The Pre-Tech Office 1: Behind the banking desk in the historic 1960s

What was it like to work in a pre-tech office in the 1960s, almost completely without mechanical or electronic aids of any sort? In this two-article series, I hope to provide a glimpse into small-office systems and methods in the period 1960s and 1970s, two of the most significant decades as we moved from near-Dickensian technology to the first viable small computers for the average business. So just what was it like back in 1960?

Today marks the 52nd anniversary of Britain’s transition from the old “pounds, shillings and pence” duodecimal currency system to the new decimal currency where, instead of 240 pence to the pound, we make do with just 100. We wuz shortchanged, as they said at the time. Today, was Decimal Day, 15 February 1971, and to mark the occasion, we are reproducing an updated version of this pre-tech office article which appeared twelve years ago in Macfilos.

Pre-Tech Office: Getting things done

Most readers will have very little idea of the pre-tech office, the world before computers, and can hardly imagine the primitive tools available to the office worker of 1960. While David Allen hadn’t honed his Getting Things Done philosophy, we did have systems. Still, they were based on age-old techniques involving card indexes, lots of heavy-bound books and ledgers and complex cross-referencing. They worked up to a point, but we spent hours and days doing what a computer can now do in a few seconds. And like all manual systems (and sometimes even some modern computerised applications), they were subject to the GIGO principle — garbage in, garbage out. It was all very labour-intensive, and I was part of the labour.

I had hands-on experience in office work for 45 years, first as a humble clerk in a bank, then in a more exciting role as a journalist for a weekly motorcycle magazine, and finally as the owner of a successful London-based communications agency. This is, therefore, a very personal view of office life.

Back in the late ‘fifties, straight from school, I was a thin, nervous youth working in a small branch of the National Provincial Bank in Lancashire. It was a grim old place that hadn’t changed much in a hundred years. There were rows of high, sloping mahogany desks with a raised bottom edge to stop the enormous bound ledgers from slipping off. Sitting on the high stool in front of the ledger, I felt empathy for Bob Cratchit in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

I was “Evans”, or if the senior staff members were feeling particularly benevolent, “Young Evans”. The service counter was a free and open space where cashiers (tellers in the US) stood on one side (no chairs) and faced the customers over a simple flat desk about three-feet deep. No security precautions appeared to be necessary back then.

Everyone in the bank was equipped with an impressive array of rubber stamps with bank name and address, sundry statements of fact (PAID, FILED) and the all-important branch stamp with an adjustable date, which was the essential imprimatur for any paid cheque or credit slip. These were the tools of our trade, alongside pencils, steel dip-in pens, paperclips, filing strings (a short length of string with metal T bars at either end for holding papers together) and the mechanical stapler. Undoubtedly, however, the most important ingredient was the human brain which was used for all calculations.

Pre-Tech Office: The telephone

The sole nod to modernity in our branch was a TELEPHONE which sat at the back of the office in a large mahogany cubicle styled on an old-fashioned red phone kiosk. This antique instrument, definitely pre-WWII, sported a large white bakelite lever which switched the line through to the single extension in the manager’s office. When it rang via a large external bell on the roof of the kiosk, whoever was nearest would rush into the cubicle and take the call. None of us juniors was very familiar with the telephone because we didn’t have one at home. The carefully guarded instrument was a very advanced and important means of communication and was paid extreme deference.

As a new boy, coming from an outer suburb where phones had no dial and you had to pick up the “receiver” and ask the operator for a number, I was at first flummoxed by the dial on the office phone. On the rare occasions I visited a telephone kiosk, I was used to picking up the receiver and asking an operator for the number. An instruction course was quickly arranged.

That was the sum of our mechanisation, apart from a single pre-war Royal typewriter which was used for the manager’s dunning letters and for copying customer statements from the handwritten ledgers onto pre-printed statement forms. It was my job to type the statements, and I’m eternally grateful for this because I became a competent and fast typist. There’s nothing like typing a copy of a hand-written ledger on a page of statement paper while the customer is waiting impatiently at the counter. It needs nerves of steel and a ready eraser (called a rubber in Britain) to correct the frequent typos. Most statements I produced were a disgrace to the bank, but it was all we knew.

Pre-Tech Office: The manual typewriter

Our solitary Royal typewriter sat on a desk at the back of the banking hall. This was well before viable small computers capable of “word processing” were thought of. We knew about computers at the time, of course, but we called them electronic brains, and only the largest companies could afford the millions of pounds they were rumoured to cost.

We sat in the tony staff room reading stories of the latest electronic brains that filled a whole room and worked wonders of calculation. All we could imagine was they were enormous adding machines; the very idea of being able to use them for typing letters, manipulating photographs or for project management was in the realm of science fiction. The spreadsheet was still more than 20 years away.

No, in our little world, it was the human brain that reigned supreme.

We didn’t even have an adding machine, still less a comptometer or one of those enormous mechanical NCR accounting machines which bigger bank branches could employ. Mechanical “adding machines” were complicated and very expensive because of the old British duodecimal currency system (more on that later). There was also a sneaking suspicion that using such aids would lead to brain atrophy and an eventual inability to add up a column of figures.

Everything we did was done the hard way, by hand and nimbleness of brain cells. I would sit on my high stool before the ledger, entering cheques and credit slips into individual customer accounts. Dip-in pen and ink were obligatory. Ballpoint pens, which had been around for about ten years, were strictly banned as being too modern, messy and ugly in output. Woebetide Young Evans if he blotched a balance or mangled a payee.

After entering all this stuff, it was necessary to list all the customers’ balances on a large cash sheet and ensure the total tallied with yesterday’s balance plus all the credits and minus all the debits. It never did, of course, and many hours were spent checking accounts one by one. If the books didn’t balance, we had to stay until they did. Many times I left for the 20-mile journey home at 11 pm, hungry and miserable. Worse, if the day’s discrepancy exceeded £5, this was a cue for a visit by a bank inspector the day after.

