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  This is the scene next
to Liverpool Town Hall in 1930 as the foundations are laid for the new
headquarters of Martins Bank – 4 Water Street. Less than 30 years later the Bank has
expanded across England and Wales and the hitherto science fiction world of
the computer is both a reality, AND another first for Martins, as “Pegasus”
takes pride of place in the new Liverpool Computer Centre at nearby Derby
House. How this achievement has come about is due in no small measure to the
vision, dedication, ingenuity and perseverance of one member of the Bank’s
staff – Ron Hindle. It is Ron’s
ability to see the future and then to explain it in terms that people can
understand that puts Martins Bank ahead of the field, but his ideas, which
are shared generously with the London Clearing Banks will shape the way in
which electronic banking in the UK is achieved for the next 60 years… In his role as Manager of Organisation
Research and Development, and later as chair of the committee set up to bring
a decimal currency to the UK, Ron is ideally placed to ensure that the best
and most progressive systems and ideas are adopted to the benefit of
all. Here, we tell only a small amount
of the story of the computerisation of Martins and the legacy of Ron Hindle,
but for the first time we are able to bring you previously unpublished images
of the man at work, and of the machinery in place and in action.
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 At the Office 59 Exhibition in Sweden, Ron visits the stand of the ADDO Adding Machine
Company. He is looking for the best
way of being able to convert data entered onto an adding machine’s
keyboard, into a language that can be recognised by a computer. To achieve
this, the adding machine must be able to produce a stream of punched paper
tape that will provide the data in binary form. This will form the very basis of
inputting data which can then be manipulated, stored and used to maintain
accurate records of the everyday workings of a bank account. The complexities of processing the daily
work of branches cannot be underestimated and it is therefore very
important that the right choice of machines is made, as the Bank will have
to commit VERY large sums of money to modernising its
practices.
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RIGHT: Ron (centre) inspects the
“Visible Record Computer” at Burroughs in Detroit
LEFT: The Office 59 Exhibition in
Sweden – Ron inspects “Addo-X” Machinery.
Images © Martins Bank
Archive Collections - Ron Hindle Estate
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From September to November 1959, Ron Embarks on
a mammoth tour of the USA, visiting banks and computer manufacturing
companies to compile his report of more than 200 pages to enable the Bank
to make the right choices for computerisation. His itinerary is quite punishing:
During this period Ron is visiting numerous
institutions, attending lectures – some of which he himself gives – AND
preparing his very detailed report between trains, boats, buses and
planes. He looks at every conceivable
type of operation, machine and computer used by a large number of
banks. Later his visits to Italy and
Scandinavia will also prove extremely valuable.
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Ron Hindle
delivering a lecture at 68 Lombard Street London Office in the 1960s
Images © Martins Bank Archive Collections – Ron Hindle
Estate
Enter
the wing’d horse!
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  At the end of the 1950s,
and after much research and careful consideration of the impact of
trialling new equipment alongside the normal running of a branch, PEGASUS – a
computer manufactured by the British firm Ferranti is chosen to be the
brain of Martins Bank’s Branch Accounting.
What we
nowadays refer to as peripherals – keyboard screen etc., consists at that
time of the following: An input device – an adding machine (the Swedish
“ADDO X” machine) that prints out binary onto punched paper tape. “The
Computer” – the enormous collection of equipment you see below, ingests the
paper tape and makes sense of the numbers.
A Printer – the Friden Flexowriter – which is a line printer capable
of quite astonishing speeds for that period. Printed output will signal the
beginning of the end for the neatly handwritten accounts and bank
statements in which staff have until now taken much pride.
