What Looking Inside a Bank Archive Can Tell Us About Modern Finance

One of the things that I like about this particular podcast, other than the fact that I get the chance to talk with you for twenty minutes every week, is the fact that we can go back in time and every once in a while kind of delve into the history of finance and markets. I love the history of financial markets. I find, you know, it's kind of like with language, how etymology helped us understand certain aspects of the present

better by seeing how these words evolved. I think there's a very clear analogy with the history of finance and economics. Seeing how some various institutions evolved can help us, uh understand their structures better today. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. So what if I told you that on today's podcast we are going to have an almost perfect synthesis of history and finance and markets. I would tell you I

am very excited for this conversation. Okay, alright, so am I. So today we are actually going to talk with a woman who is an archivist for the Royal Bank of Scotland. And I don't know about you, but I was kind of surprised to hear that RBS um as the bank is known, actually has an archive at all. I would not have guessed that at all. I mean, it sort

of doesn't surprise to me. Maybe the banks have libraries and that there's some history stored at them, but the idea of a his Dorian or an archivist at the bank sort of whose job it is to um, you know, collect the bank's history, is uh, not something I would have guessed existed. Yeah, And I have to say, if you go on RBS's website and take a look at some of the items that they have in their archive.

And we're going to talk about this later in the show, but they have some really fascinating, fascinating things, you know, things like customer ledgers that were kept during the Great Plague or to create Fire of London. Um old sort of filing systems that the bank used hundreds of years ago, and I have to say, this is one of Britain's oldest banks. Uh, so it's going to be really really interesting to hear from her. Well, I can't wait, So let's get started, all right. So our guest for today

is Ruth Read. She's the head of Archives and Art for the Royal Bank of Scotland. Ruth, thank you so much are joining us, and these two thank you. So maybe just to begin, could you describe for us exactly what RBS's archive is, what it looks like, where it's kept, and what your role in terms of being an archivist actually is, because I can't imagine there are many people out there who have that job. Yes, So to start with physically what it looks like and where it is.

We're in a pretty anonymous looking warehouse on the western edges of Edinburgh. From outside, you'd never really guessed that it was a historical archive. Um, and what we're keeping inside is the historical records of the Royal Bank of Scotland groups. So that includes quite a lot of present day banks. That's the Royal Bank of Scotland itself, but

also NAT West, which is a major name. We've got some private banks all sorts of different businesses and actually more than two hundred historic banks that have come together over the centuries to make up those present day names. These are not a national records that the bank needs to keep to do business now. Um, these are the very few records that we've decided to keep for ever because they tell us who we've been and therefore who

we are. My job in the archives could probably be summarized as capturing, protecting, and using the history of the bank and the historical records that pumped in that. So are these items in the archives things that the bank had held for a long time and then at some point that, oh, we should formalize this in an archive, or did the banks say we should have like sort of an archive of history or banking history and then go about finding the items that would make up that archive.

There's there's a big change that happened probably in sort of mid late twentieth century. So the things that have survived from the eighteenth nineteenth century, yes, you're absolutely right. Those are things that pretty much either survived by accident or survived because it was so very obvious that they were important to business. And it's really only in the past forty to fifty years that companies have become more self conscious about needing to choose the right things and

keep the right things. And that's become really important as to get into the present age, because now that records are digital, things don't survive by accident. You have to be deliberate about it. So is it unusual for a bank to kind of keep its own historic archive in in this manner, Like if we went over to Goldman Sachs or to Deutsche Bank or HSBC, would they have a similar thing in place or is this unique to RBS. No,

