7
‘London was still London,’ recalled many years later the American writer Henry Adams about the world capital that as a young man he had encountered in 1858. ‘A certain style dignified its grime; heavy, clumsy, arrogant, purse-proud, but not cheap; insular but large; barely tolerant of an outside world, and absolutely self-confident … Every one seemed insolent, and the most insolent structures in the world were the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England.’
Inside those four walls, the Victorian Bank remained physically very much Soane’s creation, though his successor, C. R. Cockerell, built a new Dividend Warrant and Pay Office, followed in 1849–50 by a new Private and Public Drawing Office, the latter giving the Bank’s commercial customers a handsome and up-to-date banking hall comparable to those of the burgeoning joint-stock banks. Probably not all that many of the staff fell in love with the place, but one who did so was Herbert de Fraine, arriving as a clerk in the 1880s:
It was a magnificent conglomeration, due to the piecemeal acquisition of the site. Nothing could have been less like the stream-lined office block of today [the 1950s]. You could seldom go direct from place to place, and dead ends seemed almost a rule … Most of the Bank was only one storey high, and many of the offices had domes or lanterns, with the solid roof supported by columns or caryatides. Separating the buildings were the Garden and various courts and yards, including the Bullion Yard and the Well Yard.
Looked at from above, the roof was peppered with domes, skylights and lanterns, in the midst of which towered the great dome of the Rotunda. There were no windows on the street on any of the four sides …
The Pay Hall (called by de Fraine ‘the Great Hall’) still had at one end its original statue of King William III in Roman garb; Soane’s Transfer Offices were ‘all beautifully proportioned, all beautifully light’, each with its ‘graceful features’; Cockerell’s Drawing Office was ‘majestic’; the parlour featured an ‘exceptionally fine’ ceiling, three fireplaces with ‘grates of burnished steel’, and at each end a ‘triple arcade supported by Corinthian columns of wood’; and altogether in the Bank’s many offices ‘the general impression was one of space, light and harmony’, so that ‘as a young man I was overwhelmed by their quiet dignity, which was even enhanced by the perfection of detail’.
Yet that quiet dignity could never be taken for granted. A revealing moment occurred in May 1867, when a large demonstration in Hyde Park, calling for an extension of the franchise, prompted an urgent, little-publicised meeting between the governor and Colonel Burnaby, commanding the Grenadier Guards at the Tower:
It appeared that the Bank were in possession of about 120 Muskets and Bayonets and the same number of Pistols, with various Pikes, Cutlasses &c: the same being kept in the Porters’ Armoury. In addition to these, the Volunteers’ Armoury contained about 150 Enfield muzzle loading Rifles with bayonets. In the Magazine were 1000 rounds of ball cartridge for the muskets, and the same number of rounds for the pistols. There was however no ammunition for the Enfield Rifles. At the suggestion of Col. Burnaby, and by the Governor’s direction, the Secretary wrote a letter on that day to the Officer commanding the Grenadier Guards at the Tower, requesting that 10,000 rounds of Breech loading Ball cartridge, and 10,000 of muzzle loading do. [i.e. ditto] with caps, might be supplied to be kept in Store at the Bank. This Ammunition including 11,000 caps was duly supplied from the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich …
The Bank’s understandable concern for its security as well as its dignity seldom faltered; and in 1883 it was the turn of the ‘Out-Door Porters and Street-Keepers’ to receive their orders from the deputy governor:
They shall attend during the time the Gates are open, to keep the approaches to the Bank clear, to prevent cabs and omnibuses standing near the Gates to ply for fares, and generally to prevent and remove any obstruction or annoyance to persons having business at the Bank.
One man shall be constantly stationed at the Front Gate, another at the Gate in Prince’s Street, and the third shall patrol round the Bank, giving special attention to the Gates in Lothbury and Bartholomew Lane …
In case of a crowd passing, or any unusual collection of persons in the street, the Street-Keeper will at once close the Outer Iron Gates, and caution the Gate-Porter on duty inside that he may be prepared to close the Inner Gates, and to give notice by means of the Electric Bell to the Head Gate-Keeper, or, if the emergency requires it, to obtain immediate assistance from the nearest point where it may be available.
Still, most of the time it was quiet and orderly enough, especially of course at night. That was certainly the case on the evening when the young Spanish philosopher George Santayana was invited by an acquaintance – the officer commanding the guard – to take dinner at the Bank. The date was 1901, but it could have been at least twenty or thirty years earlier:
The room into which I was ushered had a dingy Dickensian look of solidity grown old-fashioned and a bit shabby. There was a walnut mantelpiece with a small clock and two candlesticks without candles; heavy black walnut chairs, with horse-hair bottoms and a table set unpretentiously, with thick white plates and thick glasses. But there was a pleasant fire in the grate, and the rather superannuated butler served us an excellent absolutely English dinner: mock-turtle soup, boiled halibut with egg-sauce: roast mutton: gooseberry tart and cream, and anchovies on toast; together with one bottle of claret and one of port.1
The Bank during the mid- to late nineteenth century may in a commercial banking sense have been increasingly dwarfed by the giant joint-stock banks, which were willing (unlike the Bank and many of the long-established private banks) to pay interest on deposits. Even so, its own range of activities and responsibilities, whether for its ‘private’ purposes or in the larger ‘public’ interest, continued to grow. In 1864 the Bank entered the Bankers’ Clearing House, which meant, noted a report three years later on the Private Drawing Office, that henceforth the Bank was ‘enabled to offer the same advantages to Customers as those afforded by the other Clearing Bankers’; while, in terms of acting as the bankers’ bank, typical figures in the late 1860s showed London bankers’ balances at the Bank running at over £7 million, amounting to one-third of the Bank’s private deposits. Soon afterwards, in 1871, the Bank’s assiduous secretary, Hammond Chubb, itemised some significant indicators since 1853: Bank notes issues annually up from £9 million to £13 million; ‘a considerable increase in the number of gold coins weighed in the Weighing Office, and in the amount of silver counted in the Tellers’ Office’; the number of accounts in the Drawing Office up by more than 600, with the average balance nearly doubled; securities deposited by customers up from £4.9 million nominal value to £19.9 million, ‘the greater part bearing Coupons for half-yearly collection’; and ‘the management of all the India Stocks and Promissory Note Loans has been undertaken, as well as a great part of the Banking Business of the India Office, formerly managed at the East India House’, not to mention the printing of India currency notes, stock certificates and so on being added to the work of the Printing Department. Indeed, there was from the late 1860s, as Clapham notes, ‘a steady access of colonial, municipal, and other business for bodies corporate’ – business that was ‘safe and certain’ and of a sort that the Bank was ‘well qualified to handle’.2
Despite the overall increase of activities, the size of the Bank’s staff (including at the branches) remained notably constant: 908 in 1832, 883 in 1854, 899 in 1880. Chubb, writing in 1871, had no doubt about the key role played by ‘the introduction and use of mechanical labour’, citing as examples ‘the system of “Surface Printing” in Bank Notes, the printing signatures to Bank Notes and Warrants, the employment of mechanics in the Accountant’s Bank Note Office, an increased use of printing in special forms and cheques; and, latterly, the application of printing to the Dividend Books and Warrants’. His detailed case-study, in which he took manifest pride, concerned the Accountant’s Bank Note Office:
There was first in 1860 the introduction of mechanics as ‘posters’, and subsequently in 1861 as ‘ledger examiners’. These were aided in their work by the simple ‘stamping pen’, with moveable dates. In 1862 the system of employing uncovenanted [in effect apprentice] clerks as sorters of Bank Notes was commenced. By degrees the system was extended, and a further step was taken in 1863 by the use of stamping and numbering machines, and finally by the abolition of some duplicate work in 1868. But this is not all. The Inspectors of notes still stand at the number fixed in 1853, notwithstanding the larger number of notes – a result which has been obtained by a better organization in the Inspectors’ Department, but chiefly by the arrangements made in recent years, under which the clerks in several of the Banking Offices inspect the notes passing through their hands. The system was first applied to the Private Drawing Office, and ultimately to the Pay Hall; a slight payment being made to the clerks in these Offices to cover the increased risk.
