Threadneedle Street

The porters and clerks waiting to be let into the Bank at the Threadneedle Street gates, had they chosen to look around, would have seen an impressive building set in a wide thoroughfare. Like any modern City worker, they would have been aware of a constantly changing environment and been able to see building work going on all around them. In 1783 the London Bridge Water Works were laying new water pipes in Threadneedle Street.⁹ As a consequence, the clerks may have needed to watch where they stepped. The water company’s work would have created hazards underfoot, both during and after construction, as companies sometimes left pipes exposed or back-filled pavements with inferior materials.¹⁰ The church of St Christopher le Stocks, which stood directly adjacent to the Bank, was being pulled down between 1781 and 1784, and new buildings were being erected on the site to accommodate the institution’s ever-expanding work.¹¹ These works were just the latest of many. The area on which the Bank stood, ‘formerly covered with taverns and slums, with low tenements and mean shops’, had been systematically dismantled over many years.¹² The demolition and rebuilding work fundamentally changed the character of the area around Threadneedle Street in order to not only provide space for the growing Bank but also accommodate its directors’ desire to shape their environment for the purposes of both security and profit.

In order to better understand how the Bank’s building would have appeared to City dwellers and visitors, it is worth taking a longer view of its development.¹³ The Bank had moved to Threadneedle Street in 1734. Before that it had been sited in rented accommodations in Grocers’ Hall, inconspicuously tucked away in Grocers’ Alley, a small street off Poultry.¹⁴ The Threadneedle Street site of the new Bank placed it opposite the Royal Exchange and closer to Exchange Alley, the location of much of the activity in London’s stock market. The move also brought the Bank closer to East India House and South Sea House, the other great monied companies of the long eighteenth century. Threadneedle Street was, and is, a major thoroughfare close to other important London streets, notably Cheapside and Cornhill, which were important commercial and shopping districts; Leadenhall Street, dominated by its marketplace; and Old Jewry and Lombard Street, traditionally areas where financiers had operated.

The transfer to Threadneedle Street was a significant step in the Bank’s history, but it was not a straight-forward one. The land had been in the Bank’s possession for a decade before the decision was taken to move. Purchased at a cost of £15,000 in 1724, the estate was primarily residential, and in the years that followed, the directors gradually bought out the tenants’ leases. The plan was to erect purpose-built premises in time for the expiring of the Bank’s lease at Grocers’ Hall in 1734.¹⁵ The necessity of some form of change was obvious. Grocers’ Hall was too small for the Bank’s expanding business, access to the building was awkward and the premises were not as secure as they should have been. Yet, there was disagreement among the directorate about the prospective move, with four of the most senior directors—Sir Gilbert Heathcote, John Hangar, William Joliffe and Thomas Cooke—dissenting when asked to confirm the decision to leave Grocers’ Hall.¹⁶ Abramson argues that those most against the move had seen the institution through the worst of times. Heathcote had been one of the original directors, appointed in 1694, and thus had witnessed the battle to establish the Bank of England against those who believed that a public bank might be bent to the needs of politicians or monarchs. He had seen challenges from the Land Bank during the 1690s, the seeming opposition to the financial system from a new Tory government in 1710 and the threat posed by the South Sea Company over the period from 1711 to 1720.¹⁷ Men like Heathcote may have remained wary about flaunting the Bank’s position in the economy and political system and may have seen an advantage from maintaining the low profile afforded by residence in Grocers’ Hall. Heathcote and his fellow dissenters were also hard-headed businessmen with, perhaps, little interest in the aesthetic and may have regarded investment in a permanent building a waste of capital.¹⁸ But those old men were living past battles.

The building of a new Bank of England was representative of a significant change in the institution’s fortunes. Following the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in late 1720 and the consequent disgrace of the South Sea Company, the Bank’s relationship with the state became ‘smooth and easy’ and the institution began to be seen as the safe hands into which the nation’s finances were entrusted.¹⁹ Its role in discounting bills of exchange and providing banking services to London’s business and mercantile communities, discussed in the next chapter, also embedded the institution in the management of the economy. The Bank’s acquisition of a permanent home, its physical expansion and its relocation to a visible spot at the heart of London’s business district were part of that process of change. The building made a statement about its central place in the country’s economy and the management of its finances.

A further measure of the Bank’s changing position was the strength of the competition to design its new buildings. Designs were received from John Tracy, the City of London surveyor; Theodore Jacobsen, amateur architect, businessman and designer of East India House; and Roger Morris, renowned architect of country houses. The Bank’s chief accountant, Zerubbabel Crouch, also submitted a design.²⁰ The Committee for Building, formed to oversee the construction of the new building, were, however, persuaded by practicality rather than fame. They selected designs submitted by Henry Joynes and George Sampson as the finalists in the competition. Both men were government clerks of the works. Joynes was working as surveyor to the Commissioners of Sewers for Westminster. Sampson had been clerk of the works for the Tower of London and Somerset House. These men, thus, brought not only competent design skills but experience of such large-scale public building works. Sampson’s and Joynes’s designs were similar, and there was no consensus among the Committee about which design should win. Each, apparently, had much to commend it but also contained elements that were objected to. The final decision was eventually turned over to the Court of Directors, a committee of the Bank’s governor, deputy governor and twenty-four elected directors. They selected George Sampson’s as the winning design. They may have been persuaded by Sampson’s social connections, but his plan was also more practical than Joynes’s, incorporating, as it did, three separate entrances, a spacious courtyard and more central and accessible Pay Hall.²¹ However, the Court also retained Theodore Jacobsen as advisor to the Committee for Building, perhaps as a way of ensuring sufficient attention was also paid to the sophistication and taste required for such a prestigious building.²²

