Money money money

My last post about being mugged on the way to the bank reminded me of the time that I was involved in a bank raid. I don't think I mentioned this before, but it was when I worked at the Westminster bank in about 1968. We were having new strongroom doors fitted in the basement, and being the most junior male staff member I was assigned to watch over the workmen as they drilled and hammered away.
One Monday morning at about 10.30 I was in the basement when I heard a commotion from upstairs in the banking hall. A few seconds later one of the bank clerks rushed downstairs looking a bit scared. He had an imprint of a size ten shoe on the side of his face.
I should point out that we had no security screensin front of the tills. The powers that be thought that they were an unnecessary barrier between the bank and the customer. Well, several robbers thought that a four foot high counter was no barrier to them helping themselves so they ran in, spraying ammonia everywhere. Ammonia was the bank robber's weapon of choice. It was easy to get hold of from your hardware store. You used a squeezy washing up bottle and sprayed it into people's faces, causing minimal damage as long as the victim was able to wash the ammonia out of their eyes. What it did was immobilise the bank clerks while they scooped the cash.
Anyway, one of the cashiers had seen them come in and was turning away as the thief jumped the counter, catching him with his foot. By the time he got downstairs and we knew what was happening it was all over.
That didn't stop me almost wetting myself with fear. What if they'd heard that the strongroom was open and they were coming down the stairs? We all hid where we could. It was a bit like that scene in The Life of Brian, where the Roman soldiers search the place and can't find the rebels, even though you can clearly see them behind the curtains and under the table.
After a few minutes we ventured out and upstairs. The bank had been cleared and the doors closed. The police were there within minutes- yes minutes, no more than five.
Someone from head office came and made us a cup of tea and went there, there. No-one was seriously hurt. A few people were splashed with ammonia and had stinging eyes. One of my colleagues saw what was happening and his mouth fell open, in time to catch a mouthful of ammonia. He burped for the rest of the day.
We were all sent home after lunch. The contractors came in the next day and fitted security screens. Then it was business as usual. The robbers were caught before they had a chance to dispose of the money. No CCTV, no DNA database, just good policing.


Down the years I had to handle a lot of money. Some firms used security vans to collect the takings while other firms left it to the manager to bank the cash.
I used to smile at the advice given by head office. It was all about varying the time and the route you took to the bank. However, there was one flaw. Whether I left the shop by the front door or the back, whether I took the long route or the short cut, I still ended up at the front door of the bank. Anyone wishing to jump me only had to wait there.....


After I'd been mugged in Corby the company arranged for a security firm to collect the takings each day. I still had to go and get the change from the bank, but if anyone fancied their chances at grabbing two bags of coin and outrunning me while carrying it, I'd have said, go on, make my day.


By the late eighties and early nineties I was working in a bookshop where the average sale was £5 rather than the £1 or so in a drugstore. We were taking more and more credit card payments and we'd installed EPOS and credit card terminals. However, half of our takings were still in cash, and one of the stores I managed had an annual turnover in excess of £1m. In the run-up to Christmas the turnover would increase by 50% each week, then double each week, until we took more than a week's takings each day. The week before Christmas' takings amounted to 10% of the total turnover for that year.
My day revolved around counting money. We opened the shop at nine, and empty the tills every hour or so. At about eleven my chief cashier and I would start counting the money that we'd taken from the tills. As soon as we'd finished counting, we'd go and get some more, and so on,
By Christmas Eve I was sick of the sight of money. My hands hurt to hold the notes and my fingers ached from counting them. It was not uncommon to count £15,000 in used fivers and tenners in the course of a busy day.
That store is no more. I doubt whether the firms that took over the business ever approached the levels of turnover that we achieved. The end of the Net Book Agreement and the stupidity of selling a premium product at a loss put paid to that.

Modulus eleven

 

I've been lying in bed thinking about modulus eleven. Why? and what is it, you may ask. I just looked it up on the internet and read through the description and I'm as mystified now as I was forty years ago. It's to do with why your bank account number has those particular numbers, and why bar codes work.