‘Thus, by the adoption of these measures, which followed one another as circumstances would admit,’ concluded Chubb in his report to the governor about ‘the Expenses of the Bank’, the office ‘has been brought to its present condition, in which its arrangements are more simple, the performance of the work is more efficient, and the cost is far less than it has ever been in modern times.’3
Banknotes themselves were of declining relative importance during the second half of the century – rivalled by the growing use of cheques and the ever-greater popularity of gold sovereigns and half-sovereigns – but they still mattered hugely, while remaining to the world at large the most visible symbol of the Bank. Increasingly, as intended by the Bank Charter Act, the Bank’s notes enjoyed a near-monopoly of the note issue in England and Wales, hastened from the late 1870s by the remorseless takeover of country banks by the large, non-issuing joint-stock banks – so that by the end of the century provincial banknotes accounted for only 7 per cent of the circulation of banknotes in England, with the rest being Bank of England notes. Those notes themselves were of a new type from 1855: printed by letterpress, with a shaded watermark; on distinctively thin, crisp paper; payable only to ‘the Bearer on Demand’; on and featuring a spear-carrying Britannia of somewhat Pre-Raphaelite mien, as depicted by the artist Daniel Maclise. Forgery now became significantly more difficult, though in 1862 there was a major scare with the discovery of the theft of a large quantity of banknote paper (and paper for printing rupees) from Messrs Portals’ Laverstock Mills in Hampshire, which had led to forged £5 notes, all printed on genuine banknote paper, being presented at the Bank. The main culprits were eventually identified, leading to a trial at the Old Bailey in 1863 and heavy sentences; but never tracked down was the woman, invariably dressed in black, who would wait at Waterloo Station for the packages of stolen paper, before disappearing with them over Waterloo Bridge in a horse-drawn cab. ‘We need to write a novel,’ commented the Bank’s solicitor Henry Freshfield, with a nod to the recent Wilkie Collins bestseller, ‘and call it The Woman in Black.’4
A decade later came another fraud, another trial – and considerable embarrassment.5 An American called George Bidwell, aided by his brother Austin and two accomplices, managed in the early months of 1873 to sell to the Bank’s Western branch in Burlington Gardens over £100,000 worth of forged bills of exchange. The branch’s manager was Colonel Peregrine Madgwick Francis, who had previously run the Hull branch, and he was undone by some highly accomplished fraudsters and no doubt a significant element of negligence. ‘It appears as if the bank managers,’ recalled George Bidwell, ‘had heaped a mountain of gold out in the street and had put up a notice, “Please do not touch this,” and then had left it unguarded with the guileless confidingness of an Arcadian.’ The fraud was eventually discovered; at the ensuing trial that summer at the Central Criminal Court, all four were found guilty; and they each received a life sentence, though in the event being released between 1887 and 1891. The Bank itself recovered almost all the money lost, but The Times estimated the cost – borne by the Bank – of pursuing, capturing and prosecuting the offenders at as high as £46,000. As another paper commented, ‘If the Bank of England can be so easily misled there is no question that minor establishments may be victimised.’
It was a more innocent scene in G. E. Hicks’s wonderfully detailed and characterful painting Dividend Day at the Bank of England, a popular hit of the 1859 Royal Academy Exhibition if less esteemed by the critics. Until 1869, when postal transmission was reluctantly authorised by the Bank following political pressure, it remained the inviolable practice that all dividend warrants on stock inscribed in the Bank’s books (whether government stock or the Bank’s own stock) had to be physically handed across its counters in the Dividend Office to the individual stockholders or their authorised representatives, who could then present them for payment in the Rotunda; and even after 1869, until in 1910 the receipt of dividends on personal attendance was almost entirely abolished, the practice still continued in some considerable numbers, as remembered in the 1920s by Arthur Rowlett, a veteran clerk:
The Dividends were paid from 9 till 4, the great bulk of the public attending on the 5th and two following days of January, April, July and October, when the principal public funds became payable. On arrival at the Bank at 8.45 a little crowd of people were found waiting, the precursors of ‘all sorts and conditions of men’ and women who steadily thronged the counters till closing time. Within all was ready in the Dividend Office, freshly cut quill pens and new blotting paper laid ready for the motley crowd which soon filled the Office. Two Scotland Yard detectives were in attendance all day in case of pocket-picking or any other delinquency. The costumes were mostly of the Sunday best, and many ancient and venerable beaver hats were in evidence. Many quaint characters one calls to mind. Here we see the communicative stockholder who retails all his family history and ailments. There is the mysterious individual who whispers into the ear of the paying clerk his name and amount of Stock. On the one hand is the forgetful person who can only remember that he wants ‘a pink paper for five pounds.’ On the other hand is the stupid man who on being asked his name says ‘Two ’undred Consols,’ and when required to state the title of his Stock says ‘John Jones.’ Here is the family party with a luncheon basket, evidently making the occasion one for a joy-day in London. There we see the joint Stockholders who, suspicious of each other, come together and never let one another out of sight. And, most unpopular, the man who takes about five minutes to sign his name, and always arrives at five minutes to four for ten years’ arrear dividends which take nearly an hour to pay …
Or as the Comic Almanack had put it back in 1841, almost twenty years before Hicks painted his warrant-chewing dog, unnoticed amid all the jostle:
What a crowd! What a crush!
