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 Grimsby joins the
smattering of Martins Bank’s Branches in Lincolnshire, in September 1966 –
another full Branch is opened in the same year at Boston and a sub-Branch to
Lincoln is opened at North Hykeham.
Grimsby will however be the last Branch to fly the flag for Martins in
this part of the Country, as the merger with Barclays is just around the
corner and branch closures will be inevitable. Both Lincoln and North Hykeham
close in 1969, Grimsby in 1970 after fewer than four years open, leaving
Boston and Spalding to continue the name of Martins. Boston survives until the end of 1992, and
Spalding even longer, until May 2024.
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In Service: September 1966 to 8 May 1970
Image © Barclays Ref 0030-1127
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A grand opening in Grimsby!
The Grimsby Evening Telegraph of 17 August 1966 is
all a-buzz with the excitement of a new bank about to makes it’s mark on the
town! We are in the middle of one of
the Bank’s most loved advertising campaigns, where zoo animals accompany
human to the bank as if it were commonplace.
For Grimsby, it is the turn of Percy the Wallaby, who apparently “can’t
wait” to escort his young lady friend to the opening of yet another new
branch of Martins Bank. The newspaper spread is a well-worn way of gaining
advertising for the bank, and those contractors and other agents responsible
for the design and execution of this new branch…
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Image © Martins Bank Archive Collections
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Image © Reach PLC and Find my Past created
courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.
Reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive
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Halfway up on the
right-hand side…
As Grimsby
Branch is destined to bow out so early, it is perhaps just as well that not
long after the office is opened for business, Martins Bank Magazine
provides a very lengthy and detailed article about the town, the Branch,
and the Staff, and starts by getting to grips with just what,
exactly, Grimsby is for…
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remembering
where Grimsby
is – halfway up on the
right-hand side, for those who do not know - one might reasonably wonder
why the Bank opened a branch there. The nearest sizeable towns are Scunthorpe, a music-hall joke
town booming precariously on steel 30 miles to the west, and Lincoln 36
miles to the south-west. Between these two communities and Grimsby lie the
Lincolnshire Wolds and acres of rich farmland. The signposts guiding one
from the west fail to acknowledge Grimsby's existence until one is 20 miles
from it and even then, its name is linked with the adjoining borough of
Cleethorpes, another music-hall joke town sometimes called
Sheffield-by-the-Sea. These depressing thoughts may have been prompted by a 160-mile
drive in a continuous downpour, but we told ourselves that none of the
great explorers would ever have discovered anything had they turned back
when conditions were unfavourable. The rain eased as we approached Grimsby
which surprised us by its enormity: it has a population of 90,000 and its
adjoining resort and dormitory has 40,000. The second surprise was the
realisation that it is attractive and clean, with many open spaces, modern
buildings, and schools. We began to feel better and when the sun emerged
for half an hour, we actually wondered why we had not come to Grimsby
before. One reason is that to us and to many others Grimsby and fish are
synonymous, the other is that when the east winds blow off the North Sea
across the Humber mouth even brass monkeys would head for warmer climes.
But in September, apart from a diesel locomotive which yahoo-ed outside the
hotel window at intervals throughout the night, Grimsby was most
hospitable.
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Image
© Martins Bank Archive Collections
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It is a bustling
place, but one has to dig beneath the surface to realise how much it is
dependent on the sea and has been since the Danes settled there a
thousand years ago: only when the original haven silted up in the 16th
century did its inhabitants turn to the land for a living. Its survival
provides a remarkable story of religious, political, legal, and economic
skulduggery: laws were made to be broken, those who administered them
were too often on the make, and loyalties were bought and sacrificed.
In 1524 the mayor of
the town received a peremptory demand from 'a gentleman' to deal
leniently with a miscreant 'or else ye shall cause me to put the matter
to further knowledge, which I should be sorry to do, as knoweth our
Lord'.
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Forty years later 21
absentees from church, charged with non-attendance, were found to have gone
wildfowling: within a few years the vicar was charged with playing bowls
and football— sports apparently more vicious in those days than bull-and
bearbaiting.
Through all this runs a history of battles with the elements and of
primitive ships trading with far places. It was another gentleman—a railway director—who
raised Grimsby out of the mud and conflict when he persuaded his board to
build a railway, completed in 1848, and to build a dock. By 1851 the
population had doubled to nearly 9,000. Today Grimsby is acknowledged as the
premier fishing port of the world, with the biggest cold storage capacity
in the United Kingdom. Quite apart from a prodigious trade through the
Royal Dock, notably in timber and bacon, the development of the 63-acre
Fish Dock has to be seen before one can appreciate the progress since
orphan 'apprentices' were sent as crew on the earliest steam trawlers. A
modern trawler with freezing equipment costs Ł500,000 so, not
surprisingly, the owners of today are limited companies, but skippers and
crews are handsomely rewarded for what is still a tough and sometimes
hazardous life.
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Image
© Martins Bank Archive Collections
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Everything from repairs
and the fitting and victualling of the ships to the landing, marketing,
packing, storing and transport of their catch is handled at Grimsby, and
the wealth of the industry is reflected in the shops and the homes. Though
the town lives primarily off, if not on, fish there is no smell in these
days of quick freezing except on the 'pontoon', the long-covered sheds, and
offices where morning sales are conducted through 350 individual firms of
fish merchants.
The town has other
concerns—rubber, chemical and oil interests have been established
along the Humber bank—and this, one might say, is where we came in and why
the Bank came into Grimsby, for Humberside in the future is going to be
quite something. On the north bank is Hull 'at the end of the road to
nowhere' as we wrote some time ago, and to the south are Immingham and
Grimsby with ample room for expansion as far inland as Scunthorpe if necessary. Humberside is something to watch and, with a return
to economic sanity, the question 'why did we open at Grimsby?' could soon
become 'where do we open next?'
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The new branch is all one would expect it to be, strikingly
modern in a part of the town undergoing redevelopment, the outstanding
features being the grey marble counter face and the rear wall of the
banking hall in bold relief Anaglypta. Mr
G. H. D. Smith's recently acquired knowledge of Grimsby's main industry
following his two years as manager in agricultural Selby qualify him as the
ideal 'Manager of Ag. and Fish'. Mr R. Taylor is a native of Doncaster
whose recent Inspection experience and Domestic Training Course make him
an able lieutenant. Mrs B. L. Taylor, recently married to a local
schoolteacher, was previously at York Branch for three years and Mr J.
Driver, who was in the recruitment pipeline at the time of our visit, has
since joined the staff.
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The new office goes one better than Grimsby in having a
display window which, by featuring some large reproductions of our
advertisements, was stopping and trapping passers-by. Grimsby itself seems
content to leave the publicity to neighbouring Cleethorpes, relying on
fringe benefits and on its own industry which, it perhaps feels, is
sufficiently well-known. This seems a pity, for even though we may not eat
fish or take cod liver oil we probably use Grimsby fish in some form for
our gardens, pets, or poultry. At least by going there we now know more
about it and what it does. We could even explain it to the small child who
gazed wonderingly at the television and murmured 'I never knew fish had
fingers'.
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Image © Martins Bank Archive Collections: Stephen Walker
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