Till Time's Last Sand

by David Kynaston

  ‘Well done,’ said Catterns. ‘What is he going to do when he leaves school?’

  ‘He has not made up his mind yet,’ replied my father.

  ‘Well,’ said Catterns, ‘the Bank cricket team has not been performing very successfully of late and could do with some fresh young blood. I would be very happy to give him a nomination if he would be interested in a career in the Bank.’ He had never met me.

  Even so, that was a more direct route to the indispensable nomination than for many. Nigel Spelling’s, for instance, was achieved in the summer of 1939 ‘by an uncle who had a connection with a man who knew … who knew … who knew a senior in the Bank who knew a Director – or something like that …’ But after whatever route, there followed a two-day series of exams in Orthography, Arithmetic, English Composition and either General Knowledge or a foreign language; also required was a handwriting certificate from the London Chamber of Commerce, which usually disqualified left-handed writers. The exams themselves were not hugely demanding, and seem to have had high pass rates, but still had their moments of strain. ‘The spelling of twelve “hard” words must nearly have been my undoing,’ remembered Ted Bellamy about the early 1920s, ‘for although I had no trouble with eleven of them, I stupidly misspelt that one word so prominent in the Bank vocabulary, the word “Principal”.’1

  For all the Bank’s increased numbers, its organisational structure between the wars remained largely familiar. Two expanding areas by the 1930s were Economics and Statistics (where a newly recruited Cambridge economist, Humphrey Mynors, began to make his mark) and the Foreign Exchange Office (where the emerging force was the incisive, highly energetic George Bolton); while in 1932 the Special Committee on Organisation, under Peacock’s chairmanship, successfully recommended the creation not only of two new departments – Overseas and Foreign, coming out of the pioneering central banking co-operation of the previous decade, and Establishments, taking over responsibility from the secretary for the Bank’s domestic organisation – but also of a cadre of executive directors. All these were significant developments, yet taken as a whole the Bank was still by the Second World War a markedly federal animal, with individual heads of department tending to rule the roost along unashamedly hierarchical lines, notwithstanding the efforts of Establishments and/or executive directors to achieve a more centralised approach. The key battleground tended to be promotions policy. Peacock’s Committee had hoped that future promotions would be ‘submitted to the Staff Committee by the Chief of Establishments in collaboration with the Heads of Departments’; but doubtless following informal pressure from those heads it had soon been settled that submissions for higher appointments, the ones that really mattered, were to be ‘by the Heads of Departments in collaboration with the Chief of Establishments’. Promoting their own men, preventing them from going elsewhere, and largely determining the size of their staff, these departmental heads were the local Threadneedle Street equivalent of all those men on the spot who in effect still ruled the British Empire.2

  One area where the writ of Establishments did not even theoretically run was the Printing Works. From 1920 these were no longer a department in the Bank itself, but instead one mile away in Old Street – inside the former St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, built in 1782 by George Dance junior, to whom Soane had been a pupil. In the context of rapidly rising note circulation from the war years onwards, the principal task at St Luke’s Printing Works was the printing of banknotes; and that became even more so from 1928, when following the long-desired amalgamation of the Bank and Treasury note issues, as well as the demise seven years earlier of the last of the country banks to issue its own notes, the Bank finally assumed entire responsibility for the note issue of England and Wales. The immediate consequence was the launch in November 1928 of the Bank’s own newly designed £1 and 10 shilling notes: both with the somewhat amply proportioned Britannia as depicted by Daniel Maclise back in the 1850s, but the £1 note printed in green with a tint of blue and the 10 shilling note printed in red with a mauve tint – the Bank’s first coloured notes. As would increasingly become the case at such moments, reaction was mixed. ‘A strange and somewhat foreign appearance,’ complained the Liverpool Post, while the Glasgow Evening Times reckoned that ‘adulation of America may go too far’, given they were so ‘bilious-looking’; but at the more business end of the new note issue the Financial Times sought reassurance by submitting the signature of the chief cashier, C. P. Mahon, to a graphologist, who on the basis of magnifying it twenty times stated his conviction that it ‘revealed characteristics of stability, solid reliability, and great experience of routine work’.3

