A Midland Odyssey - Part Eight - Technical Irregularities

How often do you write a cheque? Not very often, I'd guess. From the days when writing one was the most common way to withdraw cash from your bank account and the most usual way of paying for many goods and services, cheques are now approaching something of novelty status. From a peak in 1990 when Britons issued four billion cheques, their use fell to 558 million by 2015, and speaking for myself, I probably write less than a dozen each year. Val tells me it is at least a year since she wrote a cheque and I don't think that either of my daughters even have cheque books. In 1978 it was very different...

Like many people who joined Midland Bank (and probably most other UK banks) during the 1970's, I found that my first job was by turns bewildering, boring, nerve-racking, mundane and actually quite important, despite my very junior position. Most of it seemed to involve cheques in one way or another. First task of the day was listing the incoming cheques, i.e. those drawn on our branch's customers and presented at other banks and branches, which had arrived in the clearing. Then throwing them out into three sections, which at Gants Hill were (surnames) A to K, L to R and S to Z. Other branches had more sections, and some would have whole sections dedicated to a single corporate customer who issued large numbers of cheques. Then each section would be fine sorted alphabetically by surname, then initial. Next, each section had to be cancelled, which means identifying which cheques could not be paid, either due to lack of funds or because of a technical irregularity, and which ones could.

An example of a paid and cancelled cheque, complete with Paid and Crossing stamps and cancelled (initialled through the signature in red ink). This is actually for sale on eBay, though why anyone would want it escapes me.

The ones where funds were an issue would be identified by the manager (at Gants Hill in 1976 a bluff Yorkshireman named Mr Hindley - I never knew his first name, and had I known it would not have dared used it). The Control Clerk would pull them out and return them with the reason, 'Refer to Drawer' or 'Refer to Drawer, Please Represent,' the latter meaning that if the payee chose to pay the cheque in at a later date, it might get paid (fingers crossed). Cheques could be returned for any number of technical irregularities; for being unsigned, for being undated, because the amounts in words and figures differed, because it had been stopped by the drawer, because it was mutilated, because it had been crossed by two bankers, and so on and so forth. Cheques that were paid were 'cancelled' by initialling over the signature in red ink and being stamped 'Paid.' Coloured biros were an important part of daily banking life; red for cancelling cheques, green for checking account numbers and blue or black for everything else.

What you couldn't do, of course, was 'bounce' a cheque for lack of funds if it had a Cheque Card number on the back. Cheque guarantee cards demised in 2011, but in 1978 they were highly important. Shops and tradesmen knew they could accept a cheque without worrying it might be unpaid, and they were sought after by customers, not all of whom were deemed credit worthy enough to have one. Amazing when you think that today Debit Cards are almost ubiquitous, yet by 1976 standards a significant number of customers would not be granted one.

After listing, sorting and cancelling the clearing, most of the rest of the day was then spent dealing with cheques paid in over the counter. Separating those drawn on our customers from those drawn on customers of other Midland branches and other banks, listing them, encoding them with the amount and sending the latter two categories off to Head Office. Manual processing was the order of the day when I started work; over the years automation and centralisation resulted in many of the jobs that I learned in my first few years being centralised or disappearing altogether.

If you could look around Midland Bank, Gants Hill in 1976 you would understand why banking then was so labour intensive. There were few automated processes and most work harked back to the days when hand-written ledgers were the norm (and there were some members of staff there for whom those ledgers were fresh in the memory). In short, what you would notice would be the limited amount of technology and how primitive that technology actually was: the legendary Burroughs TC-500 was the most sophisticated piece of kit we had. We didn't even have a photocopier; any copying we needed to have done involved someone trotting over the road to a firm of solicitors, whose machine we could borrow. The number of copies we made would be recorded in a washing book and the solicitors would invoice us every quarter for their costs.

The legendary Burroughs TC-500. Picture:acbm.com

Not that everything we wanted a copy of could be photocopied though. There were many, many documents that we were not allowed to remove from the premises, ledger copies of customer statements being one of them. Every time a customer had a statement issued, a ledger copy would be delivered to the branch. These did not arrive in alphabetical order - goodness knows why they could not have been delivered in order - perhaps it was to give the branch junior something (extra) to do. It always seemed that laborious, manual tasks were considered 'good for the soul.' The ledger copies had to be sorted and then filed in bins held in a wheeled trolley. Half-yearly (or was it quarterly?) these would be bound up and filed. The ledger copies could not be removed from the branch, let alone photocopied, so it was with a sinking feeling that I would have to deal with a request from a customer for a duplicate statement. That process would involve typing the details from the ledger copy onto a specific card. This would then go off in the overnight bag to Head Office. A few days later the duplicate statement would arrive. But this could not be sent directly to the customer yet because for reasons that were probably due to the limitations of the technology available at the time, many details would be excluded from the copy statement, such as the first three digits of cheque numbers, and these would have to be typed onto the duplicate.

The height of technology in 1976, the microfiche reader!

 A rare example of labour saving came in the form of microfiche copies of statements; Gants Hill branch were chosen to pilot the process and instead of a wad of ledger copies arriving each day, a single fiche would be delivered, reducing filing time from an hour or so to about thirty seconds!

Everything that a customer now receives from their bank, from new cheque books, paying in books, credit and debit cards, is sent from a central location. In 1978 all of those things were first sent to the branch. Huge boxes of cheque books would arrive periodically: naturally these were not in any sort of order and had to be sorted and filed in cabinets awaiting a request from the customer for a new book. And paying in books were received in blank and had to have customer details added by the use of an Adrema plate printer, the repetitive thumping sound of which was a daily soundtrack to life in a small branch!

There were fourteen staff at Gants Hill when I worked there, many doing jobs that would today either not exist or have been centralised; were it still open today, it would probably have no more than five or six staff. But while a lot of the work there was labour-intensive and monotonous, I learned things there that stayed with me throughout my thirty-six years. I reckon I could still fine sort and cancel a section of cheques to this day!