Alan Crosby looks at when our ancestors first opened bank accounts
Nowadays we hear a great deal about banks closing their branches. For generations, banks have been a familiar sight on our high streets, and an essential part of our personal financial affairs. In Britain banks emerged in the 18th century. They began as privately owned family businesses, whose existing wealth was invested for profit or lent out to bring in interest. Some of the names of these families are still with us – for example, the Barclays of Norwich were among the prominent financiers who became powerful and influential in the 1780s and 1790s. These Georgian banking houses only served the elite in British society; for the great majority of ordinary people a bank account was an impossible aspiration, and for many the idea simply never crossed their mind.
There was an important exception to this. By the early 19th century there was growing concern among social reformers about the ‘domestic economy’ of the working class, and their money management (or lack of it). The concept of ‘self-help’ was promoted in pamphlets and public meetings, proposing that careful husbanding of income by working people would allow them to save, and in turn those savings would be available for rainy days to come, seeing them through the difficult times. They might even allow them to progress socially and economically, climbing out of poverty and into respectability. It was a favourite theme of Victorian politicians and moralists.
Money could be saved by putting it in a box under the bed. Proverbially, French peasants kept their savings under the mattress, or even in it. But this was a hazardous strategy. The coins or banknotes could easily be lost or stolen. My mother used to tell how in the mid-1930s in a poor part of Manchester she and her brother and sister would save pennies and threepences for their holiday (a weekend at Rhyl in north-east Wales), putting them in a tin that stood on the scullery windowsill. The inevitable happened – somebody smashed the scullery window and stole the tin. Even more risky was temptation; if the money was saved at home, it was always there. Feeling the urgent need for a pint at the alehouse? Wearing shoes that had to be mended? No bread to feed the family? There was the money easily within reach, ready for spending.
Independently, several innovators argued that the working class needed acce