As soon as Sampson’s Bank of England was completed, it was too small to house the Bank’s growing business, and the directors were forced to rent extra office space from as early as 1737.²³ Moreover, the business of the Bank continued to increase in line with the growing economy and the rapidly expanding national debt. In 1734 the total debt, funded and unfunded, stood at £49.1 million. By the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 it stood at £132.6 million and by the end of the War of American Independence at £231.8 million.²⁴ The Bank handled the majority of this business on the government’s behalf, and its staff base increased accordingly, from 96 in 1734 to over 300 when the Committee of Inspection started their work in 1783.²⁵ In response to the expansion of the Bank’s business, between 1764 and 1766, three Acts of Parliament enabled the directors to acquire more property around Threadneedle Street.

In their expansion plans, the directors desired not just an increase in office space but also the removal of the tightly packed alleys and courtyards that surrounded the Bank and created a fire risk.²⁶ This had been an ongoing project but clearly remained a concern. When the issue was raised during the 1760s, it was observed that the roads around Threadneedle Street were still too narrow and other property remained too close to the Bank, with the risk that, especially in case of a fire, ‘buildings, papers and property … may be in danger of being destroyed to the irretrievable loss of the publick’.²⁷ Restricted space around the Bank was a concern for other reasons also. London had expanded considerably over the course of the eighteenth century, as had the amount of traffic and numbers of people on the move. The problem was particularly bad around the Threadneedle Street area because it encompassed both the Bank and the Royal Exchange. Hackney carriages, carriages for private hire, plied their trade around the area in such numbers that their presence was regularly complained of to the Cornhill wardmote inquest, a meeting of elected male householders convened to hear complaints and punish offenders.²⁸ The press of traffic was not just a nuisance. Horse-drawn vehicles are not easy to manoeuvre, they do not reverse, they need a wide turning-circle and horses do not always come to a stop at command.²⁹ The danger this posed to pedestrians in the vicinity was significant, and fatalities from traffic accidents were a regular happening on London’s streets.³⁰

In response to these concerns and the requirement for additional space, more than an acre was added to the Bank’s footprint from the middle of the eighteenth century, and the thoroughfares around the site were widened significantly. The Bank was not alone in undertaking this kind of clearance. London was notorious for its closely packed streets and alleyways and the poor quality of its buildings. In 1760 the City Corporation’s Committee of the City Lands embarked on an extensive improvement scheme for clearing dilapidated areas and widening thoroughfares.³¹ The City was slow in its work, however, whereas the Bank’s directors pursued a rapid process of change. Their actions pushed out the area’s previous residents, including a plumber, a diamond cutter, a schoolmistress and a doctor. Also removed were a number of taverns and coffee houses.³² With the destruction of the latter, some of the tangle of informal spaces where businessmen, merchants, brokers and jobbers met were lost.³³ They were replaced by new office blocks, known as Bank Buildings. Into these blocks moved the bankers James and Fordyce, the bullion dealer Solomon Da Costa, a lottery office and the Sun Fire Insurance Office, along with a couple of coffee houses. These spaces represented not just a significant shift in the institution’s control of its environs but also an important diversification of its business. The cost of constructing Bank Buildings was around £18,500, and the space eventually yielded rents of around £2,000 per annum.³⁴

During this period, building work at the Bank was overseen by the architect Robert Taylor. Taylor was the son of one of London’s leading mason contractors. He had an early career as a sculptor, undertaking work for the Bank, including the figure of Britannia, which sat over the entrance to the Pay Hall. He turned to architecture in the 1750s, taking advantage of a London building boom, and soon found himself in great demand.³⁵ He began work at the Bank in 1764 and was responsible for all aspects of its expansion. Under his direction, wings on both sides of Sampson’s façade and a four-storey, fire-proof library building, the most important function of which was housing the Bank’s ever-expanding archive, were added to the Bank. Taylor also built a grand Court Room, three times the size of the previous one, and a suite of parlours, committee rooms, writing rooms, a private office for the Bank’s secretary and a coffee room.

These new spaces were situated behind the church yard of St Christopher le Stocks and largely segregated from the day-to-day business of the Bank but were accessible through the banking hall and a grand lobby to accommodate the meetings of customers with the Bank’s directors.³⁶ The most important addition to the Bank during this period, however, was the Rotunda, or Brokers’ Exchange, and four new Transfer Offices. The Rotunda was a domed and circular space, around sixty-two feet high and wide, which filled each day with a ‘cacophonous crowd’ of investors, brokers and stockjobbers jostling for space and for the best deals.³⁷ It was this addition that brought the secondary market in the government’s debt onto the Bank’s premises. As we shall see, this offered many advantages to brokers, jobbers and public creditors. But the presence of the market, which seemed so often to undermine the value of public credit in an institution regarded as its guardian, also posed a challenge. It is possible to argue that one response to that challenge was the messages of integrity communicated to the public through the Bank’s architecture.

