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Bonfire
night has a knack of being drab and damp and, as this was the morning
after, the rain fell quietly, persistently, depressingly. It was a poor day
for visiting a new branch. The Elephant and Castle area has changed so much
as to be almost unrecognizable and, as yet, only one wide section of new
pavement has been laid: this is in front of our branch. Over the remaining
footwalks lay a thin coating of mud —unavoidable
with so much demolition and rebuilding. The modern front
of our new branch cheered us up.
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The Banking Hall
“The structure and planning inside
the
branch is highly original”
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The office is
sited in the clean new Ministry of Health building and has a nagged open
space and ornamental pool behind. The structure and planning inside the
branch is, as the picture shows, highly original and, after the initial
surprise, it grew on us—even the six
tubular lights which, if they were of differing lengths, might be a
temptation, musically, to anyone. Alas, we tried one with the handle of a
counter pen but found it lacking in 'ding': it merely went 'dunk' as if to
remind us that this, after all, is
a bank. We found, too, that our earlier depression had evaporated
but whether this was due to the brightness and spaciousness of the office
or the bubbling energy and enthusiasm of Mr E. J. Bartlett, our Manager,
is hard to say. He has a big task before him and no matter how many banks
may open in the new development area he is going to be a formidable rival
for not only is he a native of the district, as is his wife who joined us
for lunch, but prior to joining our staff he worked for the Southwark
Borough Council and so he knows his way around. He had very
kindly obtained for us some historical data from the Council regarding the
origin of the name Elephant and Castle and while there are no less than
seven possibilities including a mention by Shakespeare, the finding of a
supposed elephant's skeleton, and a romantic story of a refugee—the Infanta di Castello—from the Spanish Inquisition, all of
them—like the tubular lights above the counter—fail to ring true. One must
therefore accept the plain facts —that the junction of several main roads
brought custom and renown to the age-old Elephant and Castle hostelry and
that the 'elephant' with its armoured howdah, a common feature of war in
the Middle Ages, was adopted by the Cutlers' Company nearby as a sign in
connection with the ivory used by them in their products.
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 So it is all rather prosaic and utilitarian but then the
Elephant and Castle is just that—functional, down-to-earth, and
realistic—it has to be to survive—and Mr Bartlett seems to fit the pattern
very well. He entered the service in 1951 at Hanover Square
branch, moving to Ludgate Circus branch in 1955 and attending a Domestic
Training Course last winter. His second-in-command, Mr E. G. Cole, entered
the service in 1949 and apart from two years with the R.A.O.C. has had all
his experience in London District branches with a Domestic Training Course
during the winter of 1960-61. The other members of the staff are Mr R. J.
Allen, who joined the staff at Bruton Street branch in 1959, coming to the
new office when it opened, and Miss A. M. Lamb, a cheerful young lady who
has previously spent three years at Tottenham Court Road branch. This branch opened on 8th August and is the last of the new branches to be
opened and visited this year. We did
not leave it to the end deliberately but we are very glad that, on such an
unpropitious day in a rather uninspiring district. we found all the
enthusiasm and confidence that we have come to expect in our pioneer
branches.
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