Open Writing

At this time, I worked in the City of London at the Trustee Department of the National Provincial Bank, 1 Princes Street, EC1. This branch of the Bank was situated, or sandwiched between, the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street and the headquarters of the Midland Bank at 1 Poultry, leading on to Cheapside.

Every morning of the week and three Saturdays out of four I would travel by rail to London from the suburbs via the District Line, emerging at Bank underground station, which luckily had an outlet on the comer of Princes Street.

The City at that time was still an extended ruin where the blitz of the early forties had left a skeletal, drab, London cityscape with large expanses of open ground that had become a haven for a variety of birds, butterflies in season and abandoned feral cats; grass and wild flowers had taken hold on the rubble in a surprisingly effective manner. One of my Bank colleagues collected twenty-odd different wild flowers during a lunch-time break. Where the Barbican buildings now stand there was a vast open space which stretched north as far as the eye could see.

Many of the pre-World War II mores and manners were still in force in the City, in that I was required to sit a competitive examination, both oral and written, before being offered a post by the Bank.

The General Manager of the Trustee Department, Mr Pierce, would enter the Bank promptly at 8.45 a.m. every working morning and he cut a splendid figure indeed in his bowler hat (removed on entry), black jacket, striped trousers, briefcase and, on rainy days, a furled umbrella and beige coloured spats - rather in the style of Captain Mainwaring of "Dad's Army".

All male City clerical staff of a certain position wore this outfit, as could be seen when the offices disgorged hundreds of employees between 5.00 and 5.30 p.m. to disappear down the Tube or hurry on to Cannon Street, Fenchurch Street or London Bridge stations.

We women clerks, young or old, who worked in the Trustee Department were known jointly as "Mr Pierce's Young Ladies" for we were required to wear hat and gloves at all times out of the office. No member of staff was permitted to speak to Mr Pierce until spoken to first; one newly appointed "Young Lady" had the temerity to say "Good moming" to him and was reprimanded by a supervisor for using behaviour that was "bad form" (reader, it was I).

The business of the Trustee Department was the proving of wills where the Bank had been appointed executor and my duties, as a Lady Clerk Grade 2, were to write up the trust ledgers and prepare Final Accounts that were later printed and sent to legatees. I worked for three of around twenty qualified solicitors employed by the Bank to administer the trusts and wills allocated to them. I also, like Mr Pierce, entered the Bank promptly at 8.45 a.m. and took a lift to the first floor, where a dated ledger lay open on the reception counter, and signed my name and time of arrival.

At 9.00 a.m. precisely a red line was drawn across the page with a black, tubular, ebony 12 inch ruler by one of the Bank Messengers who were also clothed in an impressive outfit, but they wore a top hat and not a bowler when out of the office. All employees that signed in under the red line were late and would proceed to the supervisor to apologise and give an excuse, which was tricky because the failure of the transport system or bad weather, such as the thick pea-souper fogs which were then frequent in winter months, were not acceptable as excuses. The penalty was loss of Saturday leave.

All Bank clerks at that time were issued with black, ebony rulers, as mentioned above, and they had many uses besides being easy to roll down a ledger page when drawing lines in accounts - they were also used as good paper-weights and fly zappers and, when a member of staff retired, the whole department would bang rulers on desks while the leaver walked the length of the office and out of the door. These occasions were noisy but very moving.

When I married in 1954, the Bank gave me a lump sum payment which was termed a "dowry", for young married ladies were not encouraged to stay on at the Bank, although exceptions to this old rule were becoming more frequent.

Socially, the Bank catered for and encouraged all sports and activities. I was a member of the Bank Choir as a rather reedy but pitch-perfect soprano and we practised every Thursday evening at the Bank's Head Office at 15 Bishopsgate. Other social activities that we 'Young Ladies" took part in during the lunch period were swimming in St. Bride's Pool up near Fleet Street and, of course, window-shopping in Cheapside and St. Paul's Churchyard.

If a rumour spread that Etams or Richards, the ladies' clothiers, had nylon stockings for sale, there would be a hasty exit from the Bank at noon and a dash to join the queue, as such items were much coveted and in 1950 were in very short supply. Other days we would make haste up Bishopsgate, turn right and join others searching for nylons in Petticoat Lane. As a measure of how important nylon stockings (seamed) were to the office worker of fifty years ago, there was an old man who sat in the window of a shop in Moorgate, repairing runs in nylon and silk stockings, and women were well pleased with this service at one shilling per inch-run.

After work finished at 5.00 p.m., City workers in that pre-TV era would regularly move on "up West" to attend the theatre, Sadlers Wells or visit a cinema. In the year 1950 I can remember seeing the musical "Carousel" (twice) - Edmund Hockeridge was the male lead -and practically the whole of the Sadlers Wells repertory, both opera and ballet. It cost only half-a-crown to queue for the pit at "The Wells" where at 6.00 p.m. numbered tickets were isssed in order down the line, together with a small collapsible stool on which to sit and eat a packed supper and wait until the doors opened at 7.00 p.m.; although, once a numbered ticket had been obtained, queue members could leave the stool and go to a Lyons or ABC tea-shop for a hot beverage and then back to their place in the line.

At 7.00 p.m. the doors opened and after they had paid at the box-office there was a rush to the gallery to try for a seat "on the rail".

I rarely travel up to the City nowadays except to listen to some jazz at the Barbican or to research family history at the London Library, for although these trips up to "the smoke" are admittedly no longer smoky (Clean Air Act, 1954) I have become increasingly saddened at the way the vast open spaces of 1950 have been in-filled over the last fifty years.