My memories of working ‘on the counter’ relate to the 1960s, the period in my career when I mostly worked at Kingstanding, Duddeston,
and Small Heath branches. The job in those days, some fifty years ago, was completely different to how it has evolved in the present
era of computerisation and sales-driven targets. Even in the fundamental aspect of the job - the face-to-face relationship of the
bank to the customer - it has changed, the cashier at the counter is no longer the only point of contact; telephone banking and on-line
banking have given the customer alternative means of transacting their business.
Cashiering in the 1960s was done without any
form of assistance provided by computers. All counter transactions were entered by hand, in passbooks and the cashier’s cash
book, generally using pen and ink. (Although this was the period when the ballpoint pen had just become widely available, and the
Bank had sanctioned its use, many staff continued to use a fountain pen.) The addition and subtraction of passbook entries, and the
addition of cash book columns was done mentally, usually with great accuracy and speed.
And, unlike a bank cashier of the 21st-century,
fifty years ago a cashier would not be sitting at the counter with the majority of information regarding the customer immediately
available via a nearby visual display unit. Standing at the counter was the norm, and account balances, specimen signatures, etc had
to be accessed by walking to where the relevant paper record was kept. During the busy Saturday morning and late evening opening periods,
cashiers would be constantly on their feet, walking between record locations and their till. So it was a physically tiring job, as
well as requiring considerable mental input, concentration, all of which had to be combined with the need to communicate with the
depositor.
So, cashiers were required to have stamina, and they were also highly productive. Few cashiers spent the whole of
their working day just operating a till. In between customers, cashiers would deal with a range of back-office tasks, particularly
relating to the maintenance of account records. Following computerisation in the 1970s, many of these back-office tasks were done
automatically, and other such tasks were later centralised at Customer Service Centres. Thus cashiers became more available for selling
the Bank’s products - whether this arrangement of replacing multi-skilled staff with specialists was more productive is open to debate.
What
has probably not changed much over the years, is the type of incident and type of customer that cashiers come into contact with. My
time on the counter produced the following memories:
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a customer, without comment, passes over a passbook with a withdrawal form
for an amount such as £5/18/11d. I process the transaction, count out all the shillings and pence involved, and pass the cash
to the customer. The customer then produces a gas bill for this exact amount and passes the cash back to me;
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an occasion when I am
not entirely confident that the person attempting to make a withdrawal is the actual depositor and ask for proof of identity. The
customer replies that “I can assure you that I am who I say I am!”, which is not entirely helpful;
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it is a very busy Saturday morning
and queues of depositors fill the banking hall. After waiting in a queue for some considerable time, a pensioner who could come into
the bank any day of the week, reaches the counter. I am requested to make the depositor’s passbook up to date, and she then leaves
without making a transaction;
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I have to inform a depositor that I have made a mistake is her passbook. The depositor unsympathetically
replies “I thought that banks never made mistakes”. I resist the urge to reply that “I thought that only God never made mistakes,
but at this moment I am having second thoughts about that!”;
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depositors could authorise the Bank to pay their gas, electricity, water,
and rates bills on their behalf - an early version of the Variable Amount Direct Debit system. When completing the authorisation form
for this service, the depositor was required to choose which of the four bills was to be included. At this time, many homes no longer
used gas, and the depositor would proudly state: “I’m all electric!”;
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withdrawal forms were required to be completed in words and figures
- incorrect spelling of the words was not acceptable and required a new form or an initialled amendment - some branch managers would
insist on a replacement form. Tact was required to point out that ‘tow’ and ‘fourty’ were incorrect spellings;
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tact and patience were
also required when (1) a customer’s small child decided to test the branch’s acoustics by screaming whilst running round the banking
hall at full speed, and (2) when a customer waiting in the queue to be served was listening to the test match with his portable radio
at high volume;
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if a cashier made an error resulting in a cash shortage at the end of day, it was the Bank’s practice that the customer
should be visited, where the error was identified, in an attempt to recover the cash. When taking a utility bill, most cashiers would
write the amount of change given to the customer, on the stub retained. Discovering an overpayment of change by this system, I visited
the customer to request repayment. The customer vehemently denied that she had received too much change, but then offered me half
of the sum! I declined the offer;
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the amount of any cash difference was credited or debited to a suspense account, and a letter had
to be sent to Head Office. The letter was usually worded “At the close of business today, the cash under the control of Mr B M Banks
was found to be £1 short. This amount has been debited to Account X305”. A cashier having several cash differences in a year could
expect a letter from Head Office, requesting an explanation as to the cause of the errors. It was rumoured that one plucky member
of staff receiving such a letter replied that “If I knew the cause of the errors, I wouldn’t have made them”;
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a notice on the counter
requested that utility bills should not be paid on Saturdays - the Bank wished to reserve these busy periods for bank transactions
only. The senior cashier at the till next to me, being presented with a bill on a very busy Saturday morning, pointed to the
notice. “It only says requested” the customer responded. The harassed cashier replied: “If there was a notice on the top of Lewis’s
store requesting that people do not jump off, I suppose you’d jump”. As their conversation continued, I went to look for something
in the strong room;
-
that cashier was somewhat obsessed with the subject of people jumping or falling off the roof of Lewis’s. When
a customer brought back the ten shillings I had overpaid her, my colleague remarked that with my luck, if I was to fall off the roof
of Lewis’s, I would fall into a brand new suit!;
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another unwelcome transaction on a Saturday morning, was a Home Safe full with coins,
particularly when the contents, after being painstakingly counted and paid into an account, were then immediately withdrawn. On one
particularly busy Saturday I was presented with such a transaction by a small child. The manager (whose motto for providing customers
with a quick service was “get the buggers out”) leaned past me, pushed all the uncounted coins back to the child, and instructed me
to serve the next customer in the queue;
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it was the usual practice to ask the customer in what denominations they would like to have
their withdrawals - the normal question being “would you like Ones or Fives?”, referring to One Pound Notes and Five Pound Notes.
One particular customer always insisted on having only Ten Shilling Notes - the branch’s theory was that he suspected that on one
occasion he had given a shop two One Pound Notes instead of only one, and wished to minimise the cost if he were to make that expensive
mistake again;
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on the day following the Bank’s closure for the Annual Balance, long queues would form as depositors presented their
passbooks to have the amount of annual interest added to the book. Apparently, many depositors thought that if the interest was not
added on the first available date, it would be lost;
-
each month, a US-dollar denominated pension cheque was brought in on behalf of
a very old lady depositor; the cheque was then sent to Head Office for collection. The lady always wrote “God Bless America” on the
back of the cheque.
The vast majority of depositors were pleasant to serve, were grateful for the service that the Bank provided, and
transacted their business in a perfectly normal way. There were, however, some exceptions to this general rule:
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a depositor had
checked the calculation of the interest credited to his account, and found that it was a fraction of one penny short. Instead of being
pleased that his calculation was so accurate, he wanted a penny added;
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another depositor appeared to like verifying how inter-branch
deposits worked. His method, which he repeated on a regular basis, was to purchase a Postal Order and then pay this into his account.
For each transaction, however, he would choose a different branch and then later verify (at the branch where the account was kept)
that the deposit had reached his account record. For good measure, he kept his passbook in Safe Deposit.
However, it takes all sorts
- and there were eccentric people on the Bank’s side of the counter too - but that’s another story!
December
4th 2011