What a row! What a rush!
What screaming, and tearing, and noise –
Of cabmen and footmen, policemen and bus-men,
And poor little run-over boys! …
Oh! It’s Dividend Day!
Oh! It’s Dividend Day!
And all sorts of queer incongruities:
Old men and young maids, deaf ears and bright eyes
Are coming to claim their annuities …
It’s Dividend Day at the Bank.6
The overwhelming majority of the Bank’s staff occupied a clerical position, with up to one-sixth of vacancies being reserved for sons of those who had been clerks at the Bank for more than fifteen years. Otherwise, the main criteria for election to a clerkship were character and capacity (though it still remained necessary to find a director willing to exercise the power of nomination), as well as of course being male. ‘The general behaviour of the candidates, the nature of their testimonials, and their replies to the questions put to them regarding their habits and occupations’ were identified by the Court in 1844 as indispensable considerations; as for capacity, the examination procedure in place from the early 1850s comprised writing from dictation about thirty lines of an article taken from The Times, performing two reasonably simple interest sums, and (in the presence of the Committee for Examining Clerks for Election) working out a further sum in interest. ‘Although the system has unquestionably tended to raise the standard of Clerks,’ observed an 1865 memo almost certainly by Chubb, ‘it has, on the other hand, failed to keep out some who have proved very ill-fitted for the Bank service’; and henceforth would-be clerks were also to do a test simulating the most common work of junior clerks, namely ‘entering Warrants in the Dividend Books, or entering Cheques in the Cash and Bill Books’.
Three years later, in 1868, an internal report on the clerks and their departments gives us some names and some flesh. Starting with the Accountant’s Bank Note Office, where the individual verdicts by its Principal, Daniel Hill, suggest a more mixed picture than that model of modernised efficiency soon afterwards drawn by Chubb:
A valuable officer, but afflicted with lameness. (George Reynolds)
Indefatigable, zealous, conscientious. (George Betts)
Persevering, intelligent, speaks German. Ideas rather contracted. (Richard Baily)
Clever, useful, excitable, ready at figures. (Charles Earles)
A good conscientious clerk, negligent in appearance. (Alfred Appleton)
Excellent moral character, a promoter of ragged schools. (Edward Gribble)
Gentlemanly, intelligent, considerable ability. (Edmund Gill)
Conscientious, exemplary, useful in training young clerks, but too timid for anything beyond routine business. (Lewis Mayer)
Author of ‘Laing’s Theory of Business’. His talents might be more usefully employed than at present. (John Laing)
Industrious, attentive, illiterate. (Edward Oliver)
Well conducted, but very weak & nervous. (William Bawtree)
Gentlemanly, wants energy. (Daniel Reid)
Good clerk, not brilliant. (Charles Williams)
Average. (Henry Halsey)
Gentlemanly, attentive. (Francis Langford)
Good abilities, but liable to be careless & uncertain. (Charles Edis)
Moderate ability, conceited. (Richard May)
Well meaning, but remarkably thoughtless. (Thomas Critchett)
Average abilities, lethargic. (Frederic Stretton)
Elsewhere, to take some examples of clerks almost at random, Henry Dixon junior in the Consols Office was ‘quick, active & clever’ but ‘apt to make mistakes by too rapid a discharge of his duties’; Henry Rennell in the New £3 Per Cent Office was ‘steady, attentive, & regular’; John Bawtree in the Power of Attorney Office was ‘very careful and assiduous’; Thomas Hill in the Chancery and Exchequer Office was ‘better educated than the rest, but unfortunately very incorrect in keeping the Accounts’; Herbert Crickmay in the Branch Banks Office was ‘rapid’ with ‘good abilities’, but ‘somewhat too off-hand’; George Grey in the Private Drawing Office was ‘a medium clerk’ who ‘has not maintained his character’; Secundus Pryce Jones in the Public Drawing Office was of ‘average ability’ and ‘rather nervous’; Alexander Goudge in the Bill Office was ‘a hard working plodding Clerk and well conducted’; Gilbert Allum in the General Cash Book Office was ‘slower than formerly – says he does not feel so able for a heavy day’s work’; and so on.7 But of course, what was going on in their heads, as to a great or lesser extent they fulfilled their duties, we shall never know.
Two partial exceptions are clerks who have come down to us because of their sons. One was Robert Browning, father of the poet as well as son of the long-serving, ill-tempered Bank clerk who rose to be a department head – with all three unhelpfully having the same Christian name. Born in 1782, the middle Browning was probably still in his teens when he was sent to St Kitts in order to help manage the plantation holdings of his dead mother’s family, with the chance of a substantial inheritance. What then transpired was related by his son in 1846 in a letter to the future Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
If we are poor, it is to my father’s infinite glory, who, as my mother told me last night, as we sate alone, ‘conceived such a hatred to the slave-system in the West Indies, that he relinquished every prospect,’ supported himself, while there, in some other capacity, and came back, while yet a boy, to his father’s profound astonishment and rage … My father on his return, had the intention of devoting himself to art, for which he had many qualifications and abundant love – but the quarrel with his father, – who continued to hate him till a few years before his death, – induced him to go at once and consume his life after a fashion he always detested. You may fancy, I am not ashamed of him.
So the Bank it was, which he entered in 1803 and where he stayed for a full half-century (mainly in the Dividend Room of the Consols Office), but devoting most of his energies to his many sketchbooks and his extensive library, as well as apparently becoming an authority on sermons. ‘Not a very able Bank official but clever and much liked’ would be the verdict in the 1880s, some twenty years after his death, of the chief accountant of the day.