Part of my duties as a junior bank clerk was to allocate account numbers to new accounts.You couldn't just  choose any old number. We had a printout containing the available numbers. I noticed that consecutive account numbers were about eight numbers apart. For instance, if an account number ended in 08, then the next number in the sequence would be 16. Usually.

I was told that the last number in the account number acted as a check number for the whole number. Then they uttered the magic phrase "Modulus eleven".

It meant that if you mis-punched an account number, the machine refused to accept it, which cut down the likelihood of applying a credit or debit to the wrong account, or  consigning a credit to limbo.

I was thinking about this because the last few days I've been trying to describe the work I did as a junior bank clerk all those years ago, and I've now realised that although the cheques went through the clearing house and were somehow sorted into branch order, so that we only received our own cheques, they didn't get posted against the customer's account until the cheque arrived in the branch. And that was our job using a Burroughs punch tape machine.

The keyboard was much as the others that I have described. It was loaded with computer paper, very wide, with guide holes on each side, and faint (feint?) lines printed on the paper to help guide the eye.

The machine would only accept genuine account numbers (modulus eleven again), so we'd set the machine for either debit (cheques), or credits. Everything that was punched in found its way onto the punchtape (the soft copy) or the computer paper (the hard copy).

When punching in a batch of cheques, you'd be given a pile of cheques and a total for the batch. You'd punch in the account number, the cheque number and the amount. All that information was punched into the tape by making holes that could be read by a mechanical reader. 

Many years later I was friends with a man who collected player pianos. The tune to be played was created by making holes in a roll of paper, like this-

Exactly the same idea as computer punch tape, but one hundred years older.

I use computer technology in my recording studio. Some studios "programme" the music using a sequencer. The music roll unwound vertically, but the sequencer unrolls (scrolls) horizontally across the screen

But exactly the same principle.

Anyway, you'd work your way through the batch, get to the end and press the total key. The moment of truth. Did your total match the amount you were given? If it did, you'd start on the next batch. If not, you had to find the error. The machine couldn't be used until the error was cleared.

All this was played out against a strict deadline. You soon got good at machining, and even better at finding errors. That skill stays with you.

Proofreading? No problem.

Batch data entry? Easy peasy.

And modulus eleven? It's still in use today. Without it, bank account numbers wouldn't be secure. Without it, there's be no bar codes. You don't need to know how it works, only that it does.

Machine skills

This was the keypad I learned to use when they sent me away to learn machine skills back in 1968.

 

As you can see, there are a few more keys to use, but it's simple once you know how.

From the left hand side, the first nine columns are for pounds, the next two light coloured columns are for shillings, and the right hand column and a bit are for pence, so you can enter up to £999,999,999-19-11d in one go. Each column has buttons marked 1 to 9.

Operating it is a doddle. press the keys corresponding to the each item you want to add, eg £110-9-6 and pull the lever. repeat as needed and the total is in the little windows at the bottom (shown as white dots in the photo. Sorry but pictures of these ancient machines are hard to find)

The amount can be entered using one finger, but speed comes when you use all your fingers to depress the keys in one movement. It's easy to stretch your hands so that they can cover all the keys. The next thing to learn is to read the amount to be entered as one figure. The human brain can read long combinations of letters and recognise them as words, and it can read long combinations of numbers as well.

So you look at the amount and not at the keyboard. You use the mark on the 5 button to guide your fingers and you see the amount and form the shape of the number and press. The illustration I used is for a mechanical version that needed a crank handle to operate. There were electric versions where you touched the motor bar with your little finger to record the amount. With practice it was amazing how quickly one could list cheques, and the skill never leaves you.

Imagine a mechanical machine that consisted of a keyboard like this-

 

and this keyboard surrounded by an array of metal boxes (you can just make out a couple of them in the picture). Anything up to two dozen different boxes. Each of these boxes has the electro-mechanical equivalent of the operating handle in the earlier machine (see above).