The Meaning of the Bank

Indeed, the spaces created by Sampson and then Taylor were redolent with strong messages to the state and to the public. Figure 1.1 depicts the Bank during the early nineteenth century flanked by similar structures, but in the 1780s its Palladian façade in Portland stone stood in physical contrast to the high and narrow brick, wood and stucco buildings that surrounded it.³⁸ Thus, the Bank stood out in its environment and attracted attention. It was mentioned in tourist guides and traveller’s memoirs.³⁹ Thomas Malton found it to be designed to a ‘tolerable good style, and the parts are simple and bold’.⁴⁰ M. de Colonne, ‘a foreigner of the first taste’, thought it ‘with no exception but St Paul’s, to be the first architecture in London’.⁴¹ According to Sir John Fielding in his Brief Description of the Cities of London and Westminster, the Bank exceeded East India House and South Sea House in appearance. The former was described as too small with ‘not much to praise or much to censure’, and the latter was ‘large but plain’, whereas the Bank was a ‘noble Structure’ of around eighty feet in length ‘of the Ionic Order, raised on a Rustic Base, and by judges it is held to be well-executed’.⁴²

The impression that the building made upon these commentators was intentional. The expensive building work that had been undertaken in the wake of the South Sea Bubble had been part of a process of rebuilding confidence in finance. It was a strategy pursued not only by the Bank but also by the East India Company (EIC) and the South Sea Company.43 In the case of the Bank, the building work created an exterior view that, in the words of Clare Walcot, conveyed a ‘polite, public image appropriate for a city street and the self-identity of a corporate institution’.⁴⁴ There can be no question that the educated would have recognised those messages. Contemporary commentators certainly linked architecture, especially Palladian architecture, with business integrity. Walcot notes that in contemporary architectural theory, the appearance of a building equated to the appearance of an individual ‘in its potential to reveal character’.⁴⁵ Thus, in Roger North’s late seventeenth-century architectural treatise, he argued the following: ‘I can shew you a man’s character in his house. If he hath bin given to parsimony or profusion, to judge rightly or superficially, to deal in great matters of small, high or low, his edifices shall be tincted accordingly, and the justness or imperfection of his mind will appear in them’.⁴⁶ The architect John Gwynn likewise argued for the ‘political and moral advantage’ of magnificence in public building and called upon his fellow countrymen to ‘employ our riches in the encouragement of ingenious labour, by promoting the advancement of grandeur and elegance’.⁴⁷ Equally, the quality of public buildings was linked in architectural theory to the strength of the state and of its commerce. Thus, Robert Morris in An Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture argued that ‘the Decay of the State and government of a Kingdom, is dependent upon the Decay of publick Buildings’.⁴⁸ A flourishing state, on the other hand, was demonstrated, and promoted, through its public buildings.

The conflation of Bank and state would have become more obvious as staff and visitors walked through the front gates and into the courtyard. Here was located the entrance to the Pay Hall, where general banking business was conducted. On the pediment of that building they would have seen Robert Taylor’s statue of Britannia depicted pouring out the fruits of commerce from her cornucopia, while also carrying the shield and spear which symbolised the defence of the nation.⁴⁹ Britannia was adopted as the Bank’s symbol at its foundation. On 30 July 1694, just a few days after the Bank was established, the Minutes of the Court of Directors recorded that they had decided their Common Seal should depict ‘Britannia sitting and looking on a bank of mony’.⁵⁰ As we shall see, she appeared not just on the exterior of the Bank but on numerous objects inside the institution, including all the ledgers used for registering the ownership and transfer of the national debt. Britannia was also a symbol carried outside the Bank as the letterhead on all its correspondence and as a visible image on all the Bank’s notes.

Britannia’s importance as the symbol which most represents the Bank is brought into sharp focus by contrasting her with another dominant female allegory of the eighteenth century, that of Lady Credit. Britannia remained an exemplary figure and was always above reproach. Lady Credit, on the other hand, was intensely volatile: one moment she was your friend and the next she was turning away from you. Borrowers were warned to be ‘very tender of her for if you overload her, she’s a coy mistress—she’ll slip from you without any warning, and you’ll be undone from that moment’.⁵¹ Joseph Addison also depicted the ‘quick Turns and Changes in [Credit’s] Constitution’ and her tendency to ‘fall away from the most florid complexion … and wither into a Skeleton’.⁵² Sherman shows that Lady Credit quickly became depicted as a whore at the fall of a speculative market.⁵³ This inconstancy was applied not only to the imaginary Lady Credit but to the very real South Sea Company in the wake of the Bubble’s bursting in 1720. Thus, one commentator raged,

the Chief Managers of a certain Stock may dress up their Darling Mistress once more, and send her into the World not without a tempting Aspect; but People who have already been Sufferers by their Schemes, will look upon her with a cautious Eye. A fine Lady, who had deceiv’d a Man once, will for the Future be treated as a common Prostitute.⁵⁴

