Till Time's Last Sand

by David Kynaston

  My first impression on entering the Bank in 1926 was of a number of bearded old gentlemen and an equally elderly messenger standing in front of a large coal fire in the Treasury – on the right of the main entrance. It was all very Dickensian … On reporting to the Chief Cashier’s representative, I was instructed to walk across to the Stock Offices in Finsbury Circus. I soon found myself working in the 5% War Stock Office on the ground floor. The Principal was named Delamere. His first words, delivered rather pompously, were ‘Have you had any indulgences?’ I was completely nonplussed. It turned out that he wanted to know if I had had any leave. This was the only time he ever took any notice of me, but in those days Probationers and Third Class Clerks did not expect to be noticed, much less spoken to, by Principals and Superintendents. They never appeared to do any work, so being too busy was no excuse. Two Superintendents in an office on the first floor woke each other up during the morning by exchanging newspapers; another telephoned his friend in another office every day. ‘Bowler or topper?’ he asked, nothing more. The conversation was to decide upon the appropriate headgear for their trip to the Wine Lodge. (F. R. Levander)

  The Bank was then [in 1936] heavily rule- and image-ridden. It was made clear that one wore a bowler hat, a stiff collar and a waistcoat. We were also required to look busy all the time. This was a problem in the War Stock Office: when the market was quiet we had virtually no work. So, to create the impression of industry – until 3.55 when we got on to the starting blocks – we devised a system in which each of us filled in a batch of the Inland Revenue’s nasty little buff forms, then passed the bundle of forms and transfers to the next chap. He would tear up the forms and start again! (Jasper Hollom)

  ‘But one was working with an agreeable bunch of young people,’ added the subsequent deputy governor, ‘and with the much narrower range of entertainment in those days, the Sports Club was a great advantage.’13

  Across the Bank as a whole, most of the dullest and especially repetitive work was on the Stock rather than Cash side. There must have been moments in the Accountant’s Department – between the wars mainly situated in Finsbury Circus – when some of those employed lost the will to live. ‘Looking back to my early days,’ recalled R. B. Charsley in the mid-1970s half a century after joining the Power of Attorney Office, ‘I seem to remember masses of sheer pen pushing in the Stock Offices – “entry”, abstracts, ledgers, white sheet, circulars, etc, also adding up long columns of figures without the help of a machine, and going down to the vaults to agree signatures on Powers, Deeds, Div. Requests, etc.’ But there could be tedium too on the Cash side, with another pensioner of the same vintage, M. H. Browning, looking back on the Dividend Pay and Loans Office:

  All Bearer Bonds were recorded by Bond number and denomination in the Bond ledgers with columns indicating the dividends represented by the coupons attached. Coupons when paid, were listed on numbered sheets which were then taken to the ledgers for the sheet number to be inserted against the Bond number and under the appropriate Dividend column. Bonds surrendered for inscription in the Bank’s Books were first sorted and checked to see that coupons not yet due were still attached, and then also listed. These lists were taken to the ledgers and red lines drawn opposite the Bond number from the next dividend column onwards to ensure that no more coupons could be cashed. Every posting and red line was counted and your month’s total was reported to you together with the number of mistakes you had made, and woe betide you if this figure amounted to more than one per thousand. Ten thousand postings in a month was considered reasonably good and often exceeded in June and December when War Loan paid and we were very busy. At other times already sorted Bonds were taken away, unsorted and given out again to be resorted, and failing all else one was expected to be seen writing something – even with the wrong end of one’s pen!

  Or take the sometimes vexed matter of flyleaves. The Old Lady from 1932 ran a column called ‘Flyleaf’, and it was an apt enough symbol of the day-to-day clerical routine – involving endless precision and endless chatting – as Frank Dancaster explained many years later:

