The inter-war Bank was a significantly larger organisation than its pre-war counterpart. It was also much more mixed-sex. In 1914 there had been about 1,000 clerical staff, of whom only about 60 were women; by 1927 there were about 3,400 clerical staff, of whom some 1,270 were women, mainly employed either as shorthand typists or in connection with the progressive mechanisation of office work. Much of the increase in overall numbers was attributable to the tenfold rise in the national debt as a result of the war, a rise that in particular directly led in the immediate years after 1918 to the creation of the so-called ‘Hump’ – a mass of rather hastily recruited men who had only limited promotion prospects and who over the ensuing decades would block the path of the more able generation coming up behind them. The cause of the Hump’s creation might not only have been the suddenly bloated national debt; it was said (though not documented) that there also was informal pressure from government, anxious to keep down unemployment figures at a time when the world was palpably not fit for heroes.
Across the inter-war period as a whole, male recruitment continued for the most part along broadly traditional and non-specialist lines. A would-be recruit (who was seldom a graduate) still needed to secure a nomination from a director, which in practice meant that the overwhelming majority of clerical staff came from a middle-class background, albeit quite often lower middle class. Cricket helped. Leslie O’Brien, leaving grammar school in the mid-1920s, managed to obtain a nomination from Lord Revelstoke on the basis that his father had played with a Baring; some ten years later the Bank’s favourite game made all the difference in the life of a public schoolboy, David Harris:
My father [he recalled] was the ‘beak’ at Thames Police Magistrate’s Court and commuted by steam train from Woking to Waterloo. Among his regular travelling companions was Basil Catterns [a director and until recently chief cashier]. One morning Dad, buried in his Times, spotted that I had made 126 not out for Sherborne against Westminster and proudly drew his attention to it.
‘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.
The most influential of the public attacks was made in 1957 by Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England. He asserted that ‘Baker’s superstructure is not only oppressive but – which is worse – lacks grandeur’; he deeply regretted the destruction of ‘Soane’s interiors with their infinite variety of domes, every one original and interesting, and several of a very high and exacting beauty’; and overall, taking the first half of the century as a whole, he reckoned that it was, even allowing for the Second World War, ‘the worst individual loss suffered by London architecture’. The centenary of Baker’s birth failed to shift what had become a hostile consensus. ‘Now that Soane is esteemed as one of Britain’s great and original architects, we find it difficult to forgive Baker for his treatment of the Bank of England, Soane’s masterpiece,’ solemnly stated The Times in 1962. ‘Baker was more ruthless than he need have been. He gutted the whole interior, sweeping away all Soane’s and Sir Robert Taylor’s unique, original courts, and he built inside Soane’s peripheral wall a multi-storey block that was self-confidently elaborate where an architect with a true artist’s humility would have been content to be discreet.’8
More recent opinion has been mixed. Simon Bradley, authoritatively updating and revising Pevsner in 1997, was unwilling to retract the great man’s damning verdict (‘Pevsner’s judgement still stands’). In terms of the exterior, asserted Bradley, ‘Baker’s vocabulary generally appears not as a considered response to particular circumstances, in the way of Soane’s restless endeavours, but as a kit of parts to be deployed complacently and regardless of context,’ with ‘the recurrent motif everywhere a singling out of odd principal windows by rather weak aedicules, or by a favourite Baker form with segmental head and foot’, both of them ‘entirely out of sympathy with Soane’s style – as is the gruesome hipped pantiled roof’; as for the interior, he regretted the way Baker, though reproducing the Old Dividend Office ‘almost exactly’, had nevertheless ‘sabotaged the proportions by adding at either end a version of the domed centre bay of the Old Colonial Office’. Admittedly, he conceded, ‘the new top-lit banking halls of the perimeter are more faithful to Soane’s models than is commonly realized’, yet overall ‘the distinction between his architectural personality and Soane’s is a matter not of taste, but of the gulf between talented professionalism and imaginative genius’.
The real reputational recovery came in 2005 with Daniel Abramson’s magisterial Building the Bank of England, which included a sensitive and archivally based appraisal of the actual – often difficult – circumstances in which Baker did his work. ‘Throughout the process of rebuilding,’ he notes, the architect was ‘faced with striking a balance between tradition and modernisation’, with the latter a clear and inescapable competing priority, whatever anyone’s understandable attachment to the former:
Functionally the old Bank of England had become obsolete. The major construction campaigns of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century had culminated more than a century earlier in a more or less public complex housing some thousand staff without electricity, telephones, plumbing and other modern technologies and amenities. The new building, on the other hand, would have to house an organisation that was not only four times larger, but whose work had changed fundamentally, now being much more clerical and less publicly oriented [in the sense of daily customers calling at the Bank], and directed by a professional executive corps.