  Among the branches, those Cinderellas of the Bank, there was little change between the wars. Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle and Plymouth were all open throughout, as was the Law Courts branch; the Western branch was sold in 1930 to the Royal Bank of Scotland; the Hull branch closed in 1939; and a new branch began to be built in Southampton (eventually opened in 1940). ‘Senex’, joining the Plymouth branch in 1920, would recall what was for the most part an undemanding, unambitious jog-trot:

  Banking hours were ten till three, except Thursdays (market day) 10–4, and Saturdays 9–1, and the staff were required to sign on fifteen minutes before opening time, when the vault was opened. The staff consisted of the Agent, the Sub-Agent, the Chief Clerk, about six men, four women, and C. E. Phillips the messenger. The Agent, Sub-Agent, and the Messenger all lived on the premises, and the remainder of the staff within walking distance, or at the most fifteen to twenty minutes tram ride away. The Agent’s house adjoined the Branch, with direct access to the office through an internal door, whilst the Sub-Agent lived in a flat above the Bank with similar access.

  All money, etc, was conveyed into and out of the vault by means of a hand-operated lift. In winter the office was heated by a large fire and there was great competition to get near this in the lunch hour, when the Agents were in their respective homes. Except for certain times of the year (e.g. when dividends, etc, were heavy or when the Dockyard and Customs accounts were drawn on heavily) the hours were good, and at slack times if no one was on Governor’s Leave a round of ‘offs’ was worked, which meant that one could leave at 10 am for the rest of the day provided the Auditors had not decided to visit the Branch.

  The high sum Bank Notes were counted and examined by the Cashier, whilst the 10/- and £1 Currency Notes paid in daily by the local banks were dealt with by the women, who were granted an ‘off’ for every forgery they discovered. All the paid Currency Notes were subsequently cancelled, two corners being cut off by means of a guillotine, manipulated by the junior. Cancelled Notes were made up into parcels of 5,000, and sealed with sealing wax.

  From time to time by arrangement with the Branch Banks Office cancelled notes were sent to Head Office and new notes received. We had no Bullion Yard in those days, and the Great Western Railway van would pull up at the front door, usually at about 8.30 or 9.00 am. The packing cases of notes would be brought up, about six at a time, in the lift and taken to Millbay station accompanied by a clerk and a messenger.

  These ‘Treasure Journeys’ were much sought after as it meant a day, or possibly two, away from the Branch, and also a small fee …

  Threadneedle Street’s detailed inquiries in 1936–7 into the branches found that by this time they fulfilled three main functions: providing clearing facilities for local banks; collecting government revenue; and – by some way the most important – acting as reception and distribution centres for banknotes (Manchester, top of the league, dealing with ninety-three million paid £1 and 10 shilling notes annually). Apart from the Hull and Southampton decisions, the key recommendation coming out of the inquiries was that the Victorian premises of the branches were no longer fit for purpose and that it was now necessary to consider ‘a programme of reconstruction’.4 But for reasons beyond any committee’s control, such a programme would in the event take a quarter of a century even to begin to
implement.

  ‘After St Paul’s, the Tower and the Guildhall it probably stands more for London than any other structure, the exterior is known to everybody and I believe, in some unrealised way, is loved by all!’ Such was the tribute paid in June 1921 to the Bank’s home by W. R. Lethaby after two recent visits. He was writing to his fellow architect Herbert Baker, who was himself in the process of being appointed to undertake a major rebuild – the first since Sir John Soane had stepped down in the 1830s.5 Why the rebuild? And why Baker?

