1 August: Boreham on the Bank

A Transformed Romance
The original charter of the Bank of England was dated as from the first of August 1694 and was liable to be revoked as from the first of August in any given year. The introduction of banking robbed humanity of a rare wealth of romance. Until then, the whole world was a kind of Tom Tiddler's Ground; everybody had visions of picking up gold and silver. In those sequestered and unsophisticated days you never knew the moment at which fortune might unexpectedly appear. The earth was a packet of surprises. At any thrust of a stick into a dark wayside hole you might hear the musical chink of coins. In digging a well or excavating a subterranean cavern, one might find a box of treasure. You could not disturb a stone in a cellar floor without half expecting to come upon a chest loaded to the lid with sparkling gems. If you went to the garden or the field, you felt that any turn of the spade might expose a hoard of shining wealth. Until the bank came into existence, every crack and crevice glittered with golden possibilities.

Every reader of Pepys' Diary will recall the entry in which the good man describes his frantic search for the hidden gold. When the country was threatened with invasion, he had asked his wife and his father to bury all his money in the garden. When the peril had passed, he takes them with him at dead of night to hunt, by the light of a dark lantern, for the hidden treasure. "But, Lord," he exclaims, "what a tosse I was in when they could not justly tell where it was! I was almost out of my wits. And then to see how sillily they had hid it, not half a foot under ground, and in sight of the world from a hundred places!" To make matters worse, the bags had rotted in the earth. They burst on being lifted and the gold was scattered all over the garden. The three of them spent the night carrying heaps of dirt into the house and washing it by candlelight in search of coin. "It made me mad," Mr. Pepys tells us in a burst of confidence.

Is The Bank As Prosaic As It Seems?
Our sacred literature contains a parable which likens the kingdom of heaven to treasure hid in a field, the which, when a man hath found, he hideth, and, for joy thereof, goeth and selleth all that he hath and buyeth that field. Before the institution of banking, such astonishing experiences were by no means uncommon. Life was one vast romantic treasure-hunt. Are we to conclude, therefore, that the bank, by its very existence, has shorn life of a great deal of its poetry, its sentiment, its fondness for adventure? Or has it destroyed one type of romance in order to substitute another, and perhaps a better, one?

To most people—especially to most emotional and susceptible people—a bank is a terribly prosaic affair. It is enough to freeze a poet's blood. Stand at the great entrance-hall, with its stone steps, its granite pillars and its tiled floor, and watch the tides of humanity surge in and out. One look is stamped upon all faces—a look of stolidity almost amounting to frigidity. It is, of course, a pure affectation. The indifference is only assumed. In the nature of things, smiles and tears cannot be far from the surface. The things for which men toil and strain and worry from morning to night have a way of expressing themselves, sooner or later, in terms of pounds, shillings and pence; and it is when these things have so expressed themselves that the men concerned seek the services of the banker. The business that brings these people to the bank represents to most of them the triumph and the tragedy of life. If only some sensitive piece of mechanism could register the sensations of these men and women as they enter and leave the bank, what tales it would tell! Here is the flush of pride, the exultation of success! And here is the bitterness of disappointment, the gall of defeat! As you watch these comers and goers, you would never suspect it. Even such smiles and frowns as you do occasionally detect are fitful, ephemeral, unreliable. It is the people whose hearts are breaking who try to smile, and it is the men whose tide of fortune is at the full who study to look unutterably bored. The bank slays all sentiment as soon as you enter. You hear the chink of coin, mark the matter-of-fact faces of tellers and clerks, and feel that you are as far from poetry as a Polar explorer is from the tropics. But the men who are in the secret know better. Of all businesses, the business of banking is the most romantic.

The Temple Of Prophecy And Promise
Through several other avenues, romance enters the bank. In a pamphlet published some time ago, Mr. J. B. Butchart, himself a banker, declares that a banker, to be successful, must be something of a psychologist, and must study a people's moods and feelings. If through some unfortunate happening or public calamity, the people fall into a depressed mental condition, enterprise will languish and bad times will come. If, on the contrary, the people are cheerful and confident, their very optimism will go a long way to secure their prosperity. For, after all, a bank deals, not so much with money, as with the thought of money, the hope of money, the prospect of money. People rush in and out of the banks; they fancy that they are bringing money and taking it; but, in reality, they are doing nothing of the kind. It is all paper cheques, bills, notes and the like—that, in itself, is worth less than its weight in old newspapers. But every scrap of paper is a promise and the entire structure of the bank is an impressive monument to the faith of the people in each other's honour.

The entire financial fabric is built on trust, confidence, credit. "Credit," says Mr. Butchart, "means future goods. A banker has to dream dreams and see visions. He must gaze in inspired fancy on the crops that are not yet sown, on the flocks that are not yet born, on the mines that are not yet sunk, on the factories that are not yet built and on the ships whose keels are not yet laid. He lives in a fairyland of his own. He inhabits, not the world that is, but a world that is yet to be." Nobody need marvel that faith and vision should represent the prerequisites to felicity in the next world when, even in the finance of this one, they play such an indispensable part.

F W Boreham

Image: Bank of England HQ, London