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MARTINS BANK MAGAZINE

Our cover photograph for November 2026 is WEST BROMWICH, a branch that underwent a lavish upgrade sixty years ago. By this point in the history of the modern day Martins Bank, everything looked to be on the up for our bank, successful, memorable and eye-catching advertising, supported by a new “in-house” style for product leaflet and branch campaigns showed how modern Martins was. Just three years earlier the bank celebrated 400 years of service at the site of the Grasshopper in Lombard Street London. The later amalgamations with the Bank of Liverpool and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Bank put Martins on a course of expansion that made it attractive to other banks looking to acquire more business. By November 1968, the wrinkles of such a deal had been ironed out, and Martins Bank began its one year transition into Barclays, providing them with seven hundred and thirty branches across England, Wales, The Channel islands and the Isle of Man…

You are very welcome – as always – to Martins Bank Archive – and to MARTINS BANK MAGAZINE, our monthly news page in honour of the staff magazine that charted so well the social history of the bank at its staff between 1946 and 1969. The magazine brought news of changing times, new branches, new services and new technologies to the staff of the bank that will always be known for going to extremes to be helpful . From the earliest banking COMPUTERS, to DRIVE-IN BRANCHES and the first CASH MACHINES in the North of England, Martins rode high on the wave of the 1960s boom. The doors of Martins Bank closed on 12 December 1969, to be re-opened on Monday 15 December as Barclays Bank. Despite the wholesale cull of branch banking the 2000s, there are still SIX original Martins Bank Branches open as at 1 November 2026…

IN THE NEWS…

OUT IN LIVERPOOL – the story of Martins Bank’s contribution to computer banking is told in a fascinating article

MODERN MOOCH – we take a mooch around the social history web site that features some of Martins’ best buildings

ANIMALS AND CHILDREN – from Children’s Savings habits, to a whole menagerie of animal used in advertising!

TREASURE TROVE – This year’s finds for which, as always, we thank our eagle-eyed visitors and former Martins Bank staff

PERMANENT RECORD – It’s been on the site for months, but people are still fascinated by the uncovering of the Martins name all over the country.

OUT IN LIVERPOOL

The history, heritage and culture of Liverpool are celebrated in unique and lovingly crafted articles on the social history web site OUT IN LIVERPOOL. We were delighted to be able to supply them with archive information and pictures to help them tell the story of the contribution made by Martins Bank to computerized banking. This began in the late 1950s, when, having been pipped to the post by the Westminster Bank to the opening of a DRIVE-IN branch, the directors and senior management of Martins turned their attention to the race to be first to experiment and demonstrate the use of computers for everyday branch banking needs. In the ten years leading up to the merger with Barclays, much hard work and innovation – not least the use of the bank’s own staff to write computer programs – took place at Martins’ computer centres in Liverpool and London. One piece of programming, called BRANCH ACCOUNTING, conceived and written by Martins Bank Staff, was keenly adopted by Barclays, and parts of it were still in use on the bank’s mainframe into the early 2000s. You can read “When Liverpool helped pioneer Computer Banking” by clicking on the Out in Liverpool logo above.

MODERN MOOCH

We are delighted to say that our friends at Modern Mooch have dedicated a page of their fascinating social history web site to Martins Bank, and in particular to some of the more modern building used by the bank before its demise. Modern Mooch showcases buildings of general and architectural interest, and visitors to the site share their opinions and memories of these buildings in online forums and chats across several social media platforms including Instagram®. You can read their Article – “Martins Banks and Modernity” by clicking on the MODERN MOOCH logo above .

ANIMALS AND CHILDREN

Martins Bank’s connection with a zoo full of animals, and a range of products for its younger customers, is a topic we have neglected for a year or two, so it is worth reminding our visitors of some of the amazing visuals that remain to remind us of the variety of furry friends on show from the post-war era, and in particular the advertising campaigns of the mid to late 1960s. At a point where Martins Bank already had the confidence and the experience to establish many banking “firsts” – the cash machine, cheque guarantee cards, computers, drive-in branches, customer stationery in the Welsh language, not to mention a major programme of new and refurbished branches, their advertising developed a quirkiness that perfectly fitted the “swinging” sixties. Long before the iconic image of the little girl taking her elephant “Rufus” to the bank, Martins was already no stranger to visits from animals (real and imaginary) and their owners to its branches. Ranee the tiger often accompanied her owner to do his banking at CHESTER-LE-STREET branch, whilst a local cat at ALSTON Cumberland Branch visited the branch daily to play with the typewriter! Children’s favourite character Sooty has his own account at GUISELEY branch, and celebrated his twenty-first birthday there with his friend and right-hand man Mr Harry Corbett, and the branch Manager Mr Baxter. Whether for the first or the umpteenth time, we are sure you will be delighted to visit these stories of ANIMALS AND CHILDREN at Martins Bank…