Another depicted the South Sea Company as having ‘bewitch’d thousands to fall in Love with her … yet her Lust is not one bit abated; and She runs a whoring after new Lovers every day’.⁵⁵ But Britannia did not fall in the way that Lady Credit and the Lady of the South Sea fell. Nor did the Bank. In James Milner’s Three Letters, Relating to the South Sea Company and the Bank, the great monied companies, all written of in feminine form, were assessed with regard to their behaviour during the speculative boom of 1720. The Bank, in the final letter, was judged to be run by a ‘Body of Men not addicted to the Scandalous Tricks of Stock-Jobbing’.⁵⁶ Following the South Sea Bubble, the ‘Lady Credit as whore’ image was used frequently, while the Bank’s Britannia ultimately matured into the inviolable ‘Old Lady of Threadneedle Street’.

In the image of Britannia, therefore, the behaviour of the Bank and the integrity of public credit became inextricably and productively linked, and the message would have been apparent to many users of the Bank. Moreover, Britannia became ubiquitous in eighteenth-century Britain, repeatedly appearing as an emblem of the Protestant nation and in connection to the monarchy.⁵⁷ She was also used frequently to depict the state of the nation. Although this sometimes rendered Britannia vulnerable, especially in the latter part of the eighteenth century as the threat from the loss of the American colonies grew, in the Bank’s depictions she was an icon that spoke of strength and stability. With her warlike iconography and close associations with trade, industry and profit, she offered a clear statement of the conflation of the Bank’s aims with the goals of the British state. Indeed, Abramson argues that the use of Britannia as the Bank’s emblem ‘might even be read as implying the identity of the Bank of England itself as the nation’s protector and provider’.⁵⁸

The Bank’s exterior view held another set of messages for the public. Although of fashionably classical design, the Bank was an imposing and, some might have said, intimidating structure. Because of the need for security, there were no windows facing the street at the ground-floor level. Thus, passers-by were presented with an elegant but essentially blank façade. Iain Black labels those windowless walls ‘exclusionary’, linking them to the Bank’s aggressive protection of its privileges and monopoly position.⁵⁹ Abramson likewise has argued that the very structure and architecture of the Bank were strongly symbolic of the erosion of people’s traditional rights and liberties. It was enclosed and secretive, an embodiment of economic and political forces that were undermining the lives of the City’s lower sorts of people.⁶⁰ As we have already seen, some contemporaries regarded the Bank as part of a corrupt and dangerous financial system. Moreover, the directors’ actions underlined the messages of exclusivity and secrecy. They were aggressive and ruthless in their command of the Bank’s physical environment. Many people in London would have been excluded from its environs either incidentally, by having no business to conduct there, or deliberately. Indeed, the Bank’s porters were charged with monitoring those who entered the Bank during business hours and ensuring that undesirables were removed from its public spaces.⁶¹ These attempts at exclusion should not, however, be read solely as undermining the rights of the people. For the Bank’s customers and for the public creditors, they were an important part of establishing the reputation and security of the Bank. In particular, they helped embed the message that the Bank’s architecture offered to those who used its services: capital invested here will be safe.

The question of how we interpret the Bank’s physical presence is a complex one, and it will be returned to in the chapters that follow. We will see how both the exterior and the interior represented corporate virtue, security and probity and emphasised the institution’s connections to the state and its usefulness to country and government.⁶² It will also be shown that the employees as well as the customers of the Bank, through their actions, had the power to contribute to the performance of virtuous banking. They also had the power to undermine that message. What follows will emphasise that the more polite spaces within the banking hall offered something quite different to the chaos of the market in the Bank’s Rotunda and Transfer Offices. While there is no doubt that accommodating the business of stockjobbers and brokers within the Bank’s environs was a convenience to many, it posed a threat to the institution’s integrity as the guardian of public credit. The secondary market had the power to support but also to undermine the state’s efforts to raise funds. It was also a target for those who saw high finance as synonymous with speculation and even dishonesty. And the Bank’s transfer clerks, by virtue of their access to the market, found it all too easy to step into the role of broker and stockjobber and cross from supporting to exploiting the public creditors. Disorder and dishonesty were sometimes closer than the Bank’s directors cared to acknowledge.

Cleaning and Making Ready

Attention to the Bank’s appearance did not end with its buildings. The routines at the start of the day included cleaning of the institution’s public and private spaces and the streets on which it stood. Before dawn some of the institution’s night watchmen ceased their guard duties or woke from a few snatched hours of sleep to begin the tasks of cleaning, fetching coal and lighting fires so the buildings would be ready when the clerks arrived for work.⁶³ The job of cleaning certain offices would be taken on by the porters, who were directly responsible for the maintenance of the spaces to which they were assigned.

