Account No: 100

 

Lena Cooper

 

Of the £42. 0s. 8d. deposited at Aston branch on September 1st 1919, £2 was credited to this account. Three other depositors with accounts in the block 1 to 100 deposited £1 each:

 

A/c No: 6 - Ethel Bickley

A/c No: 30 - Joseph Breakspeare

A/c No: 74 - William Henry Cound

The process to transcribe all the details of the depositors transferring their accounts to the new Bank must have involved a great deal of manual effort. Presumably, as the transfer requests were received, a pre-numbered ledger column was headed with the depositor's name and their BCSB Account Number - these two pieces of information having been entered by the depositor on the transfer form.

 

The depositor's address would then be added, taken from existing records.

 

All this clerical effort would have had to be done in a very short period of time for the transfer requests received prior to September 1st 1919, as the 'transfer'  letter sent out by the Bank was dated "August 1919", and was probably after the Act establishing the BMB received Royal Assent on August 15th 1919.

 

The account balance and the interest value would then have to be transcribed. This procedure may have been complicated by the fact that the old Bank continued to take deposits until October 31st 1919. With the aid of a rubber stamp, the BCSB ledger was marked to indicate to which branch each account was transferred.

 

It would have been necessary to implement a system to ensure that the account balances were correctly transferred. Each of the opening balances dated Sept 1 have been ticked indicating that an independent check was made.

 

Ideally, an arithmetical check should have been made to ensure that the overall total in the BMB's ledgers equalled the total marked as 'transferred' in the old Bank's ledgers. Such a process would have become more complicated from September 1st when each branch took its ledgers out to its own office. Assuming that all the transfer forms were received initially in the Head Office in Edmund Street, it may have been necessary for the branch ledgers to be brought into Head Office each evening, or the Head Office staff may have marked the transfer forms appropriately before forwarding them to the appropriate branch. In any case, it would have been desirable to keep running totals of the amount 'deducted' from the old Bank's total balance, and the amount accumulating for individual branches. The latter amounts would have formed the basis for individual branches to balance their ledger totals after adjusting for cash deposits and withdrawals. Unfortunately, no record survives to indicate how this massive exercise was conducted efficiently.

 

In the case of the amount of Interest to be entered in the new ledgers, a different set of problems would have existed. As these examples show, the process does not appear to have been straightforward. An interest value with the pence entered to one decimal place seems to have been initially entered and then crossed out. This amount has then been replaced with two values - one being the amount transferred from the BCSB (being the interest earned from April 1st to August 31st 1919), the other being the projected interest from September 1st 1919 to March 31st 1920.

 

The first Manager appointed at Aston branch was Edwin Cheatle, whose account is number 81 in the branch's  ledger.