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MARTINS
BANK’S ADVERTISING – THE 1920s |
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For most of
the 1920s, the Bank is known as the Bank of Liverpool and Martins Limited,
born of the amalgamation of the Bank of Liverpool, formed in 1831, and the
much older Martin’s (WITH an apostrophe) Private Bank, that traces its roots
to Elizabethan London, and the trading activities of Sir Thomas Gresham in
1563. With nearly 500 branches, the
Bank of Liverpool and Martins covers much of the Northern part of England,
but it is the addition of the branches of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Bank
in 1928, that sees the creation of Martins Bank Ltd, and a branch network
that can now earn sufficient profits for the Bank to embark on a massive
expansion.
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2 December 1929
Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer
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By 1969 the
number of branches will be almost double what it was in 1918, and every major
town and city in England, and many in North and South Wales, will have one or
more branches of Martins. To begin
with, the Bank’s Advertising is purely functional – to put facts and figures
in the public domain, at a time when banking is not something that is widely
understood by “the average man in the street”.
This is
one of the early advertisements for the new MARTINS BANK LIMITED and it
appears in the Hull Daily Mail on the morning of 4 December 1929, a couple of days after a
new branch is opened at Bridlington. It is unusual, because it crams a lot of
information into a small space - not
only details of the new Branch, but also the addresses of Head Office in
Liverpool, and the Principal London Office at Lombard Street, AND details of
the number of Martins Branches, and the services the Bank has to offer.
Later
decades will see a reduction in the number of “wordy” adverisements, in
favour of imagery – in this particular advert, we have only the Martins Coat
of Arms to break the monotony. |
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4 October 1924
Lancashire Evening Post |
24 May 1929 Hendon and Finchley Times
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29 Jan 1926
Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer
03 Jul 1924 Berwick
Advertiser
09 Aug 1923
Sunderland Echo |
15 Jul 1927 Hull Daily Mail
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7 Mar 1927
Yorkshire Post
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30 Jan 1929
Sheffield Independent |
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Images
© Northcliffe Media Limited. Images created courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY
BOARD. Images reproduced
with kind permission of The
British Newspaper Archive
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Is this an
example of the first “portable” advertising?
sp2 |
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This
wallet from the Martins Bank Archive Collection, is an extremely rare example
of an early “giveaway” and is also a form of advertising. The more “well to do” amongst the Bank’s
customers may well have needed to travel outside Great Britain on
business. They would approach the Bank
to ask for a Letter of Credit – literally a letter addressed to a particular
bank in a particular country, with whom Martins was affiliated.
The letter
of Credit contained within the wallet, would instruct the foreign bank, on
production of the agreed ID from the customer, to pay over a single amount,
or several amounts on various days, to assist the customer to meet their
living and travelling expenses whilst away from home. The foreign Bank would have its own
arrangements for recovering the money from Martins. The inside covers of this charming wallet,
(which by the way is actually made of leather, and therefore not given away
to “just anyone” in the 1920s), provide a good deal of information to the
customer, and anyone else who sees it, about the Bank and its assets – a
statement of strength and stability which is an obsessive trait of Martins
for decades - until they re-think their self promotion and advertising policy
in the early 1960s.
The wallet
also provides detailed instructions on using the letter of credit and what to
do if it is lost, as well as the addresses of some of the Bank’s key offices,
and details for contacting them by that most efficient of electronic means, the telegraph. When you consider that almost none of our
modern methods of communication and of moving money around the World in a
split second exists in the 1920s, it is forward thinking of the Bank of
Liverpool and Martins to make arrangements for travellers. After 1928, the modern day Martins Bank
will have three major Foreign Branches, offering a wide range of
services. Travellers’ Cheques will be
the first revolutionary way in which money can be made portable around the Globe.
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