The other father of fame was William Marshall, whose son Alfred became a major economist and an inspiration for John Maynard Keynes. He was born in 1812; managed to enter the Bank in 1830 despite being the son of a downwardly mobile financial failure; started his own family life near the tanneries of Bermondsey, before moving to suburban Clapham; and in the Bank eventually rose in 1870 to become a cashier (though never chief cashier) before retiring in 1877. ‘A tough old character, of great resolution and perception, cast in the mould of the strictest Evangelicals, bony neck, bristling projecting chin,’ recalled Keynes less than affectionately. ‘The nearest objects of his masterful instincts were his family, and their easiest victim his wife; but their empire extended in theory over the whole womankind, the old gentleman writing [before his death in 1901] a tract entitled Man’s Rights and Woman’s Duties.’8
At any one time, there was never any doubt about who – below the level of governor, deputy governor and directors, but often just as important – were the two kingpins: the chief cashier and the chief accountant, usually in that order. The chief cashier, explained Herbert de Fraine in his recollections of the late-Victorian Bank (but broadly applicable to the nineteenth century as a whole), ‘controlled all the Cash Offices, and his own office conducted all their correspondence’:
It looked after the Charity Commissioners, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, the National Debt Commissioners, and so on and so on, dealt with Treasury Bills and handled the issue of public loans. The offices under this Chief were the Discount Office, which discounted bills for the public, and the Bill Office, which collected bills as they became due, and dealt with the ‘Clearing’ and the Out-tellers. Then there was the Private Drawing Office, which kept the accounts of private firms and individuals, and the Public Drawing Office, which kept the accounts of all Government Departments, such as the Paymaster-General, the Post Office, etc.
The Chief Cashier also controlled the Bank’s Treasury. Here, under strong-room conditions, and under dual control, was kept the stock of Notes and coin needed for the Bank’s day-to-day transactions. Under him were the Bullion Office, the Gold Weighing Room, and the Great Hall. Half of the Hall was occupied by the Issue Office, to which the public came to exchange Notes for gold. The other end was the In-tellers Office, where silver, received in bulk from the bankers, was ‘garbled’ [that is, removing counterfeit, damaged or worn coins] and checked.
‘The second Chief, the Chief Accountant,’ added de Fraine, ‘controlled all the various Stock Offices and conducted all their correspondence. The most important of these were the Consols Office, the Bank Stock Office and the India Stock Office. Here were kept the “Books” of each stock, giving full details of every holding, and here Transfers were made, to be subsequently entered in the “Books”.’
In the course of the nineteenth century, perhaps no chief cashier was quite as dominant as Abraham Newland had been until his retirement in 1807, but there were still some notable figures. Thomas Rippon (1829–35) died in harness at his residence in the Bank, having reputedly taken only one holiday (of three days) during his fifty-three years of service, ‘stating’ (explained an obituary) ‘that green fields and country scenery had no charms for him’; William Miller (1864–6) was an ardent advocate of the decimal system, managing to introduce it into the bullion department and informing a parliamentary committee that ‘the use of decimal arithmetic, independently of the greater security for accuracy, would enable the Bank of England to dispense with one clerk in twelve’; and George Forbes (1866–73) was a highly capable Aberdonian who, in a letter to the Economistshortly before his promotion, lucidly explained the annual cycles of bullion flowing in and out of the Bank, largely dependent on agricultural factors. The longest tenure (1835–64) belonged to Matthew Marshall (no relation of William), during which the division of the Bank was made – though on an accounting rather than an organisational or infrastructural basis – into Banking and Issuing Departments, as laid down by the Bank Charter Act. The son of an Amersham solicitor, Marshall had entered the Bank in 1810 at the age of nineteen and would die in 1873 at Amersham House, Beckenham.
Overlapping as chief accountant for much of the time (1831–58) was William Smee, and the chances are that the two men worked closely together, given that both were founders and trustees of the Gresham Life Assurance Society. Smee himself, who after fifty-seven years’ service died still in post at the age of eighty-one, had three sons: William, the eldest, who lived with his father at the Bank and rose to become secretary to the Committee of Treasury, before a railway smash on the Brighton line in 1852 so severely injured him that he resigned and emigrated to Australia; Frederick, the youngest, who was at the Bank from 1842 to 1876, predictably enough working mainly in the Chief Accountant’s Office; and Alfred, a doctor who in 1840 became the Bank’s first medical officer, soon afterwards invented a new ink (‘Bank Black’) that for over a century would be used for writing the Court minutes, and generally became well known for his work in electro-metallurgy, almost certainly contributing to the 1855 note. The ink was perhaps a more mixed blessing – ‘it was almost as thick as soup, smelled of vinegar, and using it was rather like writing with mud,’ noted John Giuseppi in the 1960s, on the basis of personal experience – but the Smees were clearly among the more remarkable of the many Bank families.9
What was life like in the Victorian Bank? Speaking to the Genealogical Society in 1949, Giuseppi offered a reassuring perspective:
While from time to time evidence appears of some dissatisfaction, of complaints that salaries were not keeping pace with rising prices, there was never at any time anything in the nature of an ill-disposed staff. The steady, sober clerk of some fifteen to twenty years’ service was, in fact, by modern standards, reasonably well off. He had his house, usually at a comparatively low rental, a domestic staff of two, occasionally three, trained servants: his children could be educated at ‘select’ establishments where the tone at any rate was high, and usually a sound knowledge of the three ‘r’s’ was inculcated. If he rose to be a Principal he might keep his carriage. A ‘Gentleman of the Bank’ ranked high in the City.
