Kindly shared by Robert Andrews

My memories of changeover day. I was trainee securities clerk at Brigg branch in Lincolnshire, having been transferred there the previous November.

I think it was one of the last branches in the country to be computerised, not even punch taped at that stage, so all manual. I don’t remember any particular issues happening, so it must have gone smoothly.

Around that time I remember savings accounts being merged into deposit accounts and all the savings boxes being boxed up and sent away for destruction. I was still living at home in York then and as Brigg was 50 miles distant, I stayed in digs during the week with a wonderful old lady called Miss Edlington for £5 per week including meals. I was her final lodger. She had started taking evacuees in during the war. She told me that she had once travelled to Doncaster and she’d been to Grimsby but had never been further afield in her life. Sadly she died the year after I got married and left.

My salary then as a grade 2 clerk was £817pa. About £11500 equivalent now according to the B of E. Yes the pay was poor but made up by a non contributory pension scheme, which I enjoy now and a cheap mortgage and at 4 times salary, at a time when mortgages generally could be hard to get.

We bought our first house the following year; a 3 bed semi for £4250! On 8th March I would start my 6 weeks securities course at Leeds training branch in Aquis House and on 10 March I got engaged to my now wife of 48 years. It seems like yesterday.

I remember the postal strike, who could forget Tom Jackson and his magnificent moustache. That’s when the banks internal post system was started, as the postal strike lasted for weeks.

Great times remembered with affection.

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Newsletter 23

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