  The ‘flyleaves’ of the old manuscript ledgers were with pages somewhat smaller than those of the ledgers tucked into stout pockets, pasted inside the front outer covers of the parent volumes, to prevent them from straying. When one of them did stray panic reigned until it was found, for it was an adjunct essential to the system then in use. Stock accounts have, of course, to be altered sometimes – when, for example, an address was changed, a stockholder altered her surname on marriage or a nominee for the receipt of dividends was appointed – every such alteration had to be ‘flyleaved’ and anyone who ‘forgot to flyleaf’ was due for a kick in the pants. A flyleaf page was divided into three (or it may have been four – I forget which) main columns, each of which was subdivided into four smaller columns. The first of these was for the folio reference to the altered account, the second for the correspondence ‘mark’ under which the alteration was made, while the third and fourth much narrower sub-columns were headed ‘done by’ and ‘checked by’ (dawn at last begins to break). A few weeks before a dividend was due, an operation – itself known as ‘the flyleaf’ – was performed by a couple of clerks. One extracted the slips which required alteration from their slip-box, altered them and initialled in the column headed ‘done by’ against the corresponding folio and reference mark entries; the other checked the alterations and similarly initialled the column headed ‘checked by’. The slips were large cards, made of thin, tough cardboard each bearing an exact copy of its corresponding stock account. The accounts in the manuscript ledger were, of necessity, all higgledy-piggledy being raised in the order of their dates of opening. It was therefore impossible to use these immensely heavy and bulky volumes directly for any such purpose as the preparation of a dividend but the slips were, in effect, a duplicate of the ledger in loose-leaf form which could be sorted in dividend-book order. When the ‘flyleaf’ was completed the bundles of altered slips were sent to the Printers so that the necessary amendments could be made to the dividend-books, the postal warrants and the envelopes containing them. On their return they could be easily sorted back into the main body of ‘slips’.

  A degree of mechanisation, though, was on its way: Mercedes accounting machines were in widespread use by the mid-1930s, as well as special fanfold typing machines, using continuous stationery, and the Hollerith system of punched cards. ‘I and other clerks were trained how to operate the Burroughs Adding Machines,’ recalled Naree Craik about their coming in 1934 to the Dividend Preparation Office at the St Luke’s Printing Works. ‘The large sheets, which already had the names and addresses printed on them, were rolled into the machine. The capital, interest, tax and net amount were copied from stiff slips. Then, the sheets were added up by hand and proved with various tables. Each clerk was expected to do not less than 750 entries a day. Whenever work was slack, we read or knitted, but if anyone was visiting the office, we added trip sheets from old ledgers, proved them, rubbed out the totals and began again.’

  The probability is that many found in the Bank a safe and adequately fulfilling berth, at a time of insecurity and high unemployment in the world outside. Certainly the pages of the Old Lady in the 1970s and 1980s would be full of essentially cheerful reminiscences. Take Neville Goodman’s ‘Happy Memories’, written in 1982, sixty years after he had ‘entered the Service’ as a seventeen-year-old probationer:

  There were some bizarre characters among us. There was, for instance, the occasion at the Silver Refinery (housed in the printing works in Old Street) when a young clerk turned up in a ‘shocking-pink’ shirt. This so outraged his colleagues that they took him into the ‘cloaks’, divested him of the offending garment which they tore into shreds and conveniently disposed of, hung an oval wooden seat, which lay handy, round his neck and pushed him, thus adorned, into the Principal’s sanctum. Shirts were the subject of another episode which occurred in the Dividend Pay Office: one of our number arrive
d one morning wearing the usual collar and tie – but no shirt. He explained that he possessed only one and that was at the laundry. Here, again, his fellows took matters into their own hands by painting alternate stripes of red and black ink down his chest, thus making him appear respectable – at a distance.

  Still in the D.P.O., we suffered from a superintendent named Gardiner – known as ‘Goat’s Milk Gardiner’ as he was reputed to rely on that product for his sole means of sustenance. Rather austere and feared by some, he nevertheless had his mellow side. On one occasion two of us were on our way out by the side door for an illegal ‘cuppa’ when we had the misfortune to run full tilt into G., returning, no doubt, from some similar refreshment. Using his most awe-inspiring tone, he addressed us: ‘Don’t imagine that I am unaware that you indulge in this clandestine habit – but don’t let me see you and, for God’s sake, WEAR YOUR HATS!’ (In those days, we were not allowed outside the Bank bare-headed.) …