I don't know about all of them. You would certainly find a very good and impressive archives at HSBC, and certainly all of the major British banks have got archives, and actually a lot of companies in general, supermarkets, drinks, companies, all sorts of businesses do have archives. In light of that, let's talk about some of the things that exist in the RBS archives and why they've been and one of

what and what they tell us. So one of the things that you have is a ledger that was kept from the Great Fire of London in the sixteen hundreds. What is that is from the sixteen sixties. What does it tell us? What does it what does a bank ledger from about four years ago even tell us? That's a really nice document to have because that goes all the way back to the very early history of a company called Child and Company, which is still exists as one of our banks today and is said to be

the oldest name in British banking that's still trading. So it's really lovely to have some of those early customer records. And if we're looking at the Great Fire of London period, it's wonderful to see quite how business was managing in

unbelievably difficult circumstances. You know, London had in sixty sixty five it had suffered from this plague, and then you get to sixty and sixty six and there's this terrible fire which literally stopped just before get team to the business premises of this bank, and you see that business surviving and coping through all those difficulties, and of course what it's telling us is what was going on for all of the customers of that bank at that time.

So I've spent an inordinate amount of time browsing the items that you have in your collection, so rather than ask you about some of the ones that strike my interest the most. I wonder do you have some favorites that you could maybe point as to I have hundreds of favorites, and of my favorites, i'll tell you something different every week. Um. But I guess one that I love very much is we have some field service postcards that were written by one of our members of staff

who was away on military service during the First World War. UM. So these were written between nineteen sixteen and nineteen and at that time, because soldier's letters were very heavily censored, they couldn't write anything they liked. So they'd have these post cards and they could just tick a box that said I'm fine, and it was a way of letting people back home know that everything was all right and

they were you know face um. And we have several of these and the archives that were sent by a man called Samuel McKnight who had worked at the Royal Bank of Scotland's head office. And it's wonderful to have them. But what I love most about them is the story

about how they were found. They were found by one of my predecessors in the nineties in the head office building wrapped up in a little piece of paper that said something like these cards were placed here by John Smith's messenger in the hopes that perhaps long after this dreadful war, the name of one may again be honored who was loved by all. And he did that just after the First World War. He obviously had these cards

and he wanted future generations to remember. And I took for me that summarizes what's so great about archives, because because of what he did, I remember Samuel mcnight's name, and now because as an archive here you know his name as well. That is really cool that you have

that stuff, you know. I mentioned in the intro that I thought looking at the history of banking and the sort of artifacts of historical banking might help us understand the current the present tense And of course I think probably a lot of people when they think about a bank, they imagine maybe a vault or something like that where their money is, and then they go to the bank and then their share of the money has taken out.

But as many of us know, that's really not how bank works or banks work at all, and that essentially banks are mostly digital and they're most of our money exists on a spreadsheet and so you know, just it's just sells, you know, numbers in a cell. And so looking back at some of the documents on your website and people should check it out at Heritage Archives dot

RBS dot com a lot of that. It's basically the same story that the fundamental aspect of the bank is not the money that is kept there, but the written down records of what people are entitled to. I think that's right. Um it certainly look at the essence of what banking is, that business of putting things that you value somewhere safe and keeping them safe and being able to trust. You know, there's an awful lot of crust

which is necessary for banking to rum. So that's what I love about archives and business archives is you see these footprints of people all through time using different technologies. They used what they had available at the time, but

they're doing the same thing. So in terms of the lessons that we can glean from those records, you know, things that show who owes which person what, what are some of the applications of the archive and has the archive ever contributed to any interesting research or interesting historical conclusions to your knowledge, Well, we're open to members of

the public. So academic research has come in very frequently to work on projects, and they are often about financial history, about the history of lending structures, for example, and how they have evolved over time. But also there might be um garden historians or furniture historians can come in and use the records to find that footprint is something they're researching.

It's quite nice about business records that those are quite solid, factual based records compared to somebody's diary, which is always you've got to think about what that person's agenda was in a different way from when it's simple accounting records.