The Bank was large by the end of the eighteenth century, and cleaning was a significant undertaking but one which was time constrained. The watchmen aimed to complete their tasks promptly, as many of them had day jobs elsewhere. Some were EIC labourers, who would have needed to make their way to the warehouses for an eight o’clock start.⁶⁴ The porters had other jobs in addition to cleaning, and everything needed to be ready before the admittance of customers at nine o’clock. The cleaning routines were overseen by the Bank’s housekeeper, the institution’s only recorded female employee. The wife of the head gate porter was generally appointed housekeeper, and from 1771, when the new Stock Offices were opened in the Bank, she was paid £50 per annum.⁶⁵ The housekeeper at the time of the Inspection was Jane Watkins. Her specific duties are not made clear in the Bank’s records but, given that the watchmen and porters did much of the heavy work, it is likely that the housekeeper’s role, as in a private home, was primarily supervisory. Mrs Barker’s The Complete Servant Maid, published in 1711, advised that the housekeeper be first up in the morning and that all her employer’s belongings be kept in good order, since ‘all the goods in the house are committed to her care’. She was to provision the house prudently with ‘every sort of necessaries for the family’ and to direct the cleaning of rooms, carpets, furnishings, stoves and hearths.⁶⁶ Given that the Bank contained public spaces, parlours for private meetings and office space for the directors, there is no reason not to assume that Mrs Watkins would have been responsible for the kinds of elegant furnishings and decorative pieces that might be found in a private home. Further, it is likely she would have contributed to provisioning the Bank, although not with regard to the larger-scale purchases of coal and candles, which would have been necessary to heat and light the offices and were taken care of by the Committee for House and Servants. Mrs Watkins undoubtedly had an unenviable task dealing with a cleaning force who were not under her direct supervision and a public space that was large, was complex and attracted hundreds of people through its doors each day.

The cleaning work undertaken by the porters and watchmen would have been heavy and potentially tiring. Stone floors had to be swept and washed. Wooden floors required additional maintenance; washing and scouring with sand was the norm. Furniture needed to be dusted and polished. Furniture and fabrics also needed upkeep and mending, where appropriate.⁶⁷ Clocks needed to be wound. Offices were lit by candles, probably of tallow in all spaces except those used regularly by the governor and directors. Tallow candles were smelly, burned poorly and required maintenance to prevent guttering.⁶⁸ The offices were heated by ‘large open stoves’ and fires. They were probably too cold in winter and too warm in summer.⁶⁹ Cleaning hearths and stoves and laying new fires was dirty work. Coal was the primary means of heating in eighteenth-century London. It was observed that it did not always give off much heat but did create thick black smoke and ‘caustic vapours’.⁷⁰ Another of the porters’ less enviable early-morning tasks was removing waste from the Bank. This may have included leftovers from meals, cinders and ashes from the Bank’s various fires, and other waste from the Bank’s activities, including discarded and broken items.⁷¹ At Grocers’ Hall there had been a ‘dunghill in the foreyard’ where the waste was deposited.⁷² It would have stunk, especially in summer, and rain would have turned the dunghill into a quagmire of filth. Later in the eighteenth century, waste removal was more efficient. There were carters, dustmen and chimney sweeps who would take away accumulated waste, including waste from cesspits. The latter had, by law, to be done at night. It was an unpleasant and laborious business. The night watchmen had to dig out the deposited matter and carry it in buckets to their carts.⁷³ But it was necessary since London’s sewerage system was ill equipped to cope with solid waste during the eighteenth century.

Although not obviously evident in the plans, the Bank undoubtedly had privies on site for the use of customers, staff and the individuals who lived within its environs. Privies were built external to the main building or house, usually in the rear yard. They were likely to be located over a cesspit and might have been little more than wooden benches with holes over a pit or tub. Some would have had lids to cover the holes when not in use.⁷⁴ All would have been malodorous in the extreme. Cesspits were not intended to be watertight, and thus the liquid waste drained away while the solid matter remained to be removed by the night watchmen.⁷⁵ Although no evidence can be found, it is likely that the Bank also had water-closets, located inside the buildings. Most fashionable town-houses would have included at least one by the 1780s, and thus the directors and the Bank’s more illustrious customers may have expected this convenience.⁷⁶ The water-closet was generally a lavatory pan that could be flushed with water usually from a tank but sometimes from a water pipe.⁷⁷ Water-closets were considerably less drafty and somewhat less smelly than outdoor privies.

Cleaning up the yards within the Bank’s walls and the footpaths in the exterior of the buildings was also part of the porters’ early-morning roles. The concern for the exterior presentation of the institution reflects the changing streetscapes of Britain’s towns and cities. Cruikshank and Burton note the dramatic changes in the way London’s streets looked and were experienced over the Georgian period and attribute much of the change to two pioneering Acts of Parliament: the City of London Lighting Act, 1736, and the Westminster Paving Act, 1762.⁷⁸ The latter took responsibility for the upkeep of pavements from the individual householder or property owner and placed it in the hands of local authorities with the power to tax residents.⁷⁹ The Act specified stone kerbs, raised pavements and kerbside gutters, which improved safety. The changes also eased the process of cleaning the streets, making it easier for scavengers and crossing sweepers to remove waste and, in the summer, allowing cleaning to be carried out using carts carrying barrels with holes punched into them from which water flowed to wash the streets.⁸⁰ Although the scavengers would have removed dirt from the highway, the resident was obliged to clean the steps and pavement in front of their house. For the Bank’s porters, this meant the courtyards and, by the latter part of the eighteenth century, quite considerable expanses of pavement.

