Credit Clearing

Now this was a big step for a young lad because the Credit Clearing

department comprised, at the point I joined, of two men and about 25 girls!

As a shy retiring lad who had only ever had one girlfriend, this was

intimidating in the extreme. However, it was a move up so I appreciated the

opportunity. The concept of the Clearing System is explained in my appendix

so I will cover the general things here.

My job was to do the running about and the basic book-keeping. This meant

recording in the daily journal how much money in credit transfers (CTs) was

sent out to the other clearing banks and then trying to reconcile the amount

that we received from them. Each Bank presented listings with the CTs they

sent on. These listings were supposed to have been tallied twice and be

accurate - we wished! The incoming CTs had to be sorted into our branches

for onward transmission that evening. Because there wasn't time in the day

to re-tally these, we would sort them and then send an un-listed bundle to

each branch. The idea was that the branch then listed the items they

received and sent us back that listing. Can you image how this could

possibly work in terms of a fully reconciled cash amount on any one day!

Needless to say, we had a team who were permanently stuck under microfiche

projectors, trying to find discrepancies which ran to quite large amounts on

some days. There was, obviously, a threshold below which we didn't bother

going - so much for balancing the books.

One of the favourite mistakes, and one that we became adept at finding what

was called a reversal. Standard mechanical calculators - well with a bit of

electricity to make them quicker - were used for all listings and what were

found were the commonest mistakes were typing 42 for 24, for example. This

gave an error of 18. When we saw an error like this - the cry went up -'A

Reversal' and we went looking for the transposition of the two digits.

All in all it was fairly tedious and I began to wonder whether banking was

for me if this is what it entailed. However, life was lightened a bit by me

starting to 'go out' with one Barbara Dingle - one of the girls in the

department. This became fairly serious in that it lasted for over a year but

did finally fizzle out, fortuitously as it turned out. There were two other

men in the department - Mr Cato was the manager and his assistant was Garry

Owen - a very nice Welsh lad who was extremely patient in teaching me the

job. The third person on the control team was Ivy. I have forgotten her

surname but remember that she lived in Billericay - a place that I hadn't

heard of then, but was destined to know better some years later. As an

aside, Barbara lived in a place called Stratford. Now I always thought that

Stratford was in Warwickshire and was where Shakespeare came from. However,

it turned out that Stratford was in East London - a place that I had never

ventured into being a good South London boy.

I do remember that Garry had a touch of Tuberculosis and spent some time in

hospital recovering. We clubbed together and bought him a pile of 12" long

playing records. When he returned to work, he gave me one of those records -

George Shearing - On the Sunny Side of The Strip. I took it home to be told

that Dad worked with George Shearing's brother. Yes, blind George Shearing

came from South London and had a brother who worked as a bus driver out of

Streatham Bus Garage - now there a piece of trivia.