The
Birmingham Corporation Act, 1919, provided the legal framework to enable the Birmingham Municipal Bank to be established.
Rules
and Regulations were then formulated by the City Council to specify the limitations within which the Bank could work. However, no
formal instructions to staff in how to deal with their day-to-day duties seem to have been drawn up. In his recollections
of the Bank's first day of business (September 1st 1919),
Norman Ling recalled that:
No general instructions were issued, and staff
hardly knew what might happen when they arrived at their Branch, but hoped that commonsense plus a few preliminary directions would
enable them to do the right thing.
Given that the Act to enable the Bank to come into existence had only been passed on August
15th 1919, it is perhaps not surprising that no formal 'Branch Instructions' were available to assist managers in the early days.
It appears that, in due course, Head Office addressed the situation by the issue of
specific instructional letters, 'General
Instructions'; 'Instructions applicable to Branch Managers'; and examples of
how ledger entries should be made. It was not until June
1960 that a complete set of 'Branch Instructions' were issued. The whole of the Instructions were placed in a special loose-leaf binder
so that any amendments or additions could be either substituted or added from time to time.
The 1960 Branch Instructions consisted
of three sections:
- General Instructions to Branches;
This section of the website reproduces the copy of the Branch Instructions that were originally issued
to Aston Cross branch. The copy incorporates amendments made in the years following 1960, and many of the processes and methods
described were probably relevant until superseded by computerisation replacing manual or basic mechanised systems (in the early 1970s)
and the Bank's transfer to TSB status in 1976. These later instructions were issued as Operating & System Advices - manually referenced
'OSA' on some of the Branch Instruction pages.
Apparently, an additional section was added to the Instructions when the No 3
(Investment) Department was introduced in 1967, but this has not survived.
The Branch Instructions incorporated an
Alphabetical
Index - this has been reproduced as a means of accessing the individual instructions.
Many of the Instructions refer to various
documents used by the Bank's customers and staff. The majority of these documents were identified by a Form Reference that consisted
of the abbreviation 'MB' followed by a unique number. The Instructions often quote these Form References without stating the Title
or purpose of the document - a list of known
Form References provides some of this missing detail.
The following Numerical
Index also provides links to the individual instructions, plus other relevant articles.