In undertaking these duties, however, the Bank contributed to developments that made the City a cleaner and more pleasant place to live by the latter part of the eighteenth century. It also responded to the bustle of the streets, the busyness of the area around Threadneedle Street, which daily was full of carts, coaches and pedestrians, and the accumulation of dirt that must have occurred. Cleaning around the Bank helped to preserve space for its polite and often wealthy patrons to distance themselves from the tumult of the streets. But it arguably also had meaning beyond the maintenance of order. Miles Ogborn has linked the improvement of the streets of London to the desire to ‘create the appropriate urban geography for a commercial and civilised nation’.⁸¹ In this respect the mundane routines of cleanliness link directly to the messages of integrity, security and politeness conveyed by the Bank’s buildings.

Opening the Bank

Attempts to impose order and direction on the hustle and bustle of business were also obvious within the Bank. The management of daytime security began early since, at the time of the Inspection, once the gates were unlocked in the morning, they were set open and thus anybody could enter. This included both the front gate and the gate to the cartway, which led to the Bullion Office. As noted by the Inspectors, ‘as soon as the Gates are opened in a morning any person is at liberty to come into the house & go where he pleases, without any other restraint than what may probably arise from his or the porter’s seeing him & questioning him upon his business’.⁸² The porters charged with this responsibility were of two types: gate porters, of which there were two in the Bank, and house porters, of which there were five. There was also a door-keeper, Matthias Alcock, and a messenger, Samuel Cooper.⁸³ The door-keeper and gate porters were usually on duty at the Bank’s exterior perimeter and were under the supervision of the chief accountant. The house porters staffed several of the offices and were under the supervision of the chief cashier.

The Inspectors took account of the porters’ activity, as they did every other function of the Bank, and, as we shall see, in a number of other areas related to security, they found procedures wanting. Following their investigations, they required that instead of the gates being unlocked and set open early in the morning, they remain shut until half past eight with a porter attending to provide admittance to clerks as necessary. Inspectors particularly noted the importance of having a porter in constant attendance at the Threadneedle Street gate, as ‘he might be of considerable use, for the purposes of keeping order, of having an eye on such persons as go in or out, of directing those who enquire the way to the several Offices’.⁸⁴ The Inspectors also asked that the gate porter appear properly attired at all times, with ‘his Gown & Staff’, and noted the need for the appointment of a deputy given that Mr Watkins could not be expected to be in constant attendance at the gate.⁸⁵ It is important to note here the concern for the ‘public’ that is implied in the Inspectors’ comments. As might be expected in the febrile atmosphere of the early 1780s when criticism of the financial system was intense, one of the factors that guided the Inspectors’ deliberations was the Bank’s service to the public. Thus, they noted both regular complaints and the convenience of the public, in terms of ease of negotiation of the Bank’s spaces and services and also with regard to the timeliness of delivery of those services.

The porters took up their positions around the Bank before 9:00 A.M. In addition to the man at the front gate, there were two porters in the Rotunda. Their role was to ‘take charge of the Gate in Bartholomew Lane, to keep the avenues leading to the stock offices clear, [and] to direct the Public in their Enquiries’.⁸⁶ This was perhaps the most challenging of the porters’ jobs. The Rotunda was an open public place and attracted not just people with business there but also street sellers who saw the opportunity to offer their wares to the crowds. Thus, the porters were charged with preventing ‘Persons from coming in to offer any article for sale or Exhibition. To suppress all disorderly behaviour among the Persons who daily attend in the Rotunda, and to preserve peaceable conduct as much as possible’.⁸⁷ The Bullion Office was also attended during its 9:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. working hours by porters who were, in addition, charged with attending the Bank’s vaults and treasury. Their role was ‘to assist in weighing money in the Hall & put Tickets on the Bags [and] To carry in and out of the strong room the Trucks of Books belonging to the Hall Department’.⁸⁸ The house porters were also charged with more general roles and expected to direct customers and visitors, keep everything clean and tidy, ‘keep the Books in their proper places, and suffer no articles to remain about the office not belonging to it’.⁸⁹

While the porters were cleaning offices and setting up for the day, the out-tellers were collecting their packages of notes and bills and heading out into the City. They were the first clerks to start work each day. Their role was described in the Minutes of the Committee of Inspection as to ‘receive Money for bills of exchange & notes of hand at the houses of the persons to whom they are address’d’.⁹⁰ Out-tellers, who would come to be known as bank messengers, performed an important job which required honesty and encompassed not a little risk, as they would carry paper worth large amounts about in the City. It is a job about which very little has been written and one that became obsolete from the late 1980s as electronic transfers of money became the norm. Prior to the late twentieth century, however, bank messengers would have been a common sight on the streets of all major cities, and their activities were part of the rhythms of financial life and essential to the smoothing of the payments system.⁹¹

There were between ten and fourteen out-tellers at the Bank who worked each day, Monday to Saturday, and, according to the Inspectors’ reports, covered between ten and twelve set ‘walks’ around the City.⁹² Chief Cashier Abraham Newland noted to the Inspectors that the number of out-tellers was ‘uncertain’.⁹³ There is no clarification of this point, but in the staff list for 1783 only twelve out-tellers are listed. Thus, it seems likely that other men in the Bank would be enlisted from time to time to do the job if needed.

