A Midland Odyssey Part Two - Shot Coin and Cash Dispensers

A few weeks ago I was in the Romford branch of HSBC with my younger daughter, Sarah. "I used to work here when it was Midland Bank," I told her. "I usually worked on the counter, right there," I went on, pointing to a spot opposite the front door that is now just part of the banking hall. The counter has now been moved to the far corner and whereas when I worked there in 1980 there were half a dozen tills there are now just two.

Today the banking hall of any branch of any bank is light and airy; a sea of plastic, steel and glass. The front door is usually glass and automatic or opens at the touch of a button. In the days when I sat at the counter of Midland Bank, Romford working as cashier number three, the decor was dark, highly polished wood. The counter was wooden as was the heavy front door. My father, who among his numerous and various jobs was for many years a French polisher, would frequently regale me (and anyone else who was in earshot) with tales of the bank counters and front doors that he had polished, including Midland Bank's head office at Poultry.

The banking hall at Midland Bank, Poultry, parts of which my father polished.

A typical banking hall today.

In the days when I sat at the counter in Romford, serving a procession of publicans and market traders (including the fishmonger Charlie Fancourt, whose takings had a particularly pungent aroma, as you may well imagine[1]) as well as regular members of the public, going into a branch to cash a cheque or pay in money was the normal way for a customer to conduct their business. Today banking halls are full of machines to withdraw money, to pay in cheques or cash and the average customer rarely needs to join a queue and transact with a live cashier. For many people a trip to the bank is a rarity as ATM's are to be found everywhere and a great deal of banking is automated or can be done on your PC, your tablet or your phone. In 1978 when I started work at Gants Hill our concession to automation was a cash dispenser; sophisticated it was not! Today we are used to ATM's that give us our balance, or a mini-statement and most importantly, variable amounts of cash; in 1978 the cash dispenser did one thing, it gave you £10 a day. Yes, the Midland Bank cash dispenser circa 1978 was a one trick pony. You inserted your card, typed in your PIN and a plastic clip was fired out of the front of the machine. Inside the clip were ten one pound notes folded in half. After putting the cash in one's wallet, the clip was returned into the machine via a small slot.

An early Midland Bank Cash Dispenser

Today we are used to our banking transactions taking place on-line, we have become used to contactless cards, Chip and PIN, internet banking and the like but the early cash dispensers, while projecting an air of automation, needed a high level of manual attention. Yes, today's machines still need bank staff to fill them with money, but in the 1970's they needed so much more. For a start the cash card was not a multi-purpose card (well not at Midland anyway). It was separate from the Cheque Guarantee Card[2] (limited to guaranteeing cheques up to a whopping £30); the cash card could only be used ten times before a replacement was needed. Each time the card was used it would be physically "punched" inside the machine. You could tell how many times a card had been used by the number of indents on it; yes, it really was as unsophisticated as that! Card jams were frequent and each day when the machine was serviced it would be common to find two or three cards in the bin behind the slot. Then there were the transactions themselves. Today you insert your card in an ATM, draw out £50 or whatever amount and your account is instantly debited; not back in the seventies. Then your £10 withdrawal required a physical voucher, a bit like a cheque, to be taken out of the machine (often as long as 24 hours after your withdrawal or longer over a weekend) and passed through the clearing, debiting your account three days later. This was quite handy for customers (and staff) who were a bit short a day or so before payday!

Filling the machine required someone (normally the first cashier) to take a pile of clips and a large bundle of one pound notes and put £10 in each clip; these were then loaded into the machine. Every day the machine would be tested by making a trial withdrawal which would debit a suspense account; the cash would then be paid back into the same suspense account. On one occasion when I did this I found that the clip contained £11; some poor customer obviously ended up with just £9 and when you consider that in 1978 one pound would buy you ten pints of milk, or five loaves of bread, or two packets of cigarettes, that was an amount you would miss. On another occasion, at a different branch where it was my job to balance the suspense account, I found that the previous day's withdrawal had not been re-deposited and that my colleague had accidentally paid the cash into his own account!

I have no doubt that today's ATM's are pretty reliable and comparatively trouble free, but in the days when I worked in branches, even after the original cash dispensers were upgraded to Autobanks, it was commonplace for an engineer to be called out to deal with some breakdown or other. On those occasions two keyholders would have to loiter at the back of the contraption while the man from IBM rooted around in the bowels of the machine and it was not unusual for a customer to try to insert their card into the front of the Autobank while he did so. These customers would be startled to hear a voice from the machine yell, "It's not working!" when they tried to poke their card into the slot.

After the Cash Dispenser, the AutoBank (with optional Griffin).

It's fairly rare for me to queue up in a branch and be served by a cashier these days and I normally only ever do this when I have accumulated a load of loose change, bagged it up and taken it to pay in. Bagging up even £20 or £30 of coins reminds me of the days when apart from serving customers I would be expected to count out and bag up several hundred pounds of shot (loose) coin every day[3].

Take one of these...

...and decant the content into twenty of these.

The last time I took my modest amount of change and paid it in I asked the cashier if they still had to do shot coin. Oh yes, she replied, we do. I was quite pleased to hear that because while so much else has changed in banking, bagging up shot coin by hand apparently has not!

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[1] Charlie Fancourt's was never given to other customers unless we were really short...or the customer was someone we didn't like!

[2] The Cheque Guarantee Card was trialled in 1965 and fully introduced in 1969, with a limit of £30, increased to £50 in 1977 and £100 in 1989. The scheme closed in 2011.

[3] For the uninitiated, bagging up shot coin consisted of taking a £20 bag of loose bronze and putting it into bags of a £1 each or £100 of silver and putting it in bags of £5. On a typical day that meant two bags of bronze and five of silver.