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 In February 1968, the work of the London Automation programmers at
Clements House, bears fruit in the form of BRANCH ACCOUNTING – a set of computer programs that will run on the equipment at the
London Computer Centre to process a range of bookkeeping tasks that are
hitherto performed manually at Martins Branches. Thirty six Branches in London are converted
one by one to computer input capability, and staff are given training to
enable them to produce the all important punched paper tape that will be read
and processed by the computer equipment at London Computer Centre. This is the culmination of nearly two
years’ work, during which time the daily bookkeeping work of Martins Branches
has been analysed down to the smallest of routines, individual programs and
sub-routines have been written, tested and re-written, and a robust system
developed, some aspects of which will
last way beyond Martins own existence, and into the twenty-first century.
  Life,
like truth, is often stranger than fiction: We are indebted to one of
Martins’ original programming staff – friend of the Archive Clive Frost – for
turning up a reel of punched paper tape amongst his belongings and sending it
to us. It was part of the 1967 final test run for Martins Bank’s Branch
Accounting Computer Program. Having
found ourselves in possession of such a significant piece of computer
history, we thought what should we do with it – send send it down to
Bletchley Park, home of the National Museum of Computing, and those nice
codebreakers? Well, yes that’s exactly
what we did. Bletchley Park ran the tape through a reader, extracted the
data, and with the help of a coding chart that Clive had donated to us some
years ago, the data was listed for us in several forms by the National Museum
of Computing’s Tony Frazer. A series of test entries to fictitious bank
accounts was thus revealed. When
Martins began to roll out computerisation across London, customer data was
collected in Branch using Addo X machines coupled to tape punching
equipment.
 The
tapes were sent at the end of each working day to the Bank’s Computer Centre
at Bucklersbury House in Walbrook where they were read and processed into
what were then powerful computers, the NCR model 315. The data extracted gave a digital record of
transactions and other customer records, as the basis for the production of
bank statements, and the recording of statistics which would lead to the
computerised decision making we take for granted in today’s banking
world.
Martins’ method of collecting input from its London Branches in this
way is the “missing link” between the early efforts of Banks to process
everything direct to a single remote computer, and the delineation of data by
computer terminals within branches themselves. The next stage for Martins was
to have been the transmission of data by telephone line direct from Branch
equipment to a central computer, and as we shall see later on this page, the
building that in 1971 would become Barclays’ Wythenshawe Computer Centre, was
originally planned by Martins as the home of its Branch Networked Computer
Systems. Experiments were carried out in 1968 to transmit work between London
and Liverpool. Martins Bank’s Branch
Accounting was a sophisticated program even for its own time, as it enabled
the collection of a large variety of accounting statistics alongside the
daily recording of actual transactions.
Significant chunks of this original program remained within Barclays’
own program – also known as Branch Accounting – well into the early years of
the twenty-first Century.
 Most
of Martins Bank’s staff are provided with an annual handwritten payslip right up to the time of the merger with
Barclays in 1969. This example from 1967 show just how little information is
given to staff about the most important of their employment terms and
conditions! Three years earlier the
Bank had begun to treat the
computerisation of its customers’ accounts as a priority, and working
with N C R, Martins puts its finest brains to the task of producing what
becomes known as BRANCH
ACCOUNTING. Alongside
this activity, the Bank begins to migrate the recording of Staff loans and
the production of monthly payslips to automated systems at Martins’ London
Computer Centre.
The computerised payslip will eventually provide a whole host of facts
and figures, most importantly a permanent record for each member of staff of
where their money actually goes in the course of deductions between gross and
net pay. The example here is actually
a payslip produced on an accounting machine, NOT a computer, but it provides
the basis from which computerised forms will be produced to ease the manual
work of Branches. It is interesting to note that at this stage “National
Health Insurance” and “Government Pension” are listed as separate deductions,
whereas today  a
single amount is taken as “National Insurance”. Members of staff can also see their
contributions to the Bank’s own pensions scheme – Superannuation Fund – and
to the Widows and Orphans Scheme. In
modern times these two separate items have been absorbed into one deduction
for Occupational Pension for those who have to pay into a pension scheme.
