|
  On Sunday 22 October 1961 Martins Bank takes delivery - at Clearing Department, 68 LOMBARD STREET London - of the latest “reader/sorter” technology, a piece of machinery
that will revolutionise the way customers’ vouchers are sorted into order for
processing to their accounts. At great
cost, the question of how to remove a significant chunk of monotonous work
from back office staff has finally been addressed. Whilst it will still be
many years before the widespread use of customer account numbers will start
to ease the work of the clearing banks, Martins has made a firm commitment to
technology, and there follows a period of tests during which a lot of work
will still need to be done to meet the challenges of the 1970s The government will soon give notice to
Britain’s Banks that by the time of DECIMALISATION in 1971, all branch
accounting procedures must be computerised.
For now, the IBM Reader/Sorter provides the first real chance to speed
up the clearing of cheques, and also another FIRST for Martins
Bank. On 25 April 1963, the day chosen to celebrate 400 years of Banking on
the site of The Grasshopper in Lombard street, the Chairman of Martins Bank,
Sir John Nicholson, makes the following announcement to assembled staff and
national newspaper editors in the board room at 68 Lombard Street:
“I can now announce that within the
last two weeks, we have introduced a new operational system which is a major
step forward in clearing operations for cheques on a country-wide basis, and
we understand we are the first to operate such a system outside the USA. We are working on developments to marry the
current account and the clearing operations in order to provide an integrated
accounting system in which we can see, for the future, advantages to our
customers, as well as to ourselves”
The future arrives – on the fourth floor…
Between the
arrival of the Reader/Sorter in October 1961, and the the first regularl
processing of cheques in April 1963, Martins Bank’s Organisation Research and
Development Department pulls out all the stops to make the system work
effectively. What what exactly does
the future look like, when it first arrives on the fourth floor of 68 Lombard
street? These rare pictures from the
Ron hindle Estate show that it was actually quite a spectacle for anyone who
happened to be walking down Lombard Street on that particular October Sunday
Morning. Shown here for the first time
are several shots of the action showing just how mammoth a task it is to
deliver an IBM Reader Sorter.
|
Is that an enormous upright piano on a crane?
(you hum it, i’ll play it)…,
Phew – inside the building at last, and
ready to slide down the ramp
|
The machine heads towards a specially
constructed ramp atop the scaffolding.
Easy does it.
The reader/sorter is
worth thousands, so don’t drop it
|
At this point we can only imagine everyone
looking through their fingers
Parts one and two, side by side, to be joined
for years of happy sorting.
|
|
|
Images ©
Martins Bank Archive Collections - Ron Hindle Estate
|
|
|
Huge sighs of relief as cheques
are finally read
and sorted
|
The two halves
of the Reader/Sorter are now joined, and the two halves of Martins Bank’s
Computer Operations are coming closer, but are not yet completely
together. The LIVERPOOL
COMPUTER CENTRE and and
two branches – Heywoods in Liverpool and South Audley Street in London are
equipped to enable experimentation with processing the day’s work of these
branches using PEGASUS. Lombard
Street Clearing Department uses the IBM Reader Sorter to speed up its
clearing operations, and our new and state of the art LONDON
COMPUTER CENTRE will
arrive in 1966. At this point, a susbstantial plan to automate thirty-six
of the London Branches will stretch the new technology to new limits, and
see the transmission of data down telephone lines.
For such a
determined foray into the future, the arrival of the IBM Reader Sorter
technology is given a rather low-key mention in Martins Bank Magazine under
“London District News”. Perhaps this
serves to remind everyone that Martins’ Head Office is in Liverpool, and
that London is like any other outpost of the bank!
|
|
|
|
|
|
London District News…
 Simultaneously with
last year's move into computer operation, though for the time being it is a
separate exercise, the Bank has installed its first automatic cheque sorter
in the Clearing Department in London. This machine can read for itself the
identity of the branches on which cheques are drawn and sorts the cheques
accordingly. It is unable to read ordinary printed matter, however, and
consequently the branch code numbers (and later on other data) have to be
printed in special characters using a magnetisable ink. In due course the
cheque sorters will join up with the computer to provide a fully automatic
system of accounting. Before this can be done it will be necessary to encode
the account identity and the amount in the special characters referred to.
When this can be provided the cheque sorters will be able to read and pass to
a computer all the information that is needed for the maintenance of
accounts.
|