  In the Bill Office, we had a superintendent named Williams – a strict disciplinarian. He noticed that one of our number habitually arrived late in the morning and decided to confront him. ‘Yer not doing yer duty by yer Masters; yer not doing yer duty by yer colleagues,’ said W., to which the offender replied: ‘I acknowledge only one Master, and He’s above.’ ‘Is that so?’ said Williams. ‘Well, I’m quite certain that He is the first to disapprove of yer goings on.’ Also in the Bill Office, there was a rather scruffy individual who wished, one day, to make some complaint to the Principal. On his entering the sanctum, the Principal (one Dalrymple-Hay, affectionately known as ‘Daddy-Winkle’) eyed him up and down, gave him a shilling and told him to go and get a hair-cut and a shave, after which, he would be prepared to see him …

  I cannot vouch for the following story, but it was told as fact at the time. The Rotunda included an upper gallery in which some of the clerks worked, including two chicken-fanciers. One of these two was extolling the merits of a new breed he was trying and he offered to bring a specimen to the Bank to show his friend. The next morning he placed a hamper on his desk and opened the lid for his colleague to examine the contents. At that very moment someone slammed a ledger; the bird took flight and flew over the balcony and down into the Office below, causing a great commotion. The chicken was eventually retrieved and the Principal, on his return from luncheon, was surprised to find an egg lying on his desk …

  I may give the impression that the young Staff in my time were a bit irresponsible, but we did no real harm, respected (most of) our seniors and, in spite of – or perhaps, because of – the fact that we had no Union, there was an atmosphere of mutual trust between the Bank and its Staff. We worked hard and long when required, including Saturdays. If Christmas Day fell on a Sunday, that was our bad luck, as we had only Christmas Day and Boxing Day ‘off’.

  ‘The things I have recorded,’ reflected Goodman, ‘helped one to survive the monotonous tasks we had to perform. I posted ledgers (by hand, of course) for eight solid years and, when I asked my Principal (Whiting) if I could have a change of occupation after so long a time, he chid me for my impatience, saying, by way of comfort, “I posted ledgers for eleven years – and look at me now!”’14

  In practice, few did make it to principal; and, more generally, there was a darker side to the inter-war Bank. ‘So every pre-war clerk became a person of great authority, wearing a top hat in the office, enthroned in a raised stall; and able to make or break any junior at will,’ recalled Leslie Bonnet about the absurdly overmanned Accountant’s Department of the 1920s. ‘Results were ludicrous. Some of these old men were of feeble intellect. Some were more numerate than literate. Many were just plain stupid. And why not? They hadn’t been chosen for initiative, or intelligence. Good handwriting was their best commendation. And so, confronted by this seething cauldron of ambitious, clever, young men, it is little wonder that they feared and hated the newcomers.’ It would of course be wrong to suggest that merit and ambition (qualities not as uniformly on display as Bonnet suggested) went entirely unrewarded: Kenneth Peppiatt, who had joined the Bank shortly before the war, enjoyed an almost meteoric rise, becoming chief cashier in 1934 when barely in his forties; while Leslie O’Brien, following his cricket-based recruitment in 1927, became only fifteen years later Norman’s last private secretary. These, however, were exceptions. The most revealing – and in its way disturbing – evidence comes from Reay Geddes, who after Rugby and Cambridge joined the Bank in March 1933 and spent almost two years there before deciding, at the age of twenty-two, that it was not the place for him. Son of the businessman-cum-politician Sir Eric Geddes, and not lacking in self-confidence, he took the opportunity to send to the chief of Establishments what he called his ‘sincere but untutored observation from the lowest rank’.

  Noting at the outset that ‘the boys who the Bank enlist have a good general standard of education, no experience other than that of school and holidays, and no definite bent’, and that ‘the vast majority do not come at their own express request, but on the choice of their Fathers, who are glad to find a gilt-edged investment for the capital represented by a son who is “developing rather late”’, he went on to explain how – because of the policy of deliberate overmanning in order to be able to cope with the occasional brief rush – the new recruit found himself not only quickly bored but also corrupted:

  For half the day, men are, to a greater or less extent, idle. Any attempt to interest himself in a book, be it novel or text-book, on the part of a recruit is frowned upon as much as any desire to make suggestions or try to see something of another section’s work. The command to ‘Look busy anyway’ is no uncommon one. Its continuation is ‘or they may take men away and we will have to work late’ …