Even so, as Giuseppi intimated, it was not all sweetness and light. Punch in 1842, with presumably some exaggeration, reckoned the Bank’s clerks to be ‘the hardest worked’ and ‘the worst paid’ in all of London; when two years later the salaries of the younger clerks were significantly increased, this was done at no extra overall cost, through the simultaneous abolition of the additional £30 after thirty-five years of service. For a long time the rising cost of living was a constant gripe, typified by the 1865 memorial to directors in which 558 members of staff declared that they had ‘much difficulty in meeting their unavoidable expenses and maintaining their social respectability, in consequence of the very high price of provisions, the advance in house rents, and the generally diminished value of fixed incomes’. That did the trick, resulting in a substantially improved pay scale (ranging from £70 a year for eighteen-year-old clerks to £280 for clerks of forty-five and upwards), although in 1872 the Court was less convinced by a similar clerks’ memorial, with a director (apparently residing in Kensington) producing a detailed report. ‘Potatoes,’ he found, ‘are certainly dearer than they were in 1865 and 1866, but perhaps next year they will be as cheap as ever.’ He was a little more generous when it came to washing: ‘I cannot find out that there is any increased charge under this head. I pay precisely the same now as I did in 1865. The wholesale price of common soap is rather less; but as the wages of the servant-of-all-work class are rather higher, I will allow an increase of 10 per cent on this item.’ Meat was another matter. ‘Since 1865, beef, mutton, ox and sheep tongues, of excellent quality, have been introduced from Australia, and retailed, without bone, at 6d to 7d per lb., and nothing can be nicer for occasional use.’10
Nevertheless, taken as a whole, pay and conditions were reasonable enough by the 1870s. Following a bleak period between the mid-1830s and the mid-1840s, when the Bank’s traditional ‘holy-days’ were virtually abolished, a system of annual leave was gradually put in place and expanded, in due course varying from fifteen to twenty-one days depending on length of service. A fixed scale of pensions, meanwhile, had been in place since the 1830s, broadly comparable to those operating in government departments; and in 1870 the retirement age was formally set at sixty-five. More generally, there was an increasing awareness during the third quarter of the century that, for the Bank to operate to maximum efficiency, its ‘higher duties’ would, as Chubb explained in his 1871 report, require ‘an increase of Salary to those to whom the higher duties were entrusted’ – to which policy, he added, ‘may be attributed many of the advanced additional salaries now paid, especially to the several classes in the Drawing Offices, the Security Clerks in the Bill Office, and certain positions in the Bank Note and other Offices’.
Chubb in his 1871 report also focused on an important change that had taken place around the middle of the century in the Bank’s day-to-day working methods:
Prior to 1850, an enormous mass of almost mechanical work was performed by Clerks; and, under the system then pursued, correctness was insured, as far as practicable, in large branches of the business by a duplicate system of account-keeping. The old method of entering cancelled Bank Notes in the Cash Book Office, is a fair instance of the mechanical duties then performed; and the Ledgers in the Drawing Office will serve as an example of the method of check referred to. One Ledger was kept by the Cashiers, and another by the Accountants, and a periodical comparison of them enabled a mutual correction of errors to be carried out. It is, perhaps, needless to say, that this system permitted a minimum of intelligent exertion on the part of any Clerk …
It was, in short, ‘a cumbrous system of checks’ that had been ‘relied upon for the general correctness of the work in many of the Banking Offices, rather than, as now, the efficient performance of their duties by intelligent and carefully selected Clerks’. Writing in 1898, a retired clerk, William Shand, agreed that the mid-century ‘reformation of the Bank’ had been ‘not before it was needed’, likewise adducing the condition of ‘the P.D.’s’ (the Private and Public Drawing Offices), and specifically the ‘very queer’ and ‘abominably managed’ system of book-keeping in the Public Drawing Office, that he had got to know in 1842 before being transferred for some years to the Newcastle branch:
The Cash Books were ill-kept. Great piles were slumped together and posted to the ledgers in accumulations, to which the letter ‘P.S.’ were affixed, meaning ‘part side’, or part of the side of the cash book. The alterations were numerous in the figures, and consequently in the additions and totals. The figures of the totals sprawled over the page and became sometimes so illegible that to make them readable they must necessarily be big. Blotting paper was insufficient; of sand there was plenty – so much so that the backs of the ledgers were often split by the leverage of the boards operating on a fulcrum of silica lying within and about the sewing, so as to tear away the covers.
The only purpose these ledgers served was to show how much money was at credit of the accounts, so that any overdrafts might be avoided. But this was a rare chance in the public accounts and, in fact, we were allowed to keep the books as we liked. The Principals never interfered.
The real books of the Bank, for permanent use, were kept upstairs, in a dismal place, and there the pass-books were written up the day after the transactions had taken place. So it happened every morning that a messenger was sent down to us, to come up with our ledgers to agree the totals. We got our messengers to take them on their backs, and I well remember following a snuffy old porter in livery along the garden walk towards a staircase which led up to the galleries in the roof, which were dignified by the name of the Back Drawing Office – where the men belonged to the Accountant’s side. They were a rum lot. Ragged, if not dirty, with sleeves sometimes turned up to the elbow, in an appalling atmosphere …11
Inevitably, the post-1850 approach was uncomfortable for some, especially in certain areas after the Bank’s entry to the Clearing House in 1864. ‘There is no doubt that the work of the Drawing Office has undergone a radical change both in its nature and extent, and that more intelligence and activity are required on the part of the Clerks,’ noted an 1867 report on the Private Drawing Office. ‘Many of them under the old system performed their duties with satisfaction, but now are manifestly unequal to the strain which the more pressing requirements of the day demand …’ Accordingly, the recommendation was that eleven clerks be removed ‘to less onerous positions in quieter offices’. For most clerks though, certainly most younger ones, it was surely a reformation for the better, with Hill the following year in his report on the Accountant’s Bank Note Office gratified to identify ‘more direct individual responsibility on the part of the clerks, who feel deeper interest in their duties from conviction that nothing is demanded of them which is not of real importance’. All that said, one should not exaggerate the pace or ubiquity of change. At this stage, Chubb’s vaunted mechanisation still had strict limits; huge, unwieldy ledgers – often of over a thousand folios, enclosed in half-inch-thick cardboard covers decorated with green sailcloth – remained for many years yet the staple of the Bank’s permanent records of transactions; in 1874 there was a celebrated episode as the Drawing Office launched an investigation, lasting four or five weeks, into a difference of threepence on the Private Accounts section; and when de Fraine entered the Bank in 1886, his first task was to deal with Bank notes returned from circulation – some 60,000 a day, involving clerks standing at desks and manually dividing them, one by one, into two sections, the ‘Fives’ and the ‘Tens and High Sums’, before they were then sorted, again one by one, according to date and number.12