At the Bank, the process of out-telling began the day before as clerks working in the Bill Office sorted through the bills which were to fall due the following day. A clerk then sorted the bills into ‘walks’ and stored them overnight in an iron chest.⁹⁴ That clerk then had to return early the next morning to deliver the parcels of bills to the out-tellers. Once the out-teller collected and signed for the bills, he was effectively committed to delivering the amount of the bills back to the Bank.⁹⁵ Indeed, it is quite clear from the Bank’s record that at this point the process transferred responsibility from the institution to the individual, and the clerk giving his testimony to the Committee of Inspection noted that an out-teller’s first task was ‘at his peril to compare the bills he actually receives with the list of them in the Entry book’.⁹⁶

It is impossible to reconstruct the out-tellers’ walks, but they were allocated several hours for the task, leaving the Bank before 9:00 A.M. and not being expected to return until midday. Much of their time, however, might have been spent waiting for a customer to produce payment for a bill. Payment could be accepted in ‘Money, Bank Notes, Bank Warrants or drafts on the Bank’, and the payers should have been well aware of the due dates so prepared, in most cases, to make payment. Out-tellers could also accept payments via drafts on other bankers, but in that case, ‘they must procure payment of them’ before returning to the Bank to make up their accounts.⁹⁷ Thus, an additional stop would have been added to their walk.

The out-tellers had to be very mindful of security. Once they left the Bank they were beyond its protection and in danger from assault and theft. As a precaution, they were instructed to immediately cancel all banknotes they received, except those notes that were more than a year old and thus would not have been redeemable.⁹⁸ The out-teller was also to cancel the clerk’s name on every bank warrant and write his own name against it (for the purpose of creating an audit trail), to check all notes against a list of ‘stopped notes’ and to record in a notebook the details of all notes received and from whom they were received. The Inspectors were advised, however, that the ‘multiplicity of business generally prevents these last directions being executed’.⁹⁹

Out-tellers needed to have a detailed knowledge of the common forms of means of exchange and an understanding of how to distinguish genuine from counterfeit notes. This was clearly no easy task. Bank Governor Samuel Beachcroft’s diary records a reprimand to ‘Parker the out teller for negligence in not taking proper notice of a Bank note, which he told a clerk at Wickendens was a good one, when it was forged’.¹⁰⁰ Parker should perhaps have been forgiven for his error. Some forgeries were extremely good imitations, and the multiplicity of paper means of exchange in eighteenth-century Britain meant there was much to learn.¹⁰¹ The amount of training available to an out-teller is not clear from the record, but the Inspectors noted that a senior out-teller, Thomas Fugion, received a gratuity for instructing the others.¹⁰² Fugion also testified that he saw it as his job to ‘enquire into the conduct of the junior out tellers & … see to their good behaviour & to report upon it to Mr Church [chief clerk in the Bill Office] whenever he heard anything against them’.¹⁰³ Undoubtedly potential personal liability for losses also kept the out-tellers vigilant. Each clerk at the Bank was expected to provide personal security against losses backed by an independent bond guarantor.¹⁰⁴ For less serious offences or occasions when the Bank incurred financial losses through negligence, clerks also could find their wages stopped in order to compensate the institution.

Two more of the Bank’s processes required clerks to attend early to collect papers and equipment and then depart the institution for other premises: the printing of notes and the maintenance of the Bank’s relationship with the Exchequer. With regard to the former, the Bank’s notes were printed off-site at the house of Mr Cole, a process which required both the paper and the printing plates to be conveyed out of the Bank and beyond its control. This arrangement speaks to the complexities of the processes that the Bank controlled and the ways in which lack of space constrained some aspects of the institution’s business. It is also another example of a process that the Inspectors identified as in need of rapid change in the interests of security and integrity. In their report they condemned the practice of printing notes off-site, acknowledging the danger to which both the paper and the plates were subjected all the time they were outside of the Bank’s control.¹⁰⁵ Changing the process was not so easy, though, and the printing process was not brought on-site until 1791.¹⁰⁶

In 1783 Mr Barber, the clerk who oversaw the printing process, attended the Bank early each morning to collect the printing plates required for that day from the Bank’s Treasury and take them to Mr Cole’s. The paper for the process was delivered separately by Mr Thompson, the second cashier. This was done at the start of each month, and it was Thompson’s decision as to how much paper should be made available and what denomination notes were required.¹⁰⁷ Both men traveled more than a mile from the Bank to the printer’s and followed a route that took them past Field Lane, a notoriously dangerous area.¹⁰⁸ Yet, they seem to have made this journey each working day with no additional oversight or accompanying security. The printer, Mr Cole, employed three men to do this work, which took place in a room in his house. Mr Barber’s role for the rest of the day was to watch this process and not let the plates out of his sight until the printers were done, which was usually around three in the afternoon. At this point Mr Barber returned the plates to the Bank.