Pre-Tech Office: Adding in Pounds, Shillings and Pence

In those days, we were still working in the old duodecimal currency that continued its ten-century run until “Decimal Day” in 1971. That year, on 15 February, our current decimal system was introduced — 100 pence to one pound. Convenient, of course, and the conversion came just in time for Britain to take advantage of the computerised world of the late century.

In 1960, though, we still had pounds, shillings and pence. There were twelve pennies to a shilling, twenty shillings to a pound, or 240 pennies to a pound. Our long lists of balances were “cast” or calculated manually.

First, all the pennies had to be added from the third column and divided by twelve. The odd pence were entered as a total while the shillings were carried over to the middle column.

The total tally of shillings was then mentally divided by twenty, with anything up to 19 remaining as a total in the centre column. The pounds were then added to the first column.

A grand total would be something like £723 1s 9d. It sounds incredibly laborious, and it was, especially if, as often happened, the sheet didn’t balance and had to be rechecked. Imagine the list on the right extending to 60 or more lines instead of just six.

None of these methods had changed in hundreds of years. Everything had to be done by pen and brain. It’s surprising, though, how automatic it became to add up long lists of the old £ s d*.  I can still do it rapidly and fairly accurately, despite not having needed the skill for 50 years. I suppose it’s like swimming or riding a bicycle.

Pre-Tech Office: Filing systems

What about archival routines?  Well, it was again my job to sort all the day’s “vouchers” (cheques and credit slips) into alphabetical order by customer. Then I would combine the daily piles into one large monthly stack, which was parcelled in thick brown paper (with string and sealing wax because we didn’t have adhesive tape) and “filed” in the boiler room beneath the banking hall.

This boiler room, next to the strong room, was a veritable hell. Many sweaty days were spent down there searching for a particular cheque, sometimes from the 1920s or 30s, to settle one legal argument or another. Having located the particular brown-paper parcel and performed an autopsy, we mostly threw the dismembered packets to the back of the pile. As a result, chaos reigned, and the next seeker after that particular month was doomed.

Despite all this, working in the bank was fun. We certainly didn’t know any better ways to do things, and we worked exactly as our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers had done.

Pre-Tech Office: Journalism

Later, early in the 1960s, I gave up “banking” and moved to London to become a journalist, a far more perilous calling. I was told that I was a fool for risking such a secure career on a whim. As it happened, it proved to be the start of my real career. Incidentally, in a link with today’s Macfilos blog, I had the pleasure of working at the Motor Cycle’s office in Dorset House, Waterloo, with that famous photographer Don Morley who remains a regular reader of the blog.

It was all very exciting to be able to ride and test all the latest motorcycles. But the office wasn’t much of an improvement on the bank and really hadn’t changed since the first issue in 1903. Much of our time was spent behind the typewriter rather than behind the handlebars of a Triumph Bonneville.

Instead of one ancient telephone, though, we had several ancient telephones on several ancient desks. My own phone at last! I felt empowered.  And we had a large collection of prewar manual typewriters on which I could further hone my communication skills (all of which was good preparation for the computer age to come).

That was as far as it went with mechanisation. Copy for publication was typed on flimsy paper, with a carbon copy kept for reference, and sent down to the compositors in the adjacent (highly unionised, out-of-bounds) print works. There, our gems were spewed out in hot metal on a Linotype machine, and rough prints were sent back in long strips, called galleys, for correction. All was extremely laborious and low-tech.

Pre-Tech Office: Keeping in touch

Communications hadn’t changed in 50 years. We had telephones, telegrams and postage stamps. Copy from remote sporting events was phoned in on a Sunday evening by assorted hacks. I would sit at the typewriter with a 1930s Bakelite headset on my ears, typing the reports and voicing queries into the large speaking trumpet. Errors abounded, but no one seemed to notice.

Even getting materials such as photographs around the country was fraught with difficulties. No UPS office around the corner in those days: The Royal Mail had a monopoly in matters of moving things around, and they did it with a bad grace. On one occasion, I remember, our entire reportage of a major road race in the Isle of Man was in jeopardy because of a strike by ferry workers. Unfortunately, I was responsible for getting the negatives to London in just a few hours.

I solved it by contacting a sister publication, The Racing Pigeon, the editor of which journal kindly despatched a fast bird to the island ahead of the strike. The energetic avian carried the precious negatives back to London, where I retrieved them from the rooftop pigeon loft at The Coo Press Ltd. We beat the opposition to the newstands, and I learned a good lesson in good communication which stood me in good stead during my career in public relations.

Office work in the 1960s (or 1920s or 1850s) was a labour-intensive operation involving inkwells, steel pens, monster ledgers, carbon paper (and that’s a whole separate subject, worthy of an article in its own right), blotting paper and lots of string and sealing wax.

It was in this world that I took the step, in 1968, to start my own public relations business, a one-man band in a small office in Mayfair, London. I met the clients, wrote their press releases, duplicated them onto headed paper, collated and folded the sheets and manually addressed envelopes to newspapers, periodicals and freelance writers. I was head cook and bottle washer, but better times were approaching. In 1970 we were at the dawn of the new age in office management.

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* The abbreviations £ s d (or “ell-ess-dee”) stood for pounds, shillings (20 to the pound) and pence (240 to the pound, 12 to the shilling). The d comes from the Latin denarius or penny. Since decimalisation, the abbreviation for penny has been the more logical p which has become a “pee” in general conversation. Sensible people eschew the “pee” and stick to penny and pence.

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Click here to read about all the old print and journalism vocabulary, which is all but gone

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