TREASURE TROVE

2026 has been an excellent year for new finds, whether physical or digital, and we are particularly delighted to have found a whole host of photographs including some of branches, one of them for a branch that until this year we had all but given up hope of finding an image. An Archive is like history itself, it unfolds slowly but surely, and in the seventeen years we have been online, not to mention the thirty-eight year existence of our collections, we never say never, as someone somewhere always seems to come up trumps with something we never imagined still existed. Whether this is in person, through the relative of a deceased member of staff, members of the pensioner staff who are still thriving and still going to extremes to be helpful, or the ever useful internet auction sites, we are grateful and humbled to be able to tell the story of a bank and more importantly its people.

Miss (DEPUTY) Tulipland

You just never know what might be lurking in your collection of old photographs or transparencies, at the bottom of that drawer that hasn’t been opened for many a year! We would therefore urge you to look, just in case a Martins Bank related image is amongst your treasures. We were delighted to acquire this fabulous colour transparency from 1967, showing the very first Miss Deputy Tulipland – Vivienne Brown – on her victory parade through the town of SPALDING Lincolnshire. She gives a regal wave, as the carnival float, absolutely drowning in tulips, drives not only past an admiring crowd, but more importantly for us, past Martins Bank’s Spalding Branch. Amongst many categories coving the social history of that part of Lincolnshire – known as South Holland – our friends at www.heritagesoutholland.co.uk have created a fabulous retrospective of the many Flower Parades and carnival queens that took place in that area over a number of decades.

Captain Raymond Creer

March saw a set of personal photographs for sale on an internet auction site that turned out to have belonged to Martins Bank’s former Ainsdale Manager Raymond F Creer. Ray Creer’s brainchild was “Finance for Farmers and Growers”, the annual booklet published by Martins, and later Barclays, from 1955 until 1990. His wife Beryl was the first woman to receive a managerial appointment in the Bank, and the photographs include several pictures of Beryl at work, and of various sporting events which both Raymond and Beryl either supported or took part in. There is also this wonderful image of a production by Martins Bank Operatic Society from the late 1940s. We are delighted that this small but important collection of moments from the lives of two members of staff are now safely held in the Archive. We also hold significant photographs and papers from the careers of both, which has enabled us to record their progress through the Bank from when they joined as new entrants...

Austen Strang Jopling

Another amazing find came in the form of a set of letters and papers which was being auctioned on eBay. Recognising the importance of these items to the Archive, the Grasshopper Pensioners Club have kindly secured and donated them to us, and as befits a find of its size, plenty of scanning and recording of information is currently taking place! It concerns the Jopling Family - Mr William Ewart Jopling was made Staff Manager of the Bank of Liverpool and Martins in 1926, and there are several items relating to his career, pension and even his will, that help to enrich the information already held for him in our Staff Database. When he retired early on ground of ill-health in 1941, the Bank awarded him a pension equivalent to almost £90.000 in today’s money. There is a similar collection of documents relating to his son Austen Strang Jopling (pictured, right), many of which relate to his promotion to the managership of a number of branches. There is also one very special document which shows that in the Second World War, he undertook a number of “special duties” that granted him access to public offices and departments that were off limits to the general public. More on this particular story as soon as we can uncover the details!

KEEPING A PERMANENT RECORD

An unexpected result of the closure of former Martins Bank Branches in recent years, has been the sight of the Bank’s original signage still etched - sometimes faintly, others clear as day - in the stonework above the door or window of a branch. Friend of Martins Bank Archive, Robert Montgomery, has since 2009 been on a mission to photograph former branches of the big banks, that have fallen on their sword in the name of progress. In the process he has accumulated many images of former Martins Branches. Our ongoing mission will be to add these to our Branch Network pages over the coming months. A really good example is this side-by-side comparison of Liverpool Woolton Branch. On the left you see the branch in the 1960s, and on the (right, looking almost as if time has stood still for sixty years, you can see how the branch looked a couple of days after it was closed in June 2021...

Thank you for visiting our site, we hope to see you again soon!

Best regards, Jonathan

Westmorland and Furness Saturday 31ST October 2026

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