 Now
we turn our attention to various aspects of the BRANCH ACCOUNTING program,
and the way in which it is initially set up to handle the work of Martins
Bank’s London Branches. A little later, we shall see some of the test data
from the punched paper tape decoded for us by Bletchley Park, but first we
need to understand that although computers are “fast” in 1968, they work on
infinitely less memory power and processing capability than we take for
granted today. This can be seen by the
amount of machine time taken to process each separate tape of work from the
Branches…
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 One of the most complex of the Branch Accounting
Programs is the input program – called BAINP050. Hard copies of the various Branch Accounting
programs are printed by line printer onto A3 sized fan folded paper. The list of instructions for each is vast,
with a major program like BAINP050 stretching over hundreds of pages of code,
as in this example from another of the Branch Accounting programs,
responsible for generating automatic transfers between customers’ accounts.
BAINP050 reads the paper tapes from branches and performs a number of
validity checks to ensure the security of the information held on the tapes,
as Martins must go to extremes to protect its Customers’ Data.
Image © Martins Bank Archive Collections
Procedures are in place for rejected
information, and for its re-input once the necessary corrections have been
made. Branches are informed when errors
are detected and also if this has necessitated the computer centre having to
re-process the work. This is because
the fault could well lie in the machinery Branches have used to punch data
onto the tapes in the first place. The
system constantly checks data, and will report errors as it goes, providing
error messages to help staff identify the problem. A further complicated program, BAMFU120
(BRANCH ACCOUNTING MAIN FILE UPDATE) is responsible for updating all the
records, and by virtue of its having to constantly access magnetic tape for
various pieces of information, it takes a very long time to run.
Image © Martins Bank Archive Collections
The seriousness with which the Bank is
taking computerisation shows itself in many ways – some quite subtle such as
these futuristic items of stationery, designed specifically to help with the
production of computer programs.
 At this time in the development of computers, it is
necessary to input ALL the leading zeros that might come before an amount, so
that every amount of money debited or credited to a customer’s account will
have the same quantity of characters.
This will be tedious for machine operators, who will have to take
extra care inputting amounts. Branch
Accounting Input will recognise an entry to a customer’s account in the
following format:
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The machinists in the newly automated
branches will be very familiar (and doubtless fed up) with having to input
all those leading zeros in order to achieve the correct amount to be debited
or credited to an account! All this,
and having to meet the end of day deadlines too - one member of staff who
remembers this, is Alicia Blaney, who worked at London 88 Wigmore Street
Branch during the conversion to computer accounting:
“I
worked in the machine room and I was involved in computerisation. I remember
very well if we hadn't finished our input by the time it was due to be picked
up by security at the end of the day we had to take the tape on the tube
ourselves to somewhere near Bank station”.
How appropriate it
seems, to have used BANK
underground station!
N C R
32 Range Accounting Machine
Image © 1966 N C R Limited
As far as customers are concerned, one of
the major benefits of automation will be the production of statements by the
computer. Until now staff have
repeatedly fed the same sheet of paper into a manual statement printing
machine like the one shown above, to add sometimes just one transaction to a
customer’s records, and the results have never been ideal. Staff loans are one of the first types of
account to be computerised:
Still
not perfect, but getting there.
Image (content simulated) © Martins Bank
Archive Collections
 The Branch Accounting system is capable of
producing a wealth of statistics which even for 1968 seems to be quite
sophisticated and comprehensive.
Reports are produced daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and
annually, and cover everything from those required to ensure correctness of
book-keeping, to management reports that show trends, or that comply with
legal requirements such as snapshots of savings or lending across all
accounts at a specific point in time.
