Banking for Beginners

I remember September 1967 for two reasons. I started work at the Chiswick High Road branch of the Westminster Bank, and I went to my first "proper" rock concert. It was part of the "Sunday at the Saville" season and the bands at this first show included Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band and to top the bill, Pink Floyd. Other shows I saw included those by Jimi Hendrix, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and Vanilla Fudge.
While waiting for the first house audience to leave, my friend Dave & I stood outside. Dave nudged me in the ribs and in a loud stage whisper pointed out the DJ John Peel leaving the theatre, looking as inscrutable as ever. Finally we took our seats and the curtain rose and the band that started the show sent shivers up and down my spine. They still do more than forty years later. I refer to the magnificent Fairport Convention featuring the awesome playing of Richard Thompson on lead guitar. I was less impressed with Pink Floyd. Their single "See Emily play" had just charted and I expected a pop group, not an hour of psychedelic instrumentals with the band silhouetted on a white backdrop, and a multi-coloured light show making strange shapes on the screen. I went to see them a few more times in the coming months, and repeated listening to "Piper at the gates of dawn" soon got me on their wavelength.

It was a far cry from my day job. Banking was conventional and safe. It was said that it was impossible to get fired from a job in the bank, unless you were caught with your hands in the till, or were consistently late for work in the mornings. You could get a subsidised mortage and drift along until retirement. I met many an old duffer who turned up for work impeccably dressed, punctual to the minute, who did just enough to keep going, who never attempted to excel or even be noticed. Any promotion that came their way was on the "dead man's shoes" principle, plus the fact that the banks were chronically short of good male staff. Men held all the top jobs, and the best a woman could aspire to was to be branch chief cashier in charge of the tills. That was how it was. That was how it had always been.
The branch had about twenty five staff in all. There was the branch manager, an anonymous man who lived in his office and rarely emerged. His assistant manager (not to be confused with the manager's assistant) sat in a raised cubicle overlooking the banking hall. In front of him there were a line of till positions, and to his side and behind him were the staff who processed all the cheques and paying in slips. Other specialist staff occupied areas to the rear of the floor. These included the foreign cashier, the standing orders clerk and the securities officer.
The cashiers sat at their positions with a wide open counter in front of them. There were no security screens (Until a few days after we'd had an armed holdup. More on that later) Everything was as it always had been.
The staff had to be signed in before nine. There was work to be done before the doors opened at 10.00. At 3.30 the doors shut and there was a rush to get everything done before we went at five. If we didn't get finished, we stayed. We used to open on Saturday mornings but that ceased soon after I joined.

We now know that the first computers were built and used at Bletchley Park during the war. The first company to use a computer was J Lyons & Co in the early 50s. It was called Leo and it took up a huge amount of space, being made of valves and resistors. The banks started using computers by about 1965 and so I joined the bank at the dawn of the computer age. In time I would join the team that fed the machine, but first I had to learn a few skills.

The junior staff were responsible for the filing of the customer's cheques each morning. Then they compiled the bank statements that were sent to the customers. Every statement that went to the customer included all his cheques sorted into the order they appeared on the statement. This was time consuming but a useful service. The banks stopped sending cheques with the statement many many years ago. You now have to fight to get your old cheques back.

It's useful at this point to understand how the banking system worked back then. For a start, it's important to know that it was a cash based economy. Everyone was paid in cash. Very few people had a bank account. Even fewer people had the new fangled Barclaycard.
It was cash, cash, cash.
The coinage was big and bulky. Paper money was in ten shilling (50p), one pound, five pound and very rarely ten pound denominations.
Credit was hard to come by. There was hire purchase (shunned by the older generation), and Provident cheques, that could only be spent in certain shops. My mum used Provident cheques to pay for seasonal items like school uniforms and Christmas presents. She'd borrow, say, twenty pounds, get a cheque that could be used in certain local shops, and pay it back at a pound a week over twenty one weeks.

Banks did not lend money to just anyone. Banks were places where you put your money for safe keeping. The bank manager's role was to look after your money and make sure you didn't overspend. If he thought that you were spending more than you earned, he would call you into the office for a chat. If he thought you were a good risk, he might be persuaded to advance you some money against your future earnings. It was always your money that you borrowed. You had to have some money in order to open an account. You opened an account and some time later you'd get a cheque book. Your account was watched carefully to see you didn't go astray.

Sometime during the early 1970s it began to change. Suddenly the bank manager was your friend. You needed some money? Talk to your bank manager. Debt was encouraged. Only it isn't called debt. It's called credit.
During the 1980s I'd walk past banks that advertised the "products" they had on offer inside.
To me a product was something that was a physical entity that had been manufactured, not a savings scheme that promised a bonus upon maturity. The banks had changed from safe places to keep your money, to retail outlets offering bonuses for people with money so that they can lend that money to people who had none, and making profits on the commission.

But in the 1960 it was a cash economy. Everyone paid by cash or cheque. As I said, the cash was bulky and it had to be banked somewhere. Banks had branches in every small village, town, shopping arcade, and market. They issued their customers with leather wallets that could be deposited in the night safe in the wall of the bank. Each morning the cashiers would open the wallets, and count the cash before the branch opened its doors. The amount of cash in circulation was staggering. About 90% of all retail business was paid for in cash. And the local bank needed staff to count the stuff.
Almost all wages were paid in cash. Each Thursday the local firms would telephone a breakdown of the cash they needed for the payroll, broken down to the exact number of pennies and halfpennies. The Chief Cashier would need to make enough cash available for the area's payroll needs, and would order coin and notes from the Bullion Department.
Each week the Bullion van would park outside the bank and we'd help the delivery drivers carry the coin into the bank and down into the vaults. A bag of silver coin weighs about 28lb (from memory) and it was just possible to carry four if you could grip the bags. We had a lot of coin and notes delivered each week.
One week a heavy hessian sack dropped onto the pavement in front of me. I'd been carrying coin and wondered if I should pick it up. There was no-one else around so I picked it up and carried it into the vault. When the van had gone it was opened.
There was £50,000 in new £1and £5 notes in the sack.
At that time my salary was £370 a year, with an extra £150 for working in the London area.
£520 a year.
£10 a week.