11-67-60 Otley Wharfedale Auction Mart

The 107TH Annual Report of Martins Bank Limited, lists Otley’s Wharfedale Auction Mart sub-Branch for the very first time. These are the days when the business of the Bank is expanding rapidly, and it is of course a far cry from today’s banking scene, where it is sad to think that internet banking and shopping has all but killed off the wonderful human contact once so purposefully fostered by some of Martins Bank’s smallest branches.

Once the hub of the village, amenities such as the corner shop, post office and bank have spent more than thirty years in slow but steady decline. What life you could witness, and what gossip you could hear at one time, from the farmers and other customers at places like Wharfedale Auction Mart, now seems lost forever, buried under the anonymity of the information super-highway. Shame on us indeed…

In Service: 9 May 1938 until 29 November 1971