Abramson further emphasises that during the 1920s and 1930s Baker and the Bank’s directors and public opinion generally were all more or less as one, in that they ‘accepted the Bank’s practical requirement and felt, too, that Baker’s design work and re-creations of some interior Soane spaces represented a respectful enough continuation of the classical tradition, of Soane’s aesthetic and of the Bank’s architectural history’. Moreover, he points out, ‘as eventually constructed the rebuilt Bank contained numerous preserved, altered and re-created “gems” set into the fabric of the new building’ – gems such as Taylor’s sculpted twisting and flowing 1730s figure of Britannia or various of Soane’s transfer hall lantern columns or the replication on the third floor of his Doric vestibule, even as elsewhere in the Bank such thoroughly modern and utilitarian developments were being introduced as its own generating station, engine room and 800-foot deep water well, not to mention, behind the Lothbury front, a high-tech, horseshoe-shaped Bullion Yard able to accommodate turning motorised vehicles.
Altogether, while not denying Baker’s ‘seemingly gratuitous fiddling with his predecessors’ work’, typified by ‘the alterations to his replica of Taylor’s Court Room’, and rightly critical of his ‘claims to be respecting Soane’s real intentions’, it is a persuasive defence; and Abramson quotes with tacit sympathy Baker’s own comparative verdict in relation to the newly built (1921–4) Federal Reserve Bank of New York: ‘It was a veritable fortress of wealth. But its interior had none of the welcoming appearance of a house of city merchants, which is the tradition of Threadneedle Street.’ Perhaps that was a stretch – Baker’s Bank was also a deliberately formidable, unyielding symbol of the financial power at the very heart of what was still the British Empire – yet over the years a certain domesticity, epitomised by the new Garden Court, would even in its twentieth-century garb help to make the Old Lady an institution capable of commanding affection as well as respect.9
What was life like in the Bank between the wars? It certainly did not start on a harmonious note. On a Saturday afternoon in February 1919 a crowded meeting of the staff was held in the Court Room and addressed by Wilfred G. Bryant, a 1st-class clerk in the Branch Banks Office. He began by thanking the governors for their ‘magnanimity and kindness’ in allowing ‘the use of this beautiful room’; and he emphasised ‘the gratitude we all feel for the very many privileges and blessings we enjoy in the service of the Governor and Company’. But his tone soon darkened: ‘It has come to pass that because we are in the service of the Bank, the Bank claims the right to commandeer, if it thinks fit, the whole of our waking life and to recompense us for the sacrifice of all our leisure on its own terms. Is it any wonder that human nature has rebelled against this worse than slavery?’ And: ‘For years past the whole system of promotions has caused comment and disaffection. Men are passed over without a cause assigned and are barred accordingly from legitimate advances.’ And again: ‘How many men in this room could give a complete list of our Directors? Or tell aught about their personalities? Not one in ten. Yet they are our masters …’ Strong words, yet Bryant (speaking as a member of the self-styled ‘Committee of Delegates’) was just as harsh on those gathered around him:
We have not received from you, although we have been fighting your battles, all the sympathy that we deserved. There is a terrible amount of snobbery in the Bank. There is an extraordinary ability to sit upon fences. There is a remarkable shrinking from compromising your dignity or your fancied position with the authorities. There is the strangest aversion to putting your names to documents. There is an appalling lack of brotherly feeling among you. There exists a most utter callousness to any sort of esprit-de-corps.
Suitably stung, the meeting agreed to send a memorandum, ‘respectfully addressed to the Governor and Directors of the Bank of England by the staff of the same’, demanding the establishment of a standing committee of directors and staff, on the grounds that ‘in no other way does it seem possible that difficulties can be brought to light and alleged grievances ventilated’. The deputy governor was unsympathetic – Norman in his diary calling it a ‘Grumblers Meeting’ – but the Court as a whole responded by appointing a Special Committee on Grievances.
