A Midland Odyssey Part Four - No Moustaches Please!

I've lost count of the number of courses I went on during my working life, but one thing that stands out about them is the way in which they changed over the years. By the time I left work the majority of courses focussed on soft skills like communication, managing people and being a leader, but in the early days of my time in Midland Bank the courses were about the nuts and bolts of specific roles in the organisation.

Before I had even set foot in a branch I went on an Induction Course, which taught the uninitiated what banks did and what sort of roles we would be performing.  After starting work at Gants Hill I was sent on a Remittances Course, a Control Course and a Cashiering Course[1]. Later there were Basic and Advanced Foreign Courses and sundry others. Midland Bank had a Training Branch at Buchanan House in Holborn, just by Chancery Lane tube and what was striking about the place was how strict the rules were. It was a lot more formal than working in a branch, and believe me in the mid 1970's it was pretty rigid in branches.

Buchanan House. Picture: Google Maps.

One of the first things that was mentioned on courses at Holborn was the management rule about moustaches and beards or facial hair in general. Men were told that if they arrived at Training Branch on day one of their course clean shaven, then they were expected to remain so for the duration of it. Bizarrely, Training Branch management thought that away from the their normal office environment, men would immediately take the opportunity to grow beards or moustaches and that this would not project a neat image, that the public would somehow be affronted by Midland Bank staff growing facial hair; therefore it was forbidden. Graciously, management allowed that men already in possession of beards or moustaches would not be obliged to shave them off.

There being an actual branch of Midland Bank on the ground floor of Training Branch, one might have expected that being customers of the Bank as well as Staff members, attendees on courses could take advantage of these facilities to cash cheques or pay money into their accounts. This was most definitely not allowed. It was feared that lunchtimes would see the Branch so gummed up with people from the various courses queuing to cash cheques that the whole place would grind to a halt. In fact there always seemed to be a perception among the course tutors that, freed from the strictures of working in their normal Branch or Department, course attendees would run amok. In actual fact boredom was a more common occupational hazard on these courses, driven by the fact that many people were on whichever course it was at the wrong time. Some people were sent on courses too early, sometimes even before they had done the job it related to at all. The course therefore would go right over their heads. Others would have been doing the job for so long that the course added no value. These people often knew more about the job that the tutors and were usually a valuable source of knowledge for the small band of people who were, in the manner of Goldilocks, on the course at about the right time, having done the job for sufficient time to have an understanding but not too long that they knew it all. Of course there would occasionally be something that everyone wanted to learn about, normally something that was rarely encountered in Branches. Such a thing was Automatic Transfers. I can't recall anyone in Branches understanding them, so when I was sent on a Control Course I was particularly keen to find out about them, and so it seemed was everyone else on the course. Naturally therefore, Automatic Transfers were glossed over and not dealt with at all, leading me to believe that either the tutors knew nothing about them (very probable) or that they did not in fact work properly (equally likely). On reflection, it is more than likely that both were true.

Some people were sent on courses simply to get them out of the Branch. At times when there was no one on holiday and there were more people than jobs, sending someone on a course, no matter how inappropriate, was a good way of getting them out of the way. Hence there would be Cashiers on Foreign Courses being taught about Documentary Credits when the sum total of the foreign work in their branches was the sale of currency and travellers cheques. And there were many people who went on courses and then went back to their branches only to find that it would be months before they had the opportunity to do the job the course related to, which rather diminished the benefit of attending the thing in the first place.

In those far off days when flared trousers and kipper ties were de rigueur but not everyone in the country had a bank account, Midland Bank Staff Accounts were constantly under scrutiny. Management appeared to be terrified that staff would misuse their accounts. Overdrafts were not allowed, money going into a staff account (other than the Bank's salary) was treated with suspicion and required managerial approval, grudgingly granted only after an interrogation in which all that was missing was a bright light shone in the eyes of account holder. Applying for a credit card or personal loan required much more hoop jumping than would have been the case for a regular customer. Stories circulating at the time included one about the member of Staff refused a Personal Loan to buy a car on the grounds that the car he wanted to buy was superior to that owned by his Manager, who would therefore not permit this since he (the Manager) could not be seen driving a car inferior to one of his subordinates.

 If these restrictions were driven by a terror of fraud or theft on the part of a member of Staff then it was perhaps ironic that two of a very small number of cases of dishonesty that I heard about during my years in the Bank were attributed to people who worked at Training Branch. One case, which went to court and was reported in the national press, involved a tutor who misappropriated expenses. Course attendees were paid travelling expenses, in cash in my early days in the Bank, and one tutor was in the habit of inflating claims and creaming off the difference, which ran to thousands of pounds, albeit over a fair number of years. Another tale, which may or may not have been true, involved the cafeteria at Buchanan House. This served a desultory selection of rolls and sandwiches, crisps and chocolate bars and apparently turned a regular, if modest profit. Then the chap who ran the cafeteria was taken ill and spent some time on sick leave. Profits soared under his replacement's control, only to be restored to their more modest levels upon the original chap's return. If the rumours were true, the only thing being cooked in the cafeteria were the books.

Much of what I learned at Training Branch had to be treated with a liberal pinch of salt because as everyone who has worked anywhere knows, there is a correct way of doing things and practical way of doing them. Mind you, I can still remember the definition of conversion.[2]

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[1] For the non-bank types, Remittance, often called Waste, consisted of (among other things) batching up cheques and credits paid in over the counter and processing them for input or despatch to Head Office. Control was a job that included checking entries input on the computer (dumb terminal), dealing with unpaid cheques  and balancing the books at the end of the day. Cashiering is self evident.

[2] "By our actions, we deprive the true owner of their rightful property."