This is an NCR Proof Machine, a noisy, clanking whirring monster of a machine that sorted all the cheques that had been paid in into the different banks. One box for Barclays, another for Lloyds, etc. There were a lot more banks in the 1960s. The Westminster Bank and the National Provincial banks merged to form the Natwest bank in the late 1960s. Many other famous names disappeared at the same time. At the end of the day's business, each bank's cheques were tallied up and sent to the Central clearing house. Each bank would present bundles of cheques and receive cheques back. The cheques physically changed hands. Those cheques were then sorted into branches and sent to each branch to be cleared. That's why it took a week for the cheque to be cleared. Two days to arrive at the drawer's branch, one day to be accepted, two days if it were refused.

So why, in these days of computers and instant transfers, and when cheques no longer have to be presented at the drawing branch, why does it still take a week to clear?

The mechanical Proof machine was something to behold. You knew you'd arrived if you were judged sufficiently skilled to be able to operate it. You needed to be quick and accurate.

Speed and accuracy. Where have I heard that before?

As computers became smaller and more powerful and ways were found to speed up the input at branch level, these machines were phased out. Now the cheque is to be phased out.

And one day, cash will go as well.

School days.

Anyone lucky enough to have had a primary school education prior to 1970 had the best possible start in life. No calculators, no extra subjects to cram into the curriculum at the expense of the basics.
The teachers had time to teach you how to read. You proved that could read by standing up in class and reading from a book. They had time to teach you how to spell. Our fourth year teacher had spelling competitions that were fiercely fought. I recall as a ten year old standing up in class to spell "encyclopaedia". It was competitive. It was fun.
They taught us arithmetic. We had to learn our tables, up to the twelve times tables. By heart. My dad said I had it easy. There was even less pressure on the curriculum in the 1930s, so he had to learn up to the twenty times table. We were taught fractions. We were taught mental arithmetic. Calculators hadn't been invented.
My headmaster at Penpol Primary School in Hayle was a Mr Mitchell. He was a grown up so didn't have a first name. He taught the fifth year, and got us prepared for the eleven plus exam. Out of a class of about thirty, and without classroom assistants, he enabled five of us to pass the eleven plus and go the grammar school. Competition for places was tough. There were less than 200 places for the whole of West Cornwall. Selection was on merit, on how well you did in your exam. You got into grammar school because you were the best.
All through that final year at primary school his motto was "speed and accuracy". But accuracy first, because without accuracy, speed is useless.

I read recently that GCSE examiners are told to mark as correct any mathematics answer that has the right numbers but with the decimal point in the wrong place.
I also read recently about a locum doctor who prescribed ten times the dose of a drug to a patient who subsequently died.
And they don't make the connection.

Before February 1971, the currency in use consisted of pounds, shillings and pence. Twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound, two hundred and forty pennies to the pound.
When I started work at the bank, all staff were expected to be numerate, that is to say, they could add up and take away. Each cashier was responsible for the contents of his till, which he would balance each day. He/she had the use of a tally roll calculator for adding up the "meat ticket" cash slips, but we prided ourselves on our ability to do arithmetic, and to do as much as possible without recourse to machinery.

I left the bank in 1970 and for a few months worked as an invoice clerk for a frozen foods firm. The telesales girls would ring their customers and write the order on an itemised invoice. The Invoice clerks would price the individual lines, add up the invoice and deduct the commission to leave the total at the bottom. There were four of us, working to a deadline, and we'd have hundreds to tally up during the course of a day. We were employed on the basis of our ability to add up. And we were good.
Altogether now-
Take 3 3/4% discount off an invoice for £17-6-4d.

No I can't do it now either. But I could back then. Without recourse to paper and pencil.