Over the next few months it heard many grumbles. No doubt there was a self-selecting and not necessarily representative element to those who spoke up; but cumulatively the eloquent evidence was of a far from happy workforce:
I am of opinion that the men who were promoted on the Stock side last October were very largely in one particular clique and that undue influence was exercised. (William Challis, 1st-class clerk in the Dividend Accounts Office)
I was eleven years in the 4th-Class, which was most disheartening, and I thought that once I got out of that Class things could not be worse; I have, however, been 13 years in the 2nd Class and I am still there. I am nearly 54 … I believe my case is the worst in the Bank. (Henry Onyon, 2nd-class clerk in the Dividend Pay Office)
I may say that there are many men who would like to come before you but are afraid to do so, partly because they are not sure what their reception will be, and partly because they fear that a black mark would be put against them. (Frederick Rumsey, supernumerary 2nd-class clerk in the Dividend Pay Office)
Since I was demobilised on the 12th December last, my average time of leaving on Saturday has been 3 o’clock … I used to play Rugby football and often I did not arrive on the field until half-time. (Arthur J. F. Bond, 4th-class clerk in the Private Drawing Office)
May I say that I am loath to be thought a man with a grievance … I think the Class system works unfairly in that men have to depend largely on chance for their promotion. If promotion is stagnant at the head of an office it means that through no fault of their own the men in the office are kept back. (Wilfrid M. Acres, 1st-class clerk in the Branch Banks Office and future historian of the Bank)
I may say that I came into the Bank in 1882 and since then I have not spoken to a Governor or Director. (Henry H. Lempriere, 1st-class clerk in the Dividend Pay Office)
A man never knows his character in the Bank. If a man wants to know his character he has to ask his Principal, who may or may not tell him. Any secret system is liable to abuse, as it places the Principal in an autocratic position … (James R. Sugars, 3rd-class clerk in the Accountant’s Bank Note Office)
I have to work late on every possible occasion in order that I may be able to give my family the bare necessities of life … The Bank have always been particular as to the type of men they elect into the Service; they come from decent homes and have the habits and tastes of gentlemen and I think the Bank should put them in the position to gratify those tastes. (Cuthbert Pearce, 4th-class clerk in the Dividend Accounts Office, aged twenty-nine and married with small twins, on a basic salary of £290)
We don’t want the Bank run on the lines of a factory and we fully appreciate the benefits we enjoy in the Service. We don’t expect anything unreasonable. We don’t want to be paid double for half the work or anything of that sort. But if the Staff are treated with sympathy and consideration you need have no doubt whatever that they would respond to that treatment … If the Authorities will endeavour, when considering problems connected with the Staff, to put themselves in our places and think what they would feel if they were in our position they need have no fear as to the result, nor need the Staff. (James Harrison, 4th-class clerk in the Private Drawing Office)
Reassured by what Bryant described as ‘the extreme repugnance among our men to have anything to do with Trade Unions’, the Court in July set up an Advisory Council of Directors and Staff.10 The Bank would remain for a long time a decidedly hierarchical organisation; but the old days of seemingly arbitrary autocratic rule had gone for ever.
The end of autocracy did not mean the end of paternalism – far from it. Even before the war, in 1908, the Bank had provided the eighteen-acre ground (off Priory Lane in Roehampton) for a staff sports club; and in July 1919 – only months after the ‘Grumblers Committee’ and amid rising industrial tension in the country at large – the visiting Ben Strong, following lunch at governor Cokayne’s Roehampton home, went on to the ‘field day’ at the nearby Sports Club:
They have a cricket field, bowling greens, tennis courts, etc, all in beautiful order and in every way a desirable adjunct to the Bank. There were nearly 6,000, each man taking some lady friend and each of the girls in the Bank taking some man. The entertainment consisted of cricket games, tennis, bowling, a band concert and dancing in a big open air tent. I was very greatly impressed with the general appearance of the people, resembling in many respects the type which we employ in New York. A number of the directors of the Bank were there with their families, and, as in America, the dancing proved a great attraction.
