he was finished.

  ‘“Sir” was the order of the day in speaking to one’s line supervisor,’ and all the more so to ‘anyone more exalted such as a Deputy Chief Cashier’, remembered John Hill about joining the Bank in the early 1960s. ‘Dress was of paramount importance. To approach one’s principal without a jacket would have been unthinkable. Shoes were of a strict standard and hair, both length and style, was controlled – shades of the military …’ That military element could even be explicit. ‘In my new rank I discovered that I was now an alternate member of the Senior Officials’ Mess and was allowed to attend for lunch whenever [Guy] Watson or [Roy] Heasman were lunching out,’ recalled de Moubray about becoming in 1960 assistant chief of the newly created Central Banking Information Department:

  The first occasion was taken very seriously and one of the senior officials introduced me to the others … The procedure was that one helped oneself to a drink (gin & tonic, Bloody Mary or whatever) and then went to sit at one of the three tables. It was strictly laid down by the President of the Mess, Leslie O’Brien, the Chief Cashier, that people should seat themselves in the order in which they had arrived, no doubt to avoid too much chumminess. I soon discovered that it was wise to go to lunch rather later than had been my habit. When I arrived early, I found myself seated at the top of the far table with Douglas Johns, the agent of the Law Courts’ Branch, who had some way to walk to the Bank and always arrived first. He was on the verge of retirement. Very often O’Brien would also be there and a few other elderly gentlemen; their conversation seemed to be entirely devoted to golf and to pensions! There was always wine to drink and cigars with the coffee; in later years I was to help myself to a cigar every day, but in 1960 you could not have a cigar unless the Chief Cashier offered you one.

  Of course, as in the world beyond Threadneedle Street, things were slowly changing or about to change. ‘Responsibility was already being devolved in 1964,’ reckons Carlisle, ‘so that it was no longer necessary – as it had been some years before – for every communication from the office – letter, memorandum, even a telephone call – to be closely regulated by the most senior people there.’ Even so, not only did clerks during the second half of the 1960s still refer to each other by their initials, but as a vivid reminder of traditional authoritarian, top-down ways, there persisted the ritual of the Governor’s Charge, in which probationers were paraded in front of Court to hear the Charge read out. The message itself was by now somewhat toned down from its Victorian stern morality (‘you are warned against contracting habits of dissipation’, and all that), but the ceremony itself – ‘with its marshalling, dress rehearsals, dress inspections and rigid formality’, in the words of John Footman – felt increasingly out of place in civilian Britain.15


  Institutionally speaking, labour relations continued to be conducted after the war through the Council of Directors and Staff (the qualifying word ‘Advisory’ being dropped in 1950), with both Catto and Cobbold successfully resisting attempts by the Bank Officers’ Guild (later the National Union of Bank Employees, NUBE) to secure a foothold. Notwithstanding some notable individuals being involved – including by the 1960s Jack Davies (long immortalised for having as a Cambridge undergraduate bowled Don Bradman for a duck) as staff director, Ken Andrews as chief of Establishments, and the leading trade unionist Lord (Bill) Carron who was a non-executive director on the Court – it was not all sweetness and light. In 1957 the Council was criticised by staff generally as ‘unduly ponderous and secretive’ and failing to ‘move with the times’; while 1968, that year of the street-fighting man, saw an eloquent memo submitted by the eight elected staff representatives on the Council: