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 “The programmers/analysts
who worked on the system were in a unique position, possibly not to be
repeated - we all started off as bank clerks whose work was to update
ledgers, create Waste to balance the books daily, print statements and check
balances against the ledgers, that is to say we all had experience and were
familiar with the manual system of branch accounting. This made the
work of automating it more interesting for us, and we all understood what we
were achieving. This circumstance would rarely, if at all, happen now in the
development of modern computer systems”…
CLIVE
FROST
Member of Martins Bank’s original Programming Team for the Automation
of the London Branches, July 2016.
Just what DID go on in the basement?
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  Having
looked around our online museum, and seen the faces of many of Martins
Bank’s branch staff, you may well have formed an image in your head of the
typical Banker of the 1960s – A receding hairline perhaps? Spectacles? Bowler hat and rolled umbrella? It may come as something of a surprise to
learn that many of the Programmers and Systems Designers at Martins looked
more like hippies than bank workers.
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WHY NOT ALSO VISIT THESE PAGES
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This might well have been the reason for hiding
them away in the basement of Clements House, Gresham Street, London. It has of course always been foolish to
judge by looks alone, and these
are the people who will write UK Banking’s first major computerised
Branch Accounting System, and develop its use across 36 branches in
London. – In our Branch Accounting
feature (click on the leaflet above), you will learn about the birth of
this pioneering Branch Banking Computer program that is built by Martins,
parts of which remain will in use for more than forty years. In conjunction
with the London Computer Centre, the Automation Department team at Clements
House also pioneer the transmission of data, by phone line to and from Head
Office in Liverpool. Yet not much is known about this
important part of computing history –until now. Whilst we can’t cover all the work of
Automation Department, we have persuaded a member of the Programming Team
(Clive Frost, below) to lift the lid a little, on topics such as Branch
Accounting, engineers who used transistor radios as musical instruments,
and life in the basement of Gresham House…
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 “I started off as a Junior at Paignton branch in 1963,
moved to help open Swindon branch in 1964, and then moved back to Torbay
(sub to Torquay Branch). In 1966, I was trained as a Computer Programmer
and was transferred to the Automation Department in Clements House, 14-18
Gresham Street, London. Although the Computer Centre was at Bucklersbury
House, the Automation Department, housing the Systems Designers and
Programmers, was in the basement of Clements House, headed up by Dennis
Pearce and his deputy Peter Cave.
There were about 20 staff plus staff from NCR and a an outside
Computer Consultancy.
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Stranger than fiction? Clements
House is seen here in 1961, queued out into the street on the first
(sell-out) day of the Penguin Books share issue. In just a few years, workers in the
basement of this very building will be working hard to computerise just this kind of work…
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 Bucklersbury
House – London Computer Centre
Image © Architect and Building News and Successors 1959
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My impression was of a real 'us
and them' relationship between the Automation Department and Computer
Centre in Bucklersbury House. Programmers were generally not allowed in the
computer room, even for testing! I can remember having to beg, borrow or
steal maybe the odd 15 minutes to test my programs - and operating
the computer was an absolute NO
NO!
But maybe that was how it was back in those early days of computing.
There was a resident engineer
who would service the machine most mornings prior to use. Their party piece
was to play music using a transistor radio that sat on the Central
processor cabinet. When running a program the CPU would emanate a varying
magnetic field/radio wave that could be picked on a nearby radio. A program
loop would give out a fixed monotone (long beep) - the pitch of the beep
could be changed by altering the length of the loop, and so tunes could be
created! This was, of course, prior to speakers being attached to
computers! I believe Martins was the
first bank to automate its branch accounting - the pilot branch was in
South Audley Street and it quickly was used by around 36 branches in the
London area.
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“I also worked on a system to
transmit transaction data to and from Liverpool using Data Transmission
lines - cutting edge technology then. The Branch Accounting System was
developed in 1966/67. Another
program of interest was a fun project for the programmers in the
department, designed to print out a graphic of the Martins Bank
Shield! There were of course no
pixels then, it had to be made up with characters from the keyboard, but it
was well thought out. The London
Computer Centre Branch Accounting Control Instructions (about fifty or more
pages long) gave the official procedures for running the Branch Accounting
System. “Amongst the instructions
there were details of Account Number Allocation to the branches in London.
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Computer Equipment at South Audley Street
Image Martins Bank Archive Collections
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At work on the NCR 315 Computer
Image Martins Bank Archive Collections
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I believe we had a program that produced valid account
numbers - it was used to create test data for the system, and possibly
issued to the branches to allocate to customers.
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Maybe
I shouldn't be surprised that today there is not much, if any,
documentation about the Automation Department, we were the backroom people
who were writing the Systems and Programs. We were not your conventional
Bank Clerks - maybe more 'hippy' in our outlook, and probably wore
sandals! Not to mention the long
hair - frowned on in normal banking circles!”
Text © Clive Frost 2012
Bit by bit…
This coding chart is issued to Martins Bank’s
programming staff on a pocket sized plastic card by NCR. It is used to assist with the binary
coding of letters and numbers whilst programming. This will form the basis of the “branch
accounting” program that will handle the processing of customer account
information for years to come…
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Image © Martins Bank Archive Collections – Clive Frost
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Stand by for action!
After months of training and hard work writing the
computer programs, it is almost time to unleash the power of computerised
banking! A document entitled “Configuration and Target Dates” is circulated
to all computer staff, and it provides full details of the computer
equipment that will be used to handle the cheque and credit clearings, and
the daily processing of work – Branch Accounting.
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We must of course remember, that the combined memory power of these
cutting edge 1960s devices would be hard pressed to support even a digital
watch today! However, as original computing power was reserved for
calculation, not colourful display, it was possible to process large
amounts of data within a reasonable amount of time.
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Images
© Martins Bank Archive Collections
 Bletchley Park confirms a
“missing link”…
Life, like truth, is often stranger than fiction: We are once more
indebted to Clive Frost for turning up a reel of punched paper tape amongst
his belongings and sending it to us. It was part of the 1967 final test run
for part of Martins Bank’s Branch Accounting Computer Program. Having found ourselves in possession of
such a significant piece of computer history, we thought what should we do
with it – send it down to Bletchley Park, home of the National Museum of
Computing, and those nice codebreakers?
Well, yes that’s exactly what we did. Bletchley Park ran the
tape through a reader, extracted the data, and with the help of a coding
chart that Clive had donated to us some years ago, the data was listed for
us in several forms by the National Museum of Computing’s Tony Frazer.
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A series of test entries to fictitious bank accounts was thus
revealed. When Martins began to
roll out computerisation across London, customer data was collected in
Branch using Addo X machines coupled to tape punching equipment. The tapes were sent at the end of each
working day to the Bank’s Computer Centre at Bucklersbury House in Walbrook
where they were read and processed into what were then powerful computers,
the NCR model 315. The data
extracted gave a digital record of transactions and other customer records,
as the basis for the production of bank statements, and the recording of
statistics which would lead to the computerised decision making we take for
granted in today’s banking world.
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Left to right, the data is shown RAW, EXTRACTED, then READ
Images
© Martins Bank Archive Collections
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Testing Testing…
Martins Bank and the NCR company have worked together to bring about
the daily processing of accounts, clearing, and the production of reports
and statistical data. With almost
everything in place, it it time to run tests, and set realistic “live”
dates:
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Images
© Martins Bank Archive Collections
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Martins’ method of collecting input from its London Branches in this
way is the “missing link” between the early efforts of Banks to process
everything direct to a single remote computer, and the delineation of data
by computer terminals within branches themselves. The next stage for
Martins was to have been the transmission of data by telephone line direct
from Branch equipment to a central computer, and the building that became
Barclays’ Wythenshawe Computer Centre in 1971 was originally commissioned and
planned by Martins as the home of its Branch Networked Computer Systems.
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Experiments were carried out in 1968 to transmit work between London
and Liverpool. Martins Bank’s Branch
Accounting was a sophisticated program even for its own time, as it enabled
the collection of a large variety of accounting statistics alongside the
daily recording of actual transactions.
Significant chunks of this original program remained within
Barclays’ own program – also known as Branch Accounting – well into the early
years of the twenty-first Century.
Friend, or foe?
Nowadays, we now know the full extent of the power of these early forays
into the computerisation of branch banking – that is the END of branch
banking, and what some will come to see as the “liberation” of the
customer, free to bank whenever and wherever he or she pleases, so long as
it is not in a branch! Back in 1966
computerisation was NOT however simply a “brave new world” scenario that
overtook all reason. People were
naturally suspicious, especially of a technology that even then was seen as
end to jobs. In fact, until the early 1970s, the number of staff required
to develop or use bank computer systems increased dramatically, and
on our feature page “COMPUTER
FRIEND OR FOE” you can read an article written for the staff of
Martins Bank, in which Mr C A Brockbank, Superintentdent of Administration
at Head Office tries hard to allay their fears.
It all goes together, something like this…
Using the records we have, the tape decoded by Bletchley Park, and of
course the memories of Clive Frost, we have pieced together a basic outline
of how the voucher processing side of Branch Accounting was designed to
work.
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The customers of Martins’ London Branches have their cheques and other
vouchers encoded with their account details. Under “live” conditions, the
vouchers will be listed by staff at each of the participating Branches, on
special “ADDO-X” machines. These produce an output of data on punched paper
tape. Tapes will be sent at close of
business to the London Computer Centre at Bucklersbury House, Walbrook.
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This is the actual output tape used during the pilot live running of
branch accounting on 21 March 1967. The numbers are crunched by the
computers at Martins Bank’s London Computer Centre. Finally, we have analysed the information obtained from the tape for
us by Bletchley Park, and it has been presented below as transactions
applied to the dummy accounts by the London Automation Staff. This type of printed output, and the
vouchers themselves are known in the world of banking by the rather
confusing title “Waste”.
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Images
© Martins Bank Archive Collections
Account numbers have to be issued to customers in such a way as to
make them unique to that customer, and to the branch at which they
bank. This is discussed in detail in
our separate feature NUMBERS
NUMBERS NUMBERS. When Martins began issuing account numbers at the
start of the 1960s, each number consisted of SEVEN digits. By the time of
the merger with Barclays, Martins had standardised their account numbers to
EIGHT digits, the same as Barclays and most other banks. Only Lloyds Bank
retained the use of seven digit account numbers, and kept them until the
late 1990s when they absorbed TSB.
Had Martins’merger with Barclays not taken place who knows what the
boffins at London automation would have come up with to ensure that in the computer
age, the Bank was still able to “go to extremes to be helpful”!
MARTINS BANK
ARCHIVE WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF COMPUTING BLETCHLEY PARK
AND CLIVE FROST FOR THEIR INVALUABLE HELP WITH THIS FEATURE.
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