In reality, moreover, the Victorian Bank was never, whether before or after 1850, as orderly and purposeful as those in charge might have wished. Between 1837 and 1845 alone, at least three acrimonious disputes between clerks were noted in the Court minutes: in one, an argument about the quality of the food led to post-prandial blows and a nosebleed; in another, the hurling of a large bill case, accompanied by ‘very gross & low abuse’, resulted from the refusal to part with an inkstand; and in a third, the tussle over an office stool led to a severe blow in the face, rendering the recipient ‘incapable of resuming his work for the remainder of the day’. Or take the formative impressions of W. Courthope Forman and C. H. Goodman, both of whom started work in 1866 in the Private Drawing Office. A ‘busy hive’, indeed, found Forman, but with ‘a good many quaint insects’:
There was a youngish gentleman on the ledgers, who made remarkably clever caricatures and sketches in pen and ink, sometimes even upon the covers of the sacred books. There was a little rotund, elderly gentleman, with a short temper and a colossal skull, who frequently murdered the Queen’s English in a manner that was a real delight. There was a middle-aged gentleman who ran a sort of farm in the suburbs, and brought a whiff of country to the Drawing Office, with the produce he offered there for sale; and yet another (said to have a connection in the hosiery line), who brought ties, and handkerchiefs, and fancy socks, and sold them to the highest bidder. Then there was a nice, rosy, bald-headed old gentleman, still apparently doing junior work, who dozed over his books on summer afternoons, then, leaning over a glazed partition behind him, one or other of us would gently tickle his bald spot with the feathers of a quill pen, till at last, wide awake and goaded to desperation, he would smite his ‘mighty dome’ with his palm, exclaiming, to our delight, ‘Oh! damn those flies’! Our mission accomplished, like red indians, we would steal quietly away. Then there was an irate gentleman on a waste-book, whom we thought mad, and who eventually became so. Behind him it was an entertainment to stand as he cast up the columns of his book aloud, at a terrific pace, sandwiching the most profane oaths between the figures. And, lastly, I must not forget that curious character that seemed to have stepped from the pages of Dickens; that lugubrious looking person, in tightly buttoned, ill-fitting frock coat of shiny black, with wrinkling trousers to match, who presided over the Pass Books. He wore a rusty chimney-pot hat, but ill kept, which he never took off; indeed, tradition said that he slept in it, or even, that like a caul, it was born with him.
Goodman for his part was struck by the lack of decorum of his new colleagues (‘not only were some of them rather rough but the tone of conversation of many was very coarse’), as well as by the amount of drinking that went on (‘in at least one desk was a wine bin where you could get accommodation’). Nor seemingly was the prevailing atmosphere any more prim and proper by the early 1880s, to judge by the experience of Allan Fea, a young clerk who would eventually become a full-time writer:
In those days [he would recall almost half a century later] the Private Drawing Office, to which I was handed over, was more like a big school play-ground than anything else. From the fossil cashiers down to the callow ‘unattached’, all seemed to enter wholeheartedly upon the game of enlivening the passing official hours: universal chaff and merriment, with little or no heed of the ponderous contents of weighty ledgers or the balancing intricacies of ‘Waste Books’. Balancing feats on more acrobatic lines, however, demanded a certain amount of thought and concentration when those formidable volumes were called into requisition as handy tests of muscular fitness, or proof of boasted sinew. Other mild sport was improvised in the way of ‘cock-shies’, wherein somebody’s ‘topper’ was offered up for sacrifice for want of a genuine cocoanut. Wrestling matches, also, were popular, those contesting usually involving considerable wreckage of official furniture and fittings, including the glass chimneys of gas-jets, ink-pots, and sundry such accessories. Those endowed with histrionic skill held forth, providing a varied programme modulating from a solemn pulpit sermon to an Adelphi hero’s soliloquy broadcast to the ‘gods’ more eloquently far than the aerial transmission of these times. A faithful rendering of the chairman at The Oxford [music hall] also was usually greeted with rapturous applause …
Presumably, in the Bank as a whole, it was not a case of overgrown schoolboys having jolly japes the entire time; yet, given that most other parts of the Victorian City (above all the Stock Exchange) tended to be inward-looking and ultimately conformist, for all the surface eccentricities and ‘characters’ it was probably true across the Bank as a whole that, in Fea’s words, ‘any marked peculiarity or pedantic inclination about a fellow was soon spotted, and very much brought up in evidence against him for ever after’.13
As usual, there was no shortage of rules and exhortations from above, almost all of them aimed at greater regularity of conduct. In 1847, any clerk ‘appearing at his office in a state of intoxication’ was to be ‘dismissed the service’; in 1850, immediate dismissal was also laid down as the punishment for ‘all clerks who are henceforth found to be engaged in betting, in subscribing to sweepstakes, or in gambling transactions of any kind’; in 1851, the ‘Heads of Office’ explicitly forbade ‘the admission or use of Beer, Wine or any Spirituous Liquor by the clerks throughout the Bank’ (though with an exception made for porters and ‘the Mechanics on weekly wages’); in 1853, the governor ordered that ‘in future all the clerks in the House in signing their names or initials to any book or document relating to the service of the Bank will do so in a plain, distinct, and legible hand and without any flourish’; and that same year, ‘the Authorities’ let it be known that ‘having seen a disposition upon the part of certain Bank clerks to wear moustaches, they strongly disapprove of the practice’, adding that if necessary ‘measures will be resorted to which may prove of a painful nature’. Or take the coda that followed the detailed ‘explicit regulations’ contained in the 1884 version of ‘Rules and Orders to be Observed by the Clerks of the Bank of England’:
There are matters of conduct and behaviour which are not less important, though they cannot be so dealt with. Thus it is required of every person in the service of the Bank that he behave himself honourably in all the private and social relations of life, and that his general conduct, whether within the Bank or not, be that of a gentleman and a man of principle … Discipline throughout the Bank is strictly enforced, and any insubordination is severely visited. It is essential and required of each Clerk that he be punctual in his duties, and intelligent in the performance of his work; and also that he should observe propriety in his dress and in his general habits.
The Governors have so often had before them cases of great distress arising from early or imprudent marriages on the part of the younger clerks, that they think it necessary to warn them earnestly against such a course. They leave the question to the judgment of those whom it concerns: but if embarrassment, as is almost sure to be the case, arises from imprudent conduct in this respect, the Court have decided that they will afford no pecuniary relief, and Clerks must bear in mind that irretrievable embarrassment, from whatever course, involves the loss of their position.