Additional security was no more in evidence for the men who worked at the Exchequer. Three Bank clerks went there each day ‘to pay & receive Monies issued or brought in there for the use of the Government’.¹⁰⁹ One aim of this book is to understand the interconnections between the Bank, the state and the public at the level of day-to-day processes and not just at the level of politics and high-stakes lending. The work at the Exchequer was one element of this. It shows the Bank as manager of the state’s finances in the most mundane of ways, essentially providing cashier services and means of payment to ensure that the business of government could continue. Mundane though this work was, the sums involved were significant. One of the three clerks who attended the Exchequer went early to the Bank each day to withdraw sums in notes ranging ‘from 50 to £100,000’, in Exchequer bills usually between £500,000 and £2 million and the rather more paltry sum of £1,000 to £2,000 in ready money.¹¹⁰ After the clerk signed for all this, notes, bills and cash were put into a ‘small Tin Chest to which there is a padlock’ and conveyed through the streets to the Exchequer.¹¹¹ Once at the Exchequer, the Bank clerks operated alongside government-appointed clerks to support the business of revenue collection and government payments to contractors and suppliers.

As those men were leaving the Bank, others were arriving to take up their places in the various offices. Their punctuality was required and lateness was noted. Matthias Alcock, the principal door-keeper, told the Inspectors that he kept an ‘Appearance Book’ in which he drew a line at ten minutes after nine every morning to indicate those clerks who did not arrive on time.¹¹² Alcock also made a note of any clerks who were sick or absent for other reasons but was reliant on the clerks themselves for this information.¹¹³ The first task for the men arriving before 9:00 A.M. would have been to locate the relevant keys. Some had been taken home in men’s pockets, but others were stored at the Bank. The key to the iron chest, and for which there was no duplicate, had to be collected from the lodging of the chief accountant, ‘who returns it to whichever Clerk attends earliest the next morning, for him to deliver the Bills to the Bill Office’.¹¹⁴ In order to be ready to receive customers in the banking hall and other customer-facing areas of the Bank, the clerks and porters then needed to retrieve ledgers and notes from where they had been stored overnight. They might also have collected stationery as well as ‘paper, pens, Ink, packthread, little books, wax & wafers’.¹¹⁵ The clerk who issued the stores took ‘signatures in a book (for pens only) of such Clerks as come for them’.¹¹⁶ The pens and ink made available for the use of customers in the banking hall would also have been replenished.

The in-tellers who worked in the Pay Hall were obliged to collect ‘every morning from the warehouse such a number of Bank Notes as it is expected may be called for, these, together with their bags, deposited in the warehouse the night before’.¹¹⁷ The nature of their business, and the fact that they had to be ready for the arrival of customers at 9:00 A.M., meant that their supervisor Mr Campe was in the office regularly by 8:30 A.M.¹¹⁸ Campe was probably one of the first senior men to arrive at the Bank each morning. Account books and ledgers were brought out from the safes and cupboards in which they had been lodged overnight. The chest which contained the discounted bills was unlocked so as to be ready for use at 9:00 A.M.¹¹⁹ In the Transfer Offices, the ledgers were so large and unwieldy that they were taken out of the strong room by the watchmen before they finished their shifts and placed in the relevant offices around six or seven in the morning.¹²⁰

As a precaution against fire, overnight duplicates of the stock and debt transfers made each day were sent out of the Bank every evening and taken to the house of Edward Payne, one of the directors. It was the job of the porters to retrieve them each day and return them to the relevant offices.¹²¹ The primary ledgers in which the Bank’s work was recorded were also returned from the overnight storage in the strong room. The General Ledger, the Treasury book and the Exchequer book (the book in which the delivery of Exchequer bills was recorded) were taken out by the watchmen and then sat exposed in the Accountants Office until Mr Edwards, the deputy accountant, arrived to take charge of them.¹²²

Edwards’s time of arrival in the office is not recorded, but, being one of the senior men, he likely was not in the office before 9:00 A.M. and probably often after. It was predominantly the junior men who prepared the Bank for the day. The rhythms and routines by which this process occurred were undoubtedly so familiar to the clerks as to require very little thought. The risks of those routines, the lapses in security, the ledgers left in unoccupied offices for much of the early morning and a lack of oversight by the senior men were clearly little considered before the Inspection. The Inspectors, however, were quick to recognise where procedures might be improved, and, as we shall see in the following chapters, the question of what responsibilities the senior men should take was returned to a number of times.¹²³

By 9:00 A.M., the area around the Bank and the institution itself would have been a hive of activity. London would have been filling with people with business to attend to, and the Bank sat at the heart of its commercial district. Within the Bank’s walls, clerks would have been occupying their designated spaces in the offices ready to start work for the day and customers would have been starting to arrive in the banking hall. The early-morning routines set up the business of the Bank on a mundane and practical level. It has been shown how much needed to be prepared before the institution opened for the day. But those routines also set the scene for engagement in orderly and polite commercial exchange. The following chapters will show that the performance of virtuous banking was just as important as practical routines of the Bank’s business.