11-17-60 Manchester Moss Side

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CONTENT WARNING

1960S ATTITUDES TO RACIAL GROUPS

Martins Bank’s Moss Side branch is inherited from the amalgamation in 1919 of the Palatine Bank with the Bank of Liverpool and Martins. The ethos of the Palatine was simple, to provide somewhere safe for the small savings of ordinary people. You can read a little more about this on our BROOKS’S BAR page. The whistle-stop tour of Manchester Branches by Martins Bank Magazine in 1967 stops once again (and again all too briefly) at Moss Side. Nevertheless, the following article gives an incredible account of life in this part of Manchester. As you read the article below, we would ask you to remember that in the 1960s, attitudes to race and social class are quite different from those of today…

In this part of Manchester, the fine old houses of the former gentry have become clubs, flats, and crumbling dwellings for the mixed population stretching into a sprawl of terraced streets which spreads to the east and south until halted by Alexandra Park. At the centre of all this stands Moss Side Branch with a beguiling air of quiet respectability.

This Building in Service: pre 1919 until 30 April 1973

Image © Barclays Ref: 0033-0367

A murder was committed a quarter of a mile away, and another attempted within 100 yards of the branch. Indians, Pakistanis, Lebanese, Chinese and West Indians form the bulk of the population, and the business ethics and personal habits of some do not always endear themselves to worthy Mancunians. Moss Side Branch is a tough school for any banker, and those who seek only the more sheltered big branch life would be well advised to resign if a transfer to 92 Princess Road seems imminent. On second thoughts they might enjoy a spell there, for life is never dull. A foreign national did £100 worth of damage, trying to drive his car through the front door, and through lack of experience, the same amount getting out again. It has been “broken and entered”. It has magnetic properties for dust and dirt and for strange people whose conception of banking is borrowing somehow, or anyhow. We must relate the story of the coloured gentleman who persuaded the bus conductor to allow him to place a sack of coke beneath the bus stairs: while collecting fares on the upper deck, the conductor heard laughter from the passengers below and saw through the back window the coke owner pedalling a bike frantically in order to keep his property in sight on the journey home. That at least gives some indication of the need for “an understanding of people” a term accepted glibly as a “must” for all budding bankers, sometimes with too little understanding of all the implications. Moss Side branch will be demolished for road widening, but somebody should write a book about it….



*Mr H A Paersch* *Manager* *1922 to 1944*	*Mr H Beeby* *Clerk in Charge* *1956 to 1958*	*Mr G G North* *Clerk in Charge* *1958 to 1965*	*Mr H Prime* *On the Staff* *1959 to 1962*	*Mr F Sharples* *Clerk in Charge* *1965 to 1968*	*Miss G K Fielding* *On the Staff* *1967*



*Mr C J Walsh* *On the Staff* *1967*	*Miss J Simpson* *On the Staff* *1967*	*Mr E J Mellor* *On the Staff* *1967*	*Miss P L Skilling* *On the Staff* *1967*	*Mr P W Manuel* *Clerk in Charge* *1968 onwards*