By this time, moreover, clerks on their election to the Bank also received what was known as ‘The Governor’s Charge’ (probably introduced in 1812):
Your Salary is sufficient to maintain you in a suitable manner if expended with strict economy and a reasonable measure of self-denial …
You are warned against contracting habits of dissipation, and you are enjoined to be careful in the selection of your companions, and to maintain a respectable character in all relations of life.
The Library, which has been formed within the Bank for the use of the Clerks, affords facilities for reading at small expense, and it will furnish a resource for the leisure hours.
Governors came and went, but a governor of a particularly high moral tone was William Lidderdale. ‘It has become evident to the Governor that the cause of most of the troubles which have befallen Messengers and Porters, and of very much of the ill-health from which many of them have suffered, is to be found in present or past habits of intemperance,’ stated a notice posted on his behalf in July 1890 by the chief accountant. ‘In the Porters’ and Messengers’ own interests, therefore, the Governor gives distinct warning that any men brought before him for want of sobriety will be severely dealt with.’14
In practice, when it came to disciplinary action, one’s overall impression is that the Bank tried if possible to be merciful to transgressors and to give them another chance. The fate in the late 1850s of Ernest Stephens was instructive. A young clerk in the Accountant’s Bank Note Office, he was up before the Committee of Inspection first in February 1858, when he was found guilty of having certified that he had checked notes when in fact he had not; but having expressed his ‘sorrow and a sense of shame’ for his ‘neglect’, he got away with a ‘severe reprimand’ from the governor. Barely a year later, however, he was back in the dock:
On the 7th May it was the duty of Stephens to read the file containing the £100 Notes sorted and entered in the course of the day, in number about 1800. He should have requested some other clerk to take the books in which they had been entered and check the entries as he (Stephens) read over the Notes. It was then the duty of each to sign the check books and the file, the one as having read and the other as having checked the same. All this Stephens neglected to do. He selected no partner, but simply took the pile of Notes, tied it up as though it had been read and checked, and then signed the label on the outside of the file and the end of each check book with his own name and the names of two other clerks as having read and checked the Notes in question.
This time, inevitably, he was ‘called upon to send in his resignation’ – which at least meant that, unlike being outright dismissed, he would be able to find a berth elsewhere in the City. Then, just over two years later, in July 1861, occurred the ‘extremely difficult’ case of Richard Denison of the Bill Office, a case prompted by this twenty-six-year-old clerk applying to the Bank for a loan of £200. On inquiry, it emerged not only that he had been during his four and a half years at the Bank ‘generally careless and wanting in zeal and attention’, albeit showing ‘a slight improvement lately’, but that he had got himself in a pretty pickle:
In November, he married a widow, in whose house he previously lodged, and whose husband had died about a year and a half before that time. Prior to his marriage he had the distinct assurance both from herself and her mother, that she was quite free from debt, and that the furniture of the house, with slight exceptions, was her own. Very shortly after his marriage however, he discovered that his wife’s former husband had died insolvent – that she was considerably in debt, and that the furniture was the property of her brother-in-law, who immediately commenced an action for its recovery. Another brother-in-law who, it appears, is a professional money-lender, then advanced the sum claimed on the furniture, which advance Denison was to pay off by instalments, but this money is now called in, and Denison is threatened with imprisonment … His wife has one child by her former husband, and another child, by her present husband, is just born.
What was to be done? ‘The young man has no friends who can aid him, and urges that he has no course, if assistance be withheld, but to go to prison or to hide himself. The Committee [of Investigation] believe him to be the victim of evil disposed persons, from whom he is well inclined, if he can, to free himself.’ The eventual conclusion was that ‘had Denison’s previous character been praiseworthy’, and had it been possible to ascertain more clearly ‘the amount of his liabilities’, then ‘they would have been strongly inclined to recommend that the advance should have been made’; but in the circumstances the Committee felt compelled to recommend that Denison ‘be called upon to hand in his resignation forthwith’.15
Much of the responsibility for staff relations attached to the secretary, and it seems that in the long-serving Hammond Chubb the staff had a firm but sympathetic chief. Forman in his reminiscence of the late 1860s evokes him vividly:
I was sent to work on the ‘Stock Side’, and while there had experience of what was called ‘the Shutting’, when for some days the public were excluded and the clerks prepared lists of Stockholders in duplicate or triplicate; I forget which … In the morning, to each clerk was given a packet of slips on which were the names and addresses of Stockholders, and the amounts of their holdings. Here one might be lucky or unlucky. A slip might, for instance, be inscribed: John Smith, 12 Rye Lane, Peckham, £200, or it might have the names of a dozen trustees whose addresses were lengthy, and whose ‘godfathers and godmothers in their baptism’ had been inordinately generous. But, lucky or unlucky, your portion of slips finished you were free for the day. This led to great carelessness in writing, everything being sacrificed to pace. To make matters worse, we had sweepstakes of 6d or 1s a sheet among ourselves … At eighteen my hand was boyish and unformed, and quickly degenerated sadly. My ‘sheets’ were, doubtless, shocking. However, ‘shutting’ being over, I thought no more about them till, one day, a week or so later, I was sent for by the Secretary, a small gentleman of mournful mien and suave address. When he interviewed me, turning upon me ‘a countenance rather in sorrow than in anger’, he looked not unlike a mediaeval saint in a painted window, substituting, of course, for robe and halo, a black frock coat and grey trousers. ‘He washed his hands with invisible soap’ (a habit of his) while he gently dressed me down, and then, so to speak, rubbed my nose in those unfortunate ‘sheets’ written in the ‘Shutting’. ‘Sheets’ that had been returned as illegible by Somerset House, and which looked, I confess, as if an irresponsible spider had dipped his legs in ink and pranced gaily up and down the paper.
‘Well,’ added Forman, ‘I was never invited to take a stool in the Secretary’s office’; but almost certainly under Chubb’s say-so, the Bank kept him on, and he was soon transferred to the Western branch.
