Now I know my ABC…

How did an idealistic, slightly naive, vaguely progressive young man of Thatcher’s Britain end up working for a Bank?

It’s a very good question, well I think it is. The simple and most obvious answer is “money”. I was fed up with being broke or nearly broke, and graduate management training schemes offered great starting salaries and even better potential future salaries. Then there were the benefits. In a world, a time and a culture obsessed with owning your own home, employment with a bank offered cheap fixed-rate mortgages at a time when interest rates were high and extremely volatile. 

But there was more to it than that, at least from the perspective of 40 years I think there was. At that age I was still trying to please my parents, even if they didn’t know it and I didn’t know it. Even if I was hardly speaking to them at the time, some part of me was trying to do something they’d approve of. Furthermore banks in those days were still highly bureaucratic and employed tens of thousands of people in thousands of places across the UK and indeed the world. The Bank offered a form of security, not just financial, and not just for now, but the promise of a lifetime’s worth of stability.  That it proved to be an illusion and has all been swept away by the advance of technology and automation, I was not to know in 1987.

And dark green is my favourite colour.

I had taken part in the assessment centre at the Bank’s very opulent Management training centre in Kingswood in Surrey, back in March, and was offered a place a few weeks later. I accepted and was allocated a place at the Bank’s branch in Knightbridge, literally opposite Harrods. I rented a flat with some friends in Chiswick and on 1st September pitched up for my first day, in my first suit, with a rather fragile confidence.

Nobody had prepared me for how much the rest of the staff disliked graduate trainees. With varying degrees of animosity, which ranged from outright hostility, to mild disinterest, to a sort of jovial but friendly sarcasm, it soon dawned on me that the first lesson I had to learn was how to get people to like me, when they clearly didn’t. I heard stories of some graduates being exceptionally arrogant, as well as some who were “OK, you’re almost like one of us”, so you had to learn who you were dealing with pretty quickly. 

It’s hard to believe now, but the branch had well over 100 staff on its roster, in a variety of departments. First, in the processing room (called “the machine room” which I never questioned, but which now seems incredibly archaic, as if machines were something amazingly new),  as well as other various departments like “Foreign”, Cashiers, the Lending teams (yes plural), as well as people dealing with stocks and shares, safe deposits and the “general office”.

There were also a bank of cabinets filled with customer cheque books - still the main way by which people made payments in those days, and all used cheques were returned to their branch of origin every morning in the “waste” - I know it was an acronym but for what no one ever seemed to know. These all had to be filed away, and filed properly, given the thousands of customers the branch had. You never knew when someone would want a copy of a particular cheque, or who may turn up at the counter asking for a new book.

Then there were the Managers and their Secretaries, and of course there was a clear gender split there I’m sorry to say. The Senior Manager was a cross between something out of Monty Python and a character from a 1950s Peter Sellers’ film. Early on, I made the foolish mistake of addressing him by his first name, only to be suitably, but very politely, rebuked!

The junior Manager, who must have been in his late 30s was allocated to “supervise” me, which meant he might talk to me about once a month or so. Usually to criticise me or take me down a peg or three. He definitely didn’t like me very much.

A training plan had been drawn up for me, and for that first week, my tasks to make me into this amazing Manager that I aspired to be, consisted of three areas. In the morning I would be filing cheques and cheque books into alphabetical order.  This is not as simple as it sounds, and clearly the “system” had been devised to fool people like me, and reinforce the mantra that all graduates were useless. You may be thinking “how hard could it be?” But every branch had its own system, and you had to learn it quickly. For example how were McDonald and MacDonald to be filed? Double-barrelled names? Or the Irish or French O’ and D’ respectively. 

I heard stories from other trainees at other branches that they were sent over to Barclays to borrow the glass hammer, for straightening bank notes, only to be sent on to Nat West who had borrowed it that week. One colleague had also been sent to Midland Bank and told to ask for the long weight. He was told to sit in the corner and left for a couple of hours.

But the best joke played on me that first week was to put me on the Enquiries counter. Serving real, and very often angry customers who had random questions to be answered or resolved. Especially funny as I knew precisely nothing about everything. I suppose you could say it’s an excellent way to get people to learn and talk to other team members, but it’s also an excellent way to scare the living daylights out of new and aspiring managers and put them in their place. 

It wasn’t long before I was moved to other departments to learn what they did, some of them more interesting and fun than others. The machine room consisted mainly of operating the Encoding machine - a task I was never trusted with, so more alphabetical filing ensued.

I did spend about 4 months doing B & C (Bonds and Certificates) and B & P (Boxes and parcels), which involved a lot of dealings with the wealthier of the branch’s customers. Don’t be fooled though, we also had hundreds of customers who worked for Harrods, and at that time most of them seemed to be in debt or about to be in debt. It’s not all glamour in SW1!

One big thing I notice now, looking back on it, is that there was still a big drinking culture. Not during working hours, although some people might have couple of pints at lunch time. But definitely after work and certainly on a Friday. All of that has largely gone now, along with the smoking which still took place at people’s desks. 

I never got to serve on the Cashiers’ counter, partly because they were led by a very fierce person who refused to allow graduates anywhere near her tills. We caused too many problems apparently. But I did get to work on the Foreign exchange till, as well as dealing with Foreign business for our business customers arranging payments abroad and letters of credit. 

Once a week I toddled up to Moorgate to study for my Banking exams, which were quite dull to begin with but got a bit easier as I could relate them to more and more actual banking business. It’s where I learned to read a balance sheet and other financial statements, and would come in very handy later on when dealing with actual business customers. 

In subsequent years, the graduate schemes stopped doing this real-life immersive stuff, and the trainees never went near the sharp end of a branch. Obviously pros and cons, especially given the rapid rate of subsequent change. But the main thing it gave me was an empathy for the day-to-day roles of the people I subsequently managed. Again, I made many mistakes and it took me a long time to learn how to do it in a reasonably competent fashion, but at least by learning the alphabet every time I moved branches, I had some idea of the coal face!