  The reason for the rebuild was obvious enough, lying mainly in the hugely increased size of clerical staff following the war and the accompanying desire to have everyone working on the same site; as for the choice of architect, it reflected Baker’s own ‘imperial’ qualifications (including his important work with Sir Edwin Lutyens on the government buildings in New Delhi), as well as a personal connection with Cecil Lubbock, chairman of the Special Committee on Rebuilding the Bank. Lutyens himself was dismayed at not landing the commission, but reputedly had forfeited his chances by jesting to Norman that the Soane halls were just the place for a thé dansant. From the start, Lubbock’s committee emphasised to Baker the need for the ‘reconstruction’ to be ‘satisfactorily carried out consistently with the general appearance and style of the building being preserved’; in accordance with this sentiment, Baker reassured the Committee that it was ‘unnecessary for me to add my advocacy to the widely-acknowledged importance from the points of view of archaeology, architecture and historical association of the retention of as much of the old building as may be possible without too great a sacrifice of the other vital considerations involved’. The architect also (he would relate) asked Lubbock what the Bank of England stood for. ‘Not the amassing of money, I was told; but rather that invisible thing, Trust, Confidence, which breeds Credit …’

  Things moved up a gear in 1922 with the publication of Baker’s plans. ‘An entire reconstruction of the interior will be necessary,’ the Bank’s recently started house magazine, the Old Lady, informed staff that autumn. ‘But in order to preserve as far as possible the style and character of the existing building it is proposed to keep the present outside walls with as many of the old rooms behind them as possible; to continue a similar series of top-lighted Offices round the site, and, inside the enceinte thus formed, to raise the building to the height of four or five floors.’ The staff’s response is unrecorded, but inevitably there was concern from the Soane trustees, not just because it was clear from the start that the Rotunda would have to go. ‘It is the intention to keep all of Soane’s banking halls which lie comfortably with the exterior wall,’ Baker wrote soothingly to Lubbock. ‘There are three such halls and the entrance vestibule.’ Even so, he was compelled to add that ‘the remaining two of Soane’s Banking Halls which lie uncomfortably with the outer wall must, unfortunately, if any plan like mine be adopted, be rebuilt’. The other external pressure came from the City Corporation, wanting the western wall withdrawn in order to allow the widening of Princes Street; while parliamentary legislation was required to enable the clearing (human bones and all) of the ancient graveyard of St Christopher-le-Stocks, which had long provided an attractive garden court within the Bank. By April 1925 demolition had begun and rebuilding about to start, and a few weeks later a model of the proposed new Bank was put on public display at the Royal Academy. The Architects’ Journal offered an early assessment, praising ‘the luxuriant combination of wings, domes, and porticoes’, but arguing that Baker’s final design was ‘marred by the superaddition of the standard London County Council two-floor dormer roof, a feature into which no architect alive could breathe a tolerably individual spirit’. Nevertheless, the overall verdict was that ‘the building promises to be one of considerable distinction’.6

  Work was soon fully under way. ‘A combined impression of the ruins of Carthage, the fall of Jericho and the after effects of an air raid,’ reflected one observer, as each day a small crowd gathered in Bartholomew Lane to watch the demolition of the Stock Offices. Probably few imagined at this point that the entire process of rebuilding the Bank would take seventeen years, including a new wave of air raids over London. For those at the coalface, it could be hard and sometimes furtive going. ‘It was the most difficult job I have tackled,’ remembered John Chitty in the 1940s about the erection of a glistening dome over the re-creation three storeys down of Taylor’s Treasury:

  There was so much moulding and panelling. It was done without the use of solder or brazing. Everything had to be panelling … The old outer walls were left standing when the reconstruction work on which I was engaged took place. The reason was that if the foundations of the outer wall should be broken the City Council would be likely to step in and claim street widening … The new vaultage of the Bank was kept a secret, and the men working in it were sworn to secrecy.

  For Baker himself, these were occasionally fraught but mainly satisfying years. ‘I go happily [on his way to India] having seen the portico finished,’ he wrote to George Booth (Lubbock’s successor) in January 1931, hours after the formal unveiling of the six buttress figures sculpted by Charles Wheeler above the architect’s new Threadneedle Street entrance. ‘I only hope,’ he added, ‘the music won’t be a terror to face! … My wife sends her kind regards; and says she is proud that Baker now rises above Soane.’ The following year, when George Bolton joined the Bank’s Foreign Exchange Office, temporarily housed ‘in two contractors’ sheds in the Chief Cashier’s Garden Court’, he was disinclined to mourn the passing of the familiar. ‘The old Soane structure,’ he unsentimentally recalled several decades later, ‘was not only an anachronism in terms of internal services, office efficiency and flexibility, but was becoming a ruin; the ceilings, for example, were prevented from falling on staff and customers alike by festoons of chicken wire draped in cobwebs that had the appearance of grubby Spanish moss hanging from trees in a deserted Carolina plantation.’

