The Day They Prayed For Profit (12 August 1977)

One day in 1950 two men came into the Gazette’s original office in the approach road to Bletchley’s Central Gardens.  They told me they were setting up a Trustee Savings Bank in Bletchley, but needed a number of suitable persons to act as local trustees, and did I know any?

I was hazy about such banks, but I told them there was one man right there in the building, if they thought the chairman of the local council might come up to their requirements.

I have forgotten what happened next.  I believe the said council chairman, Mr Harold Price, who was head of Bletchley Printers Ltd. the Gazette’s original publishers, at that moment popped his head through an inner doorway.  But at any rate, that was the first inkling I had of a branch of Northampton Trustee Savings Bank coming to the town.

In the following weeks, plans for the conversion of a private house in Bletchley Road (now Queensway) to a bank, with manager’s flat above, were approved and local builders Tranfield and Co got on with the job.

The formal opening ceremony came in October, though there were few to witness it, that day being early closing day.  The bank was precisely where it is today, though occupying much less space.

The company present at the ceremony included the appointed local trustees – and with no pomp at all Mr Price was asked to open the door.  In doing so, he said it was a good thing from the civic point of view to see one more house in Bletchley Road cease to be a house and become a symbol of commerce and progress.

We then trooped inside, but before any business was done a prayer for the branch bank’s success was offered by one of its former head office trustees, Canon Trevor Lewis, Vicar of All Souls’, Northampton.

After that, the bank got under way.  Present was the bank’s actuary, Mr Tolton.  Behind the counter was the manager, Mr R T E Pearce.

Also behind the counter was the bank’s first staff in the shape of Miss Winnie Holdom, who had previously been Bletchley’s first woman police constable.

Some of the trustees made deposits, after which they and myself were taken to the Swan Hotel for lunch, courtesy of the bank.  I had that chance to be among the first depositors.  Unfortunately, I had only a shilling in my pocket to see me to Friday and so had to forego the chance.  I joined the following week but my number was then 72 instead of being among the first dozen.

In the first fortnight over 100 accounts were opened and £6,000 deposited, which was considered quite good.

Not long after the bank had opened the Gazette changed hands and eventually moved to now-demolished premises near the station end of Bletchley Road and on the same side.  During that period the present bank was built and while the work was going on its business was operated from a former shop practically next door to the Gazette.

Mr Pearce was still manager when the new bank opened, but some time later he left to take a managerial position with a Canadian bank on Grand Cayman Island, in the West Indies.  Quite a change from Bletchley, I would say.

Before the general availability of banks it was not unusual for some people to hide their money and other valuables in their homes – and not merely in an old sock under the bed, either.

In 1911 the Bletchley Co-op acquired a house on the site of their present self-service store.  Thirty years later a new water pipe was installed.  This entailed taking up the tiles in the pantry.  A workman named Charles Dickens was doing the job when he found a tin box under the tiles.  It contained £310 in gold coins, about £40 in silver coins, a 15-carat gold chain, and a silver watch inscribed “G F Payne, Bedford, 1862.”

The discovery led to a search for the legal owners and it was found that a family named Payne had lived there from about 1882 to 1900.  No living relatives could be found, however, and eventually the North Bucks Coroner formally seized the treasure trove for the Crown, and Charles Dickens was rewarded with about threequarters of its value.

It is interesting to speculate what that treasure, secreted away 77 or more years ago, would be worth today.