But also ways that we use the archives are a lot more intangible, so they might be something about building colleague engagement, helping our colleagues to feel proud of our business, helping them to feel the importance of doing a good job for our customers by having that weight of history and understanding how many generations there are behind us who've

been doing this job all this time. I wanted to pick up on that sort of heritage point because I did notice that one of the items listed in the archive is a letter from someone who has employed wid at the bank in the early nineteen hundreds or actually for most of the century, who was an Olympic runner Um, And he actually ran in the Olympics that were made

famous by the Chariots of Fire movie. And it's interesting if you read the letter from him, he's responding to congratulations from his employer at the bank, where they recognize his running achievement. Um. But the Olympic aspect of it is almost um, it's almost uh, what's the word subordinate to the fact that he works at the bank. Um. You know, the fact that he works at the bank

is something to be proud of. Do you think the role of banks and bankers in society has changed over the past hundred years or so, given the you know, the events of two thousand and eight and things like that. Of course it changes at the time, and of course where at a point at the moment where banker's reputation isn't particularly high, and there are very good reasons for that. And that's actually something that again I think the archived brings value because it hasn't always been easy to work

for a bank in the last few years. You know, we see the things that people say about us, and we know that there's a lot of justification in it, and having that three year long history or longer which talks about good things bankers have done. It gives people a context that I hope and think helps people get out of bed in the morning and come to work

and do a good job as a banker. Yeah, I'm looking at another thing that Tracy had discovered on the website, This letter from our Florence Nightingale talking about a way for soldiers to send money home more effectively. You know, a classic example of a financial institutions the role that

they play in society. But what is you know that's you know, we sort of take it for granted, this idea that if I want to send money to Tracy right now, you would be a little bit of a pain, but I could probably do it without too much issues. But it's sort of mind boggling to think how people would have sent money across borders two hundred years ago. What are some of the interesting technologies that you we discover when you look back at the archives about sort

of solving these really difficult problems. You see it changing all the time, and you can see banks trying to to use the new dodges that are emerging and bring them in. One example I think of that's relatively recent is from the eighties when our bank No West was wanting to bring in a telephone banking service for the first time. Um, so you could you know, you could phone up and you could press buttons on your phone to choose whether you wanted a balance or to make

a payment, all of those things. But this being certainly a lot of people in Britain still have the type of phone that you had to turn a dial on to get the I remember that. So, Um, they didn't work with this tone, with with this kind of button

pressing technology. So the bank introduced this little thing that was like a small calculator that had the buttons on and you could hold it up to the mouthpiece of your phone and then press those buttons and it would make the right beats to go down the line to make the phone banking work. And I really like that insight into a moment where a good technology was nearly there but not quite so the bank had to find

some intermediary method of making it work. I remember their technology only because my grandfather was a criminal defense lawyer and he only had rotary phones and when he would need to place calls to his clients who were in jail. He had to go through a tone operating system, and so he had one of those handheld devices that mimicked the tone of the one through zero keypad. So yeah, quite a breakthrough. You might be one of the as people have spoken to. I haven't thought about that in

a long time. Um, well, I think Joe brings up a really good point. There has been so much technological advancement in the fields of banking and finance. You know, a hundred years from now, assuming that RBS is still running an archive, what is it going to look like, because you know it's easy to gather Well, it's not easy, but the idea of gathering old historical documents into one place is a common one. How do you start to tell the story of digital finance. Well, for one thing,

you can take in digital documents. Most of what we take in now is actually taken in electronically rather than as physical documents, so that is certainly no impediment. And actually the same things that we want to document are still done. People still have to meet together and talk to each other and say are we going to do this? How are we going to do it? And they have to prepare for it. So in fact, we're not keeping transactional records. We're not interested in the kind of it happening.

We're interested in why and how and how they make it happen, and all of that stuff will happen the same. It might be that it's an electronic file rather than a paper file, but that's not intellectually different from our point of view. You know something that I'm interested in in terms of history of finance technology is a tally sticks. And you mentioned that there was the fire in London or we talked about that in the sixteen hundred, But

is it is it true? Is it like in the eight hundreds that a big fire was caused in Parliament by the burning of a bunch of these sticks that were used hundreds of years earlier to keep track of credit? Am I making that up? I feel like I've heard something about that one. No, you're absolutely right, um. But the tally sticks were used for keeping track of debts.

