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Mighty oaks from little acorns grow…
Image: Martins Bank Archive								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.
How this achievement has come about is due in no small measure to the vision, dedication and perseverance of one member of our 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 our 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…			Image: Martins Bank Archive
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the computerisation of Martins and the legacy of Ron Hindle, but for the first time we are able to bring you previously unpublished images of the man at work, and of the machinery in place and in action.
Seen here at the Office 59 Exhibition in Sweden, Ron (centre) is visiting 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. It is important that the right choices are made, as the Bank will have to commit VERY large sums of money to modernising its practices.							Image © Ron Hindle Estate
Ron (centre) inspects the “Visible Record Computer” at Burroughs in Detroit Image © Ron Hindle Estate
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:
	24 Sep	Depart London Airport		16 Oct						Detroit
	25 Sep	Arrive New York		18 Oct						New York
		then:		19 Oct						Detroit
	26 Sep	Dayton Ohio		22 Oct						Cleveland and Buffalo
	28 Sep	New York City		23 Oct						Rochester
	01 Oct	Washington DC		24 Oct						Boston
	05 Oct	Los Angeles		26 Oct						New York
	10 Oct	San Francisco								then:
	14 Oct	Salt Lake City		03 Nov						Depart New York on the “Mauritania”
	15 Oct	Chicago		10 Nov						Arrive Southampton
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.
Ron Hindle giving a lecture at our 68 Lombard street Office in the 1960s Image © Ron Hindle Estate
Enter the wing’ed horse!
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 was chosen to be the brain of Martins Bank’s Branch Accounting. What we nowadays refer to as peripherals – keyboard screen etc., consisted at that time of the following: → Input device – an adding machine that prints out binary punched tape → Printer – the Friden Flexowriter, capable of astonishing speeds for its day.
A disused building near to 4 Water Street was chosen to become the Liverpool Computer Centre, and a local branch – Liverpool Heywoods was 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 had already clocked up a distinguished career with Martins working entirely with and around office machines. She also trained staff and toured the country installing new equipment, and as such was the ideal choice to take charge of Pegasus. Not surprisingly, her appointment attracted considerable interest from the press as this article from Martins Bank Magazine from 1961 explains:									Denis Pearce (left) is Ron Hindle’s assistant. He is seen here making final checks of the Pegasus II Computer at Ferranti’s London HQ with a member of their staff… Image © Ron Hindle Estate
Another first for a woman in Martins…
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…
Image: Martins Bank Archive										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 or is printed on the relevant vouchers. Then 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.
Image: Martins Bank Archive							x 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. Later, solid state technology will reduce the need for air condition units to be installed. These are currently needed to keep the computer equipment cool to an exact working temperature…
Images © Ron Hindle Estate
Edna and her staff 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:
xImages © Ron Hindle Estate
And so the first part of Ron Hindle’s vision for Automatic Data Processing is complete – the experiment at Heywoods, along with another at our Branch at South Audley Street in London provides valuable information about how robust such systems will be when rolled out across our 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 © Ron Hindle Estate
Operated by computer centre staff member Valerie Blunden, this IBM reader-sorter looks after the clearing at our 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 our purpose-built and state of the art computer centre at Walbrook, London. You can read more about this HERE
A lasting legacy
It will probably be impossible to fully estimate 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 is more 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! 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.
© gut informiert 2007 to date