A Midland Odyssey Part Twelve - Spanish Pesetas and Travellers Cheques

Every year, as the end of July approaches, I inevitably think back to my days as Foreign Clerk at Midland Bank in Barking during the 1980's, and the panic that set in as the Fords shutdown approached. Factory shutdowns in the summer have long been a characteristic of manufacturing industries, and with Ford having a major plant just down the road at Dagenham, the end of July - beginning of August period would see literally thousands of residents of Barking and Dagenham simultaneously on holiday. As many as 40,000 people worked at Ford's in 1953, and although this number has steadily fallen over the years - to just over 3,000 today - as recently as the 1980's Fords were a major employer in the Barking and Dagenham area.

Ford's plant at Dagenham. Picture: Lars Plougmann - Flickr: 164945157

So, each July, as the end of the month edged closer, thousands of Fords employees began contemplating their fortnight on one of the Spanish Costas, or one of the Greek islands and that meant picking up their Pesetas, or Drachmas, and their Travellers Cheques. And whereas today it's possible to just wander into a bank, or bureaux de change, travel agents, or the Post Office and buy your currency over the counter, back then at Barking branch we were not allowed to hold stocks of currency and therefore most customers wanting their foreign money had to order it in advance.  The plus side of this as far as I was concerned was that I knew for any given day, how many foreign money orders I would have to make up; the downside was that I knew exactly how busy and increasingly frazzled I would be on those days, and inevitably it was Fridays that most customers seemed to want to collect their orders.

Each morning during the summer months, one of my first tasks would be to make up the travel orders before we opened for business at 9.30am, but no matter whether there were twenty orders, or just five or six, it was inevitable that the customers who arrived for their travel money first were the ones whose orders had not yet been made up, while those orders where the cash had been counted, the Sterling equivalent calculated and all of the vouchering completed, would lie in the dual-control drawer until sometime in the afternoon. And handing out that currency was a time consuming job too, since in addition to their cash, most customers bought travellers cheques which I had to watch as they signed them, and then run through my customary patter about keeping the receipt separate from the cheques so that in the event of their loss or theft, they had a record of the serial numbers for any insurance claim.

One year I decided to take holiday during this particularly busy time, and my good friend and colleague Keith Markham was moved from his normal role on the Securities desk to cover me. I think that the trauma of stays with him still, as he often mentions the experience when we meet up. While he may have forgiven me, he certainly hasn't forgotten!

Today, if you go into a bureau de change to buy your foreign currency, you will be served by someone with a computer in front of them, and your receipt will be printed out complete with currency amount, exchange rate, Sterling equivalent and commission amount (if any). In my technologically impoverished day, the conversion was performed on a calculator and the customer's copy and associated accounting vouchers were written out by hand, and also unlike today, each transaction attracted commission. I very much doubt there are many places that charge commission charged today, but it was the norm in the 1980's. But that doesn't necessarily mean today's travellers aren't paying commission, it's just that today the rates are loaded to account for it, and the spread (between buying and selling rates) is much larger.

Those exchange rates today are usually on view in banks and other exchanges in some form of digital display, but they weren't in Midland Bank, Barking circa 1985,! In the banking hall there was a light box with the names of the various currencies that we bought and sold on it, with columns showing the rates - buying and selling - for notes and coins (although in practice we rarely, if ever dealt with coins) and for cheques. And each morning I would stick little plastic numbers on that light box in accordance with the rate sheet that had arrived in the Head Office Letter that day. In theory, when an exchange rate update was advised during the day, I would have to go out and amend the display, and also change the calculation on any unsold orders. In practice, this was observed in the breach unless the rate in question had moved dramatically, and dramatically enough to get me out there would be if someone had devalued their currency! The rates were rarely accurate anyway, due to the propensity for those plastic numbers to drop off the shiny surface of the light box; the only way to have any chance of them adhering was to dab them with saliva, not the most wholesome of practices!

It wasn't just the sale and purchase of foreign currency that was labour intensive in 1980's branch banking. While Midland Bank had moved away from the iconic Burroughs TC-500 computer terminal to the rather slicker Nixdorf machines, on the foreign desk the pen, calculator, books of record and the typewriter still reigned supreme, and the typewriter on the foreign desk was especially busy. There were Credit and Debit Advices galore to be typed, with one customer - a record exporter - receiving numerous payments from overseas during the day, which printed from the Nixdorf terminal and had to be transposed onto a Credit Advice and sent out in the mail. And that same customer issued numerous Foreign Bills for Collection, the forms for processing which were seven-part monsters that necessitated the use of six pieces of carbon paper to complete. It goes without saying that typing using that amount of carbon paper required quite a heavy touch to make sure that the seventh copy (the one retained in the Branch) was legible, but also required an accurate touch as corrections were a total nightmare!

It seemed in those days that almost everything one did had to be recorded in a book, whether it was foreign currency transactions, issuing travellers cheques, processing payments, or processing bills; just about everything had its own book or ledger. And those books stood on a shelf in front of me, the face of which was plastered with stickers on which I had typed the addresses of customers and account numbers of the accounts I used most frequently. It would not be allowed today of course, data protection regulations would put paid to that time-saving hack - actually I'm not even sure I ought to have done it even thirty years ago, and I'm vaguely aware of some point in time when I was required to remove them all to avoid bringing down the wrath of the inspectors.

I can't find a picture of Midland Bank, Barking so here it is in later years rebranded HSBC.

I spent five and a bit very happy years at Midland in Barking; when I started there I knew only a little about foreign work - a job that became my favourite and shaped the rest of my time in the bank - by the time I left I wouldn't say I was an expert, but I certainly knew a bit about virtually everything, and I had the task of making up foreign money orders down to a fine art.