‘Cokayne told me,’ added Strong, ‘that steps were being taken by the bank employees in London, including the Bank of England, to get up some sort of a general protective organization, not quite along the lines of the labor union, but, I gathered, with the expectation that ultimately it will amount to the same thing. He viewed the movement with some concern.’ In the event the recently formed Bank Officers’ Guild failed to secure a meaningful foothold in the Bank, but directors like William Douro Hoare and Cecil Lubbock now started to spend significant amounts of time on matters of staff welfare, with Hoare’s cricket match against the Bank 1st XI remaining the centrepiece of the annual summer garden party until his death in 1928, when a governor’s team took over, usually fielding a Test star or two. Other indications of the enhanced paternalism between the wars included the start in 1921 of the Old Lady (albeit seldom a forum for the venting of grievances), the establishment in 1934 of a Superannuation Fund for pensioners (replacing the old system of pensions being granted ‘at the pleasure of Court’), and, especially valued by current staff on a daily basis, the creation in 1927 in Tokenhouse Yard of the Bank of England Club, featuring a bar, a coffee room and a meeting room as well as dining rooms – ‘Every stick and stone of which,’ reported the Old Lady, ‘has been ungrudgingly given by the Governor and Company.’11
The third floor at Tokenhouse Yard was reserved for women clerks, while at Roehampton the women had from 1921 their own separate Sports Club. What there does not seem to have been – in the early 1920s anyway, and probably throughout the inter-war period – was parity of esteem. ‘Experience has shown,’ declared a January 1920 memo about the Secretary’s Office, ‘that although Women Clerks perform straightforward work very satisfactorily they are unable, with rare exception, to carry out any intricate work without supervision and they suffer from a lack of adaptability …’ Moreover: ‘Women Clerks cannot be employed on the work of the Bank Provident Society, or the Income Tax, which involve private affairs of members of the staff, as the staff will not consult them. The work of the counter, involving as it does on many occasions criminal questions, is also unsuitable for women.’ A memo later that year from the principals of the Correspondence Department was if anything even less enthusiastic:
We are of opinion that a given number of men will get through considerably more work than an equal number of women; & that speaking generally the standard of their work will be higher … The value of the work of Women Clerks is lessened because of their frequent absences, because they are emotional & easily upset & also we think because there is a tendency amongst the younger ones not to look upon their work as their career in life.
The key report was that of March 1921, as the House Committee submitted to the deputy governor its views on ‘The Future Employment in the Bank of England of Women Clerks’, in other words in the larger context of men’s post-war return to work. After noting that ‘the disparity, under existing conditions, in the absolute efficiency of the two sexes is sufficiently obvious in our opinion to justify the relegation of women in the mass to the work for which they seem specially adapted’, the report went on:
Without expressing an opinion upon the abstract merits of Equality of Service, we do not consider that the service of the Bank admits the practical application of a principle of equality because the continuity of the subordinate and administrative careers implies eligibility for either, but the woman’s eligibility for the administrative career is qualified by uncertain duration of service: a disqualification, in fact, that we would make apparent during her subordinate career by restriction to a particular class of work and render perhaps less objectionable by segregation from men. Nor although there may be women whose capacity equals or exceeds that of the average clerk do we think that it would serve any useful purpose under present conditions to engage such women exceptionally upon the work which we propose to confine to men.
‘Shorthand and Typewriting; Currency and Bank Note work; Machining and sorting dividend warrants and coupon work; General Card Index work’ – such were the functions, concluded the report, to which women in the future were to be confined, with of course the rule staying in place that a woman had to leave at once if she married. Nor was there significantly more freedom sartorially. Hat and gloves on arrival and departure were compulsory for all female staff; a notice was issued forbidding make-up, especially lipstick; and when in the 1930s a female clerk in the Dividend Office dared to wear a blouse with a bow at the neck showing above her stipulated dark-navy overall, a superintendent in the War Stock Office took exception and formally complained.12 Women may have comprised over one-third of the workforce, but in all essentials and outlook the Bank remained – as Janet Hogarth had realistically anticipated – almost as male-dominated an institution as it had always been.
First impressions can be the sharpest, and a trio of male reminiscences evoke the flavour of a place that was still, in many other sorts of ways as well, traditional and unchanging:
The twenty young hopefuls who made up my ‘Election’ [in 1921] were paraded in the Court Room and subjected to the usual scrutiny before being walked round the Bank and dropped off in ones or twos in various offices. My destination was the old Private Drawing Office, which in those days faced north and overlooked the old Bank Garden … The Superintendent of the G-O section, on which I worked, was Charlie Butterworth. Clad in a frock coat and wearing elastic-sided Victorian boots he seemed to me to be a very old gentleman … The Drawing Office then was a noisy, busy place. Ledgers, cash books, pass books and waste books were all hand written and at around 3.00 pm and again after 4.00 pm there were furious rushes to enter the ‘Town Clearing’ and then the bundles of Bank cheques … The countermen were noisier and used louder and coarser language than in later years. Especially I remember a couple named Troughton and Olivier, the latter said to be the son of a bishop. Olivier had a habit of leaving the counter and passing through the office, pinching or annoying some woman clerk on his way, to bait an inoffensive colleague named Grugeon who worked on the Bankers counter. (C. D. Garton)
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 arrived 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 stifled what Keynes would call capitalism’s necessary ‘animal spirits’.