  It is quite inevitable that the recruit should start work in one of the outer offices. There he meets and works beside ‘Disappointed men’ who are always willing to tell what dreadful luck they have had at the hands of God, disease, the war and the Bank’s complete disregard for merit. These gentlemen have one curious loyalty: if their superior winks at the custom of coffee or tea being taken during office hours, it is quite understood that each clerk enjoys these pleasures entirely at his own risk, if there are complaints from the ‘case’. The recruit then learns that the foremen allow rules to be disregarded, but deny any knowledge of such transgressions. This cannot increase the recruit’s respect for his superior. Apart from this loyalty, the disappointed ones have had none. With their mocking of keenness, their obstruction of questions and their eyes on the clock, they are a strong and undesirable influence on boys fresh from school, during the latter’s almost inevitable periods of doubt and apprehension.

  Inevitably, disillusion sets in – exacerbated, according to Geddes, by older clerks often saying to the recent recruit, ‘Does it ever strike you that you will be like me one day?’ And as a result, he calculated, some 2,000 men, roughly half the total workforce, were condemned ‘to work at which their education only serves to make them uncomfortable – either openly discontented or passively awaiting a pension’. Accordingly, he recommended that it would be altogether more desirable if the work was done by those better suited to it:

  The objections to a cheaper grade of labour than the Bank employ at present are behaviour, appearance and intonation. A visit to the Clearing House would show how difficult it is to pick out Bank men [as opposed to those employed by the clearing banks]. This is not to suggest that the Bank’s standard is lower than in years gone by, but that mass-produced clothing and general knowledge have spread a certain ‘savoir faire’ which used only to be obtainable in conjunction with expensive education.

  ‘While the men are here,’ concluded Geddes, ‘let them work. If they are temporarily surplus, they are better playing golf at home than dominoes in a “Mecca” café.’15

  Geddes himself had a notable business career ahead; his report was carefully filed away, to gather dust; and it would be a while yet before the Bank became an environment that nurtured rather than st
ifled what Keynes would call capitalism’s necessary ‘animal spirits’.

  12

  The Dogs Bark

  Despite the national humiliation of going off the gold standard in September 1931, only six years after the return to gold, Montagu Norman would remain as governor for the rest of the decade and indeed beyond. Later that autumn he successfully resisted a final threatened coup – ‘some of us,’ reflected Addis, ‘would like to see him retire, but I fancy he will get his own way in the end’ – by dint of verbally promising to depart in 1933, a promise carrying so little weight in subsequent practice that as early as July 1932 the Court formally told him that henceforth there would be ‘no restriction’ on his ‘length of service’. It is likely that Norman was being less disingenuous when in July 1936 he informed the Committee of Treasury of his wish to step down by 1938, prompting over the next twelve to fifteen months a serious search for a successor. Four possibilities were considered: one, W. H. Clegg, back at the Bank since 1932 after his stint in South Africa, decided in 1937 on health grounds to leave the Bank altogether; another, the merchant banker Charles Hambro, who had become a director in 1928, regretfully decided that he could not permanently detach himself from the family firm; a third, Sir Otto Niemeyer, was ruled out by Peacock on the basis that ‘the name would not be easily swallowed in several quarters’; and the last one, Lord Catto (formerly Thomas Catto), a highly regarded partner at Morgan Grenfell, was for the moment inadmissible because that merchant bank already had a presence on the Court in the person of Lord St Just (the former Teddy Grenfell). Hambro came nearest to replacing the seemingly irreplaceable, with the approach to him representing an attempt (in the words of Norman’s first proper biographer, Henry Clay) ‘to find a candidate who satisfied both the Governor, who wanted a “professional”, and the old gang on the Treasury Committee, who wanted a traditional-type merchant-banker’. Yet whether Hambro anyway had the stomach for it, quite apart from his other commitments, is another matter. ‘I am not fit to be Governor,’ he frankly admitted to Peacock even before the approach in September 1937, ‘because I loathe a row and have not the guts to see it through.’1