The following list shows those reports that must be produced DAILY for
use by branches and the London Computer Centre:
Image © Martins Bank Archive Collections
 February 1968
sees Martins pushing the bounds of available technology once again, with the
fruition of its experimental plans to transmit data from the Liverpool
Computer Centre to London, so that the bookkeeping being recorded at both
ends of the Country can be combined into one centralised record system. Although the capability to transmit data
down telephone lines has existed since the Second World War, this is the  first time that this method will
be used so widely, as the implication is that all Branches in England Wales,
the Channel islands and the Isle of Man will be connected to the system. The whole thing relies on a clever method
of data transmission known as “packet switching”, which is commonplace in
today’s wireless world. In the home it
allows your broadband router to process the data that is sent and received by
any number of devices, laptops, tablets etc.. The beauty of the system is that instead
of having to keep each stream of data separate, everything combines into one
stream which is separated out at the destination and fed to individual
devices. Even our televisions use this
system now that the UK has gone digital.
Instead of the image being scanned line by line and sent to your tv on
a single channel, the picture is encoded into conveniently sized “blocks”,
and in the space previously needed for just one analogue channel, up to
twenty or so channels are now fed simultaneously to your TV’s digital
receiver which then extracts only the information needed to show the
programme you want to watch.
 Well before the merger with Barclays, the British
Government makes it clear that the clearing banks should be computerised in
time for decimalisation on “D-Day” 15 February 1971. Martins is already researching long distance
data transmission in the mid 1960s, and experiments successfully with the
processing of the work of several Liverpool Branches at the LONDON Computer
Centre, using the transmission of data down GPO telephone lines. With a large concentration of branches in
the North of England, Martins chooses to develop a site at Wythenshawe,
Manchester to provide a computer centre that can handle the traffic of data
being transmitted to and from these branches.
Martins chooses Wythenshawe as it meets the requirements of the
availability of GPO telephone lines, adequate labour resources and good road
communications. The plans have to be put on hold pending the merger, but
Barclays, faced with having to revise its own computerisation methods once it
takes over so many Northern branches, revisits Martins’ original plans and
revises them to develop a much larger centre on the same site. The centre
will be the receiving point for all input to the Branch Accounting Program by
branches all over England, Wales the Channel islands and Isle of man. Thus Wythenshawe opens in November 1971,
and goes on to serve the needs of Barclays’ computer operations for several
decades; Barclays’ Gloucester Computer Centre handles a proportion of the
work, and both centres are capable of taking over from each other in the case
of major faults. Sadly as computer
centre technology becomes less labour intensive, Wythenshawe is eventually
closed in the 1990s.
Wythenshawe Computer Centre opens
for business in November 1971 - Image
© Barclays
The familiar strains of “Hello, Wythenshawe”
will be fondly remembered by many Barclays staff, especially those of us
still trying to process the day’s work at 8pm because the computer centre had
ground to a halt. Even as late as
1985, some Barclays branch staff were faced with turning computer engineer, having to manually
switch the branch telephone lines from “four wire” to “two wire “
working. Surprisingly the two wire
option usually did the trick and work disappeared quickly up the line to
Wythenshawe. In the days before the
call centre threatened to execute staff who did not answer the phone within
two rings, is was quite normal to phone Wythenshawe and sit with a plate of
sandwiches, waiting for an answer. The
call itself could take anything up to an hour, as the always friendly
staff helped you with your problem. Such happy days, now gone forever along
with branch machine rooms and the staff who worked there…
Image and some detail kindly provided by Barclays Group
Archives.
  In July 1968, the programmers at Clements House decide
for fun to write a program that will test the capabilities of line
printing. They need to write more than
fifty pages of code simply to reproduce Martins’ Coat of Arms, using a
collection of dots, dashes, strokes and letters. By the standards of today’s sophisticated
graphics, the result might well seem primitive, but we think the Coat of Arms
is a tribute to the ingenuity of the pioneers at London Automation. What we
have seen in this feature is only a glimpse into the capabilities of Branch
Accounting, but it shows that those at work in Clements house and London
Computer Centre strived to produce a highly sophisticated set of programs,
given the equipment they had to work with.
The fact that Branch Accounting is written “in-house” – i.e. not
bought in from an outside agency, shows the sheer quality of Martins’
Computer Staff, all of whom are hand-picked for their analytical skills from
branches all over the country. That
parts of this program remain at work within Barclays for the next forty years and beyond, is an amazing
legacy and a great tribute to their dedication…
 M
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