Our branch of the bank was busy. We had several large local firms, plus many local shops and department stores. At the close of business, we'd have a pile of cheques a foot high that had to be sent away to the clearing house. Each morning we'd receive a huge pile of cheques that had to be filed into each customer's file. This was called sortaway. Then we'd compile the statements, taking the cheques and paying in slips and arranging them into the order they appeared on the statement. and woe betide if a cheque was mis-sorted. It had to be found.
By the time this was complete, there was a pile of today's work to be done. There was always a deadline to hit. It was pressure. It was fun. From 3.30 when the branch closed the doors until 5.00 it was a rush to balance the tills (to the penny), transfer the cash to the vaults, process all the paying in slips and cheques, punch the data, and bag up the cheques for clearing.
It was fun if you could keep up.
I couldn't.
I used to watch the more experienced staff as they operated the various machines. Their fingers flew over the keys and they never seemed to look at what they were doing. And their work was almost always correct to the penny.
I had to be taught how to do that. So they sent me away for a week to learn. It's a skill that never leaves you. In recent years I've worked from time to time in data entry. I easily passed every assessment, both for speed and for accuracy.
Speed and accuracy. But accuracy first.

GIGO

GIGO is the first rule of computing. It means, garbage in = garbage out. When I joined the bank in 1967 it had been computerising customer accounts for about two years. All the London branches were computer based when I started work.
Computers were big machines that needed tender loving care. 1960s TV shows like the Avengers, the Persuaders or Thunderbirds would portray them as big metal sided boxes with large reels of tape whirring around on the front. The modern mobile phone has more computer power than these monoliths, but they had to start somewhere.
The computers could process data faster than it could be inputted, certainly much faster than a human punch it in. The bank used punch tape to input the data. The branch could input the data throughout the day and transmit the tape via a phone line to the computer in the City.
Here's a picture I found on the internet. I hope the owners don't get too precious about me borrowing it to illustrate this post.

This picture shows the punch tape being loaded onto the first spool. Once loaded, the tape is fed through the reader and on to the second spool. Hit the start button and the machine reads the holes in the tape as binary code and is transmitted down the phone line. At the end of the transmission, the computer tells you if it received everything successfully.

Our branch had one of these terminals, and every day a courier van would arrive at about 5 o'clock with data spools from the sub-branches.These would be transmitted as well. Several (always male) members of staff formed a rota to stay late to transmit this data, and if you were lucky it took an hour. If there were errors in the data, you stayed until you found them, corrected them, and retransmitted the data.

So accuracy was essential.
The first law of computers is garbage in = garbage out.
The first rule of banking is credits must equal debits. Someone pays cheques and cash into their account. The various cheques and cash must add up to the total on the paying slip. That is fundamental and easily understood. Extend the principle so that every paying in slip when added together must equal all the cash received, plus all the cheques received. Simples.
Banks were built on trust. When a customer placed his money with a bank for safe keeping, the last thing he wanted was for the bank to lose sight of it, or be unable to account for every penny. Accuracy and numeracy were absolutely essential. It was the customer's money.

These days it's no longer the customer's money that keeps the bank in business. They keep in business by lending the bank's money to customers who have none. They stopped insisting that every cashier balance his till to the penny every day about thirty years ago.
I was working in retail at the time and each day I'd take the takings to be banked, and collect bags of change for the tills. I spoke to the cashier a week or so after the changeover from individually accountable tills to a system where the tills results were pooled. They never balanced from day one. They never did, ever again. Later again they stopped balancing the tills daily and only balanced them weekly. It might have saved time, I don't know.
What I did know was that numeracy (the ability to add up and take away) was declining alarmingly through the nation. Maybe the banks were forced into pooling the tills through a lack of quality staff.
What I did know was this. Every day, supposedly honest and trustworthy staff were buying their snacks using money from the till. It wasn't much, a few pence, but a principle had been lost.
If credits no longer equalled debits because of a few Mars bars, who made up the difference?

And did those who participated in, or oversaw and colluded with this petty dishonesty ever make their way to the top of the banking industry?

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.