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Denis Pearce (left) is Ron
Hindle’s “right-hand man”. He is
seen here, making
final checks of the Pegasus II
Computer at Ferranti’s London
Headquarters, with a member of
their staff…
Image
© Martins Bank Archive Collections - Ron Hindle Estate
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Another
first for a woman in Martins…
 The basement of Derby
House, a former reference library near to 4 Water Street is chosen to become
Liverpool Computer Centre, and a local branch – Liverpool Heywoods - is
chosen to have its daily work processed by Pegasus. Not shy at being first with so many
things, Martins appointed Edna Devaynes as the UK’s first lady Computer
Centre Supervisor. Edna has already
clocked up a distinguished career with Martins working entirely with and
around office machines, training staff and touring the country installing
new equipment. She is the ideal choice to take charge of Pegasus. Not
surprisingly, her appointment attracts considerable interest from the press
as this article from Martins Bank Magazine from 1961 explains:
 A personality
at present in the news is Miss Edna Devaynes, who supervises the Ferranti
Pegasus 2 computer which we have recently installed in the basement at
Derby House, where the Liverpool Commercial Reference Library used to be
situated. Miss
Devaynes is a native of Liverpool but, owing to war conditions, her
education was spread over various schools in different places. She
commenced her business career with William P. Hartley Ltd., the jam
manufacturers, where she was trained as a machine operator in their
Accounts Department. She entered the Bank as a machine operator in 1945 and
served at a number of branches. Her first
important promotion came in 1956 when she became Deputy Lady Supervisor at
Liverpool City Office. Two years later she was entrusted with the job of
starting and running the Bank's training school for machine operators to
serve in the Liverpool, Northern, Craven and South Western Districts of the
Bank. It was also part of her job to visit branches in various parts of the
country to supervise the installation of new machinery and to introduce new
systems. Now she has become Supervisor of the Bank's first computer
centre. Her principal interest
outside the Bank is foreign travel and she has paid three visits to the
United States and Canada, in 1955, 1957 and 1960, and she has also visited
Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany and France.x
All Systems Go…
 Staff are busy in the machine room at Heywoods branch, as the day’s
work reaches them from the counter, and other sources in the branch. The
items have to be checked to ensure that each customer’s account number has
been written on by hand or is printed on the relevant vouchers. they are
listed on the ADDO-X machines and binary computer tape is produced. It is this tape that goes each day to the
Liverpool Computer Centre. The punched tape contains details of the customer’s
account number, and the details of the items that are to be passed to their
account that day – cheques to be debited, other items to be credited and so
on. Pegasus has a tape reader that
can read these items very quickly and process the information to individual
customer records.
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A machine-readable cheque and how it might appear on paper tape…
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The Machine Accounting Room at Heywoods Branch, Liverpool…
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 At the Liverpool Computer Centre, four high
speed tape drives busily manipulate the information they receive from
Pegasus, as the operator feeds in the paper tape. It is impressive that even at this
fledgling stage of evolution, this banking computer can handle the details
of more than 30,000 current accounts.
The operator sits surrounded and almost swamped by the huge cabinets
that go to make up the Pegasus II Computer.
In the future, solid state technology will reduce the need for large
numbers of air conditioning units to be installed. These are currently needed to keep the
computer equipment cool, and to an exact working temperature… Edna Devaynes and her staff at derby House
also maintain the bank of Friden Flexowriters, which are loaded with reams
of special paper – perforated and
lined up to produce a customer’s bank statement on each sheet:
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Images
© Martins Bank Archive Collections - Ron Hindle Estate
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At this point, the first part of Ron Hindle’s
vision for Automatic Data Processing is complete – the experiment at
Heywoods, along with another at Branch at South Audley Street in London
provides valuable information about how robust such systems will be when
rolled out across Martins’ network of branches. The other phase of automation requires
the consensus of the London Clearing Banks, but once approved will provide
the standard method of processing cheques and other items across all banks
that is still used today – reader/sorting…
Image
© Martins Bank Archive Collections - Ron Hindle Estate
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 Operated by computer centre
staff member Valerie Blunden, this IBM reader-sorter looks after the
clearing at Martins Bank’s Lombard St London Office, and is capable of
reading and sorting 950 cheques per minute.
Once again, this is a massive achievement for the time. The developments described on this page
lead directly to the establishment of a purpose-built and state of the art
computer centre at Walbrook, London.
It is there, that Martins Bank Staff will run Branch Accounting, the
computer program that will process the transactions of thousands of bank
accounts in Martins AND Barclays, for the next forty years and beyond. You can read more about this on our
LONDON COMPUTER CENTRE page.
A lasting legacy
It will
probably be impossible to estimate fully what the work of Ron Hindle did
for the automation of British Banking.
What is especially notable is his amazing generosity of spirit in
sharing his ideas with everyone else.
Even though there is bound to have been a level of corporate secrecy
on some issues, Martins Bank, through Ron made an enormous and lasting
contribution to something that we still take for granted today. That the speed of CLEARING a cheque
doesn’t seem to have improved in 50 years was at first a testament to the reluctance
of individual banks to help one another, as the mechanisms for instant
clearing may well have been in Ron’s calculations from the start! However, as the twenty-first Century
progresses, cheques are slowly being phased out of the financial systems of
the UK, and clearing them between many of the larger banks is achieved
through an exchange of photographs of cheques taken by
customers on their mobile phones! Without doubt, the Liverpool Computer
Centre was the acorn from which mighty oaks have grown, and are still
clearly visible.
SPECIAL THANKS TO ANNE
HINDLE FOR GENEROUSLY MAKING AVAILABLE
THE FILES AND PAPERS OF HER
LATE HUSBAND RON.
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