Not long afterwards, in late 1870, Chubb reported on the ‘peculiarly painful’ case of Robert Gerard. Elected a clerk in July 1866, and now almost twenty-four, he was the son of a clerk at the Bristol branch who had died in 1862. ‘During the early part of Gerard’s Service, he was absent very seldom. He was a good, well-conducted Clerk, and earned for himself an excellent character throughout the house.’ In 1867 he got scarlet fever; in 1868 ‘his attendance was very regular’; and then, early in 1869, ‘he showed distinct symptoms of want of mental power, which showed itself in a feeling of almost horror for the Bank’, and he missed almost the whole year. Alfred Smee in May 1870 tried out Gerard on ‘some simple duties’, but he ‘soon broke down’; between August and October he was only intermittently present, though when at the Bank he ‘conducted himself exceedingly well, showing himself capable of performing all the ordinary work of the Office’; and finally, in early November, he sent Chubb a letter which ‘showed symptoms of a return of his previous state of mind’. The humane secretary summed up the sad case:
His Mother, Mrs Gerard, was left with six children and very limited means … It is known that Gerard felt very acutely the position in which his Mother was placed, and believed that, as the eldest Son, a grave responsibility rested upon him. There is some reason to believe his present state had its origin in the fever of 1867, or rather of his coming to work before he was really strong enough to work. But whether this did affect his brain or not, those who know something of his family and have had opportunities of watching him, believe that he has given way under the constant strain of mind arising from his efforts to aid his Mother and his family.
Accordingly, Chubb recommended that Gerard’s name be removed from the list of clerks, but that a donation of £100 be made to his mother.16
In broader terms, it is fair to depict the Victorian Bank as an increasingly paternalistic organisation, seeking to create for its staff a secure, stable and morally improving environment in which to spend their working lives. Take three emblematic developments, the first of them described by the Illustrated London News in May 1850:
On Wednesday afternoon, a handsome reading-room, which has just been formed for the Bank of England Library and Literary Association, instituted by the directors for the use of the clerks, was opened by Thomson Hankey, junior Esq., Deputy-Governor of the Bank. There was a very numerous meeting of the members; when the Chief Cashier, as President, and the Chief Accountant, the Treasurer of the Institution, moved and seconded a vote of thanks to the Court of Directors for the handsome manner in which they had fitted up the Library, and for the liberal support which had been accorded the Association.
Several hundred of the staff were soon members of the library, paying an annual subscription of 10 shillings, at a time when the concept of the public library was still only slowly taking hold; and members were allowed to borrow two books, with an especially strict time limit (eight days) for novels. The second development followed shortly, with the founding in 1854 of the Bank Provident Society – essentially a savings society that also undertook life assurance business, and whose 4 per cent interest on premiums paid was guaranteed by the directors. Finally, there was the whole stomach-rumbling question of the inner man. In 1881 a detailed memo (probably written by Chubb) on lunch arrangements found that, of the 650 clerks in the Bank, some 110 to 130 managed to knock up a scratch meal within the building, about 100 stayed in their offices and got porters to fetch something from outside, and the rest went out for lunch. The memo continued:
That the present arrangements are unsatisfactory in every way is admitted on all sides. They are unsatisfactory to the Clerks, many of whom earnestly desire some means by which their wants can be simply but decently met. The underground Drawing Office kitchen is a most uninviting room – it is close to the cooking place, lavatories, etc; the food may be good, but it is roughly served, and the surroundings are so disagreeable that it is repugnant to men of any refinement. In the case of those who remain in the Offices, the meal furtively eaten behind a desk cover cannot be desirable; and though many no doubt will always desire to go outside The Bank during the ½ hour, it is known that the places where a cheap good meal can be obtained are becoming fewer each year and it is felt, especially as regards the younger clerks, that the alternative of obtaining what they require within the walls would be better for their health and keep them from the temptations of the Bars and Wine rooms.
As regards the Porters, the present practice is equally unsatisfactory. During much of the morning they are engaged on duties, which though, in a measure, recognised, are wholly undefined and cannot be supervised: it leads them to go out of The Bank to buy what is required, and it gives rise to the very objectionable practice of their making money out of the Clerks, with whom it begets a certain undue familiarity. The time occupied by the porters in this way cannot be estimated, but it is undoubtedly very great: and indeed it is a question whether if these duties were taken from them, the number might not be reduced.
Altogether, concluded the memo, if ‘a General Luncheon Room’ were introduced, and ‘if the room were bright and the service well conducted’, this ‘might lead, in many cases, to a higher tone amongst the Clerks’. Chubb then circulated a notice, eliciting strong support for the concept of ‘fitting up Dining Rooms within the Bank, in which, at a cost to cover actual expenses only, gentlemen could have lunch or light dinner’; and by 1884 a fully fledged staff canteen was in existence, though known by the more dignified title of the Luncheon Club.17
What the Victorian Bank was not was a meritocracy. In 1869 the Court ordered that ‘the practice, now becoming prevalent, of private canvassing of Directors, through their personal friends, on the part of Clerks seeking to be appointed to vacant offices, be prohibited’; but almost certainly this had little effect, and some twenty years later a young, ambitious and capable clerk like de Fraine found that ‘no one believed any effort would help towards promotion in the Service’:
The only way to ‘get on’ was to pull strings with Directors or Chiefs of Departments. As one caustic colleague said to me, ‘It doesn’t matter what you are; it’s what you can persuade the other fellow to think you are.’ I saw the string-pulling in action several times, the men who were on to a good thing being perfectly frank about their progress. One told me that on approaching his Director he received the suggestion, amounting to a command, that he should show a keen interest in the House – join the Volunteers, for instance, or stand for the Luncheon Club or Clerks’ Library Committees. He followed this advice, and in a few weeks was seconded as ‘Assistant’ (a hitherto non-existent post) to a Principal in another office. From that moment he never looked back, and eventually became a Personage.
Still, an institution does not need to be meritocratic in order to have a very clear appreciation of its own worth and a very clear attitude towards the outside world. A reply in November 1845 to one Joseph Hartnell of Hawkhurst in Kent, who had had the temerity to write directly to a former governor, might have been sent at any time in the ensuing half-century and was just the sort of missive that Henry Adams would have imagined emanating from behind those ‘insolent’ walls:
I beg to inform you in reply to your letter of the 27th Inst. to Mr Palmer, that the present balance to the credit of your acct is £920.14.0 and to request that your pass Bk may be forwarded by Post for the purpose of being made up.
Be good enough in future to address your official communications to ‘The Chief Cashier of the Bank of England’.18