  April 1933 saw the building of the first half of the new Bank completed – with departments moving in at nights and over weekends – and Baker took the opportunity to issue a comprehensive press statement. The ‘several old Soane Banking Halls,’ he noted, had been rebuilt ‘not as separate disconnected units as before, but on the same axis and opening into each other’; moreover, ‘owing to improvements in the design of the lighting it has been possible to remove the ugly iron and glass skylights which had been built above his circles of columns and caryatides, and to replace his solid domes thus restoring to their original design the most beautiful feature of his halls’; and altogether ‘it may be truly said that the Soane Banking Halls can now be seen to better advantage than ever before’. Baker had plenty of other progress to report. He referred to ‘the great Garden Courtyard, half of which has now been built’; ‘the Court Room is being built on the first instead of the ground floor as before’; ‘the treatment of the new Parlours’ was, it had been decided, to be ‘in the same familiar style as the old’; the ‘skill and craftsmanship’ of the Boris Anrep mosaics on the ground floor were self-evident; while as for ‘the walls, and the domed and vaulted ceilings of both the inner and outer halls’, these had been ‘built in solid stone from the Hopton Wood quarries in Derbyshire’, involving with such hard-as-marble stone a quality of masonry that ‘has perhaps never been equalled and reflects the very highest credit on the British masons of today’.

  The Times soon afterwards also accentuated the positive: ‘Within the enclosing walls the transformation that has taken place is, ignoring style, something like that of the medieval fortress in the Renaissance mansion. A good deal of the reconstruction has taken the form of the simplification and tidying up, with improved lighting, of cellular structure.’ In architectural terms, the last significant development was unveiled in October 1936 with the formal opening of the controversially reconstructed Tivoli Corner – a reconstruction necessitating, in response to traffic requirements, a pedestrian passage through new archways, but going beyond necessity in
Baker’s cavalier decision to remove Soane’s crowning attic. ‘This tomb-like superstructure,’ claimed his retrospective justification, ‘the design of which Sir John Soane let his fancy play with, however suitable it might have been as seen against the skyline of a one-storey building, would lose all its character and appropriateness – or meaning if it ever had any – in relation to and as seen against the high building behind it.’7

  By this time, even before the completion of all the work, Baker’s critics were starting to sharpen their pens – none more so than C. H. Reilly, a professor of architecture who wrote regularly in the Banker. A building ‘which was once majestic’ had been transformed, he declared in 1937, into ‘the overgrown private residence of some plutocrat of more than Rockefeller proportions’. Especially regretting the Tivoli Corner reconstruction – formerly ‘a thing of complete and strange and unexpected beauty to find in the City’, now ‘a commonplace little cupola above a low dome’ – he concluded bitterly enough: ‘I see nevertheless after all this, the Bank has erected a statue to Soane. When one has destroyed a man’s best work, I suppose it is the gentlemanly thing to do.’ Eight years later, shortly after the publication of Baker’s self-justifying memoirs, which misleadingly emphasised the retention and incorporation of Soane’s best features, the aesthetically discerning diarist James Lees-Milne was shown round:

  To my surprise there is absolutely nothing left of Sampson, Taylor or Soane’s work inside, and outside only Soane’s outer wall. And that has been mutilated by Sir Herbert Baker. I was disgusted by the re-erection of the Taylor court room, which Baker tampered with to suit his own devices. Had he demolished the whole building and built anew from the foundations I should have respected him more, but he has compromised by reproducing Taylor vaulting and Soane motifs in the basement. Yet Baker is a distinctive architect and craftsman. His lapses into Kraal detail are undignified in classical work.