When somebody borrowed money, there would be a tally stick and they would split it down the middle and to borrow and the lender would get a half each so that you could read in them. It was a way that you could track debts, uh in a world where

lots of people weren't literate apart from anything else. So there were thousands of thousands of these stored in the House of Parliaments in London, and I think they stopped using them in the early nineteenth century, and somebody, I assume you could possibly say he was an archivist in that he was responsible for looking after them, decided to clear out some space by burning them, uh. And the fired that out of control and did indeed burn down

the House of Parliament. That's why the House of the Parliament we have now are a Victorian building, because that's the replacement. A good lesson to all subsequent archivists not to just burn, not to just burn their stuff for space for storage reasons. Ruth, I want to ask you

one more question. You know, when you go over the entirety of RBS's archive, is there one particular item that to you is kind of most important when it comes to the history of the bank or the history of banking overall, something that kind of hints that maybe an important transformation that took place in either of the company or the industry. I think it would be really hard for me not to choose the Founding Charter of the Royal Bank of Scotland from seven. So that's the company's

birth certificate. That's where it all starts as far as the Royal Bank of Scotland goes. And I think why I would really pick that out is not so much for the document itself, but my experience is showing it to colleagues when they come to visit the archive and I showed them this document and by far the most common question they asked me is can I touch it? Because they want to make that connection with the past.

Are they allowed to touch it? They are allowed to touch it at the edge, as long as they don't touch the ink, because to go away with with a feeling of having touched the past and having been inspired by that. So I think if a document can do that job for them, then I'm really glad to see it's still working three years after it was drawn up. That's very cool, uh. I like the idea of people touching the document is a direct link to history. Ruth

read the archivist at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Really cool discussion. Your website is awesome and hopefully one day me and Tracy can come visit and we could do a long thing and go through all of what you have. But I really appreciate you joining us on the odd Loads podcast. Great, thank you, Joe. I love that conversation.

And I have to confess I'm still looking at the Harveys Archive website and right now I'm looking at a picture of a bank manager's hat from the nineteen fifties, and all I can think is, this is what George Banks would have worn in UH. Mary Poppins, you remember that I'm looking. I'm on the website too, I'm looking at the UH and this is another one that you found earlier, the spike file, like this gigantic iron spike that they used to put papers over, just essentially glorified

or a sort of a primitive filing cabinet. But no, I really like that conversation as well, and I do think everyone should check out their website Heritage Archives dot RBS dot com because it's uh, it's you know, it's a great example of how banking is widely different and also exactly the exactly the same that essentially, you know, as we were saying, a bank is a spreadsheet or mostly something digital and a bank used to be pieces

of paper on an old iron spike. But though what really matters to the bank is not necessarily what they have an a vault or anything, but what they the history that they have recorded. Yeah, I agree with that. I just wonder that, you know, as things become more electronic and as they become more digital. Um. And we did just discuss this with Ruth, but I wonder if some of that that tangentity kind of gets lost, and if finance becomes more and more abstract and kind of

more unwieldy as a result. And I also wonder, like, because I like history and I like antiques, um, I think there's something about human nature where we actually want to go out and as Ruth was saying about the original bank charter, you kind of want to go out and connect with the past, and the easiest way of doing that is seeing or touching or interacting with something that's actually old. And I just wonder if you know, seeing a digital ledger is going to have that same effect. No,

that's a that's a really good point. So it's like, even though we know that money is kind of this imaginary thing, there's still some value in a thing, even if it's just a book or a piece of paper or a filing cabinet that we can see, and so it's really going to be like this weird thing when that really just doesn't exist in any formula, and it's purely like, yep, this thing in the this thing on the web, or this thing and spreadsheet is really all

there is and there is not it's not the representation of anything. Joe, I can see you're about to turn this into another What is Money? Podcast? I can feel it coming. Let's yeah, well, of course we'll we'll have to let's revisit this one in ten years and we can ask Ruth what she saved from the year seventeen. Oh that's a good idea. All right, all right, I'm marking my calendar. Sarah, our producer, I'm reminding her right

now to uh schedule that one seven. But in the meantime, this has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart and I'm Tracy Alloway. I'm on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. And you can follow Sarah on Twitter at Sarah pat with two Teas. Thanks for listening.