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This is a story of great
optimism, as we look at the youngest District of the Bank - the South Western
District of Martins Bank, only formed in 1960, and doing so well for itself
in just six or seven years, that lavish, expensive expansion is approved AND goes
ahead, even with the death-knell sounding for Martins Bank itself. We are particularly grateful to Barclays
for a number of images, and to Mrs Clarkson, widow of the first South Western
District Manager Mr G E Clarkson, for her input and contribution to our
Archive…
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 An important new step in the history
and progress of the Bank will take place at the beginning of April when the
branches in the South West will be grouped into a fully fledged District
with a District Office in Bristol. A local Board of Directors has been
appointed and there will be a District General Manager, a Superintendent of
Branches and an Inspector. The Chairman of the Local Board will be Mr. G.
E. McWatters who has been elected to the General Board of the Bank.
Educated at Clifton College, Mr. McWatters represented Bishopston on the
Bristol City Council from 1950-53.
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Mr G
E McWatters
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Viscount Cilcennin
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He is President of the Bristol Central
Parliamentary Conservative Association and Chairman of the West Country
Branch of the Institute of Directors. He is Chairman and Managing Director
of John Harvey & Sons, Ltd., wine merchants. The Right Hon. the
Viscount Cilcennin of Hereford, P.C., will be a director. He is Chairman of
T.W.W. (Independent Television for South Wales and the West of England). He
is also a director of Bestwood Co. Ltd.; of the Clerical, Medical and
General Life Assurance Society; of the General Reversionary and Investment
Co.; and of Silentbloc Ltd. Lord Cilcennin is a man of wide interests apart
from business. He has been Lord Lieutenant of Herefordshire since 1957 and
he is a Governor of Rugby School. He was Parliamentary Private Secretary to
the Secretary of State for War, 1940; Lord Commissioner of the Treasury,
1940-43; Financial Secretary to the Admiralty, 1943-45; Vice-Chairman of
the Conservative and Unionist Party, 1945-51; First Lord of the Admiralty,
1951-56; and a Knight of St. John, 1958. The District General Manager will
be Mr. G. E. Clarkson and details of his and other South Western District
appointments will be given in our next issue…
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 In 1960 Martins Bank’s South Western
District Office is the newest in its network of “local head offices”, but
it has to share 47 Corn Street, both with Bristol City Office Branch, and
Bristol Trustee & Investment Department. Mr G E Clarkson is the first
appointed South Western District General Manager, a post he holds until the
time of the merger with Barclays, some nine years later. At long last there
is more local control over the Bank’s branches in the West and South West
of England, and the South of Wales.
Growth in the work of this new office is exponential – so that
larger premises are soon required. In January 1968, the South West District
Office moves over the road to No 48 Corn Street which has been designed for
the future needs of the growing district.
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1967 – to let…
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…2007 – to let once
more
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 The
workload has istelf, grown because Martins is still “growing” its branch
network in the area. The majority of new state of the art branches opened
in the 1960s are to be found within the boundaries of South Western
District. These include the opening of new offices and the redevelopment of
older ones in Bristol. The Bank’s
presence in Newport, Monmouthshire increases from one to three
branches. A second branch opens in
Cheltenham at Montpelier, and the original Cheltenham branch premises are
bulldozed and rebuilt. Gloucester Branch is also given new premises suited
to modern banking, following a highly critical inspection report that
condemns the existing premises as “unfit”.
A number of new sub branches are also opened in prime shopping areas
of many towns and cities in the South West.
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Swindon, shown above (left) has a brand new
state of the art branch in 1964, which looks as if it would fit easily
anywhere on today’s High Street. A
young district thus requires a modern district office, and then chance for
Martins to move into a building of the right size so close to their
existing buildings, is too good to miss. The two images above show 48 Corn
Street as she was to let in the late 1960s, and again forty years later in
2007. The colour image is shown here courtesy of Burston Cook Commercial www.burstoncook.co.uk. Before we see the ambitious reworking
of the building by Martins, we have some more images taken when the
building was empty and ready to be let to the Bank…
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Barclays main Bristol
Office is only four doors down…
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…48
Corn Street was once a large post office…
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Inside, progress and
tradition have not mixed well…
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Some
features are downright ugly…
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… and
some not so bad!
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With 6,000 Square Feet of space
to play with, Martins design staff can really go to town on the building to
make it into a District Office that is “future-proof”. The results are shown below, in what are
currently the only known photographs of the new interior. All looks
fabulous, and ready for take off, but that bit about being “future-proof”,
well, that might be a step too far…
In 1968 Martins Bank Magazine
publishes a kind of triumphant “we told you so” article, showing off a
series of pictures of the lavish new offices at 48 Corn Street, and
declaring that they always new the South Western District would
expand. Ironically, within nine
months of this article being written, the first stage of the takeover of
Martins by Barclays will have been completed…
 
 from our spring issue 1963 following a visit to Bristol in snow and
ice: “The old saying 'nothing
succeeds like success', is shown in the atmosphere of liveliness and vigour
at Corn Street, which starts at the very top . . . As we write we keep
wondering how long the snow sticks on the roof. . . Not long, we think,
with all that energy below - unless the
insulation is very good: in which case nobody will be fooled except our
competitors”. Well, there you
are! We saw this coming five years ago— not just the need for more elbow room but all the
indications that our South Western District would continue to flourish.
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Everything written about
it in these pages during the past five years has confirmed this, and now
District Office has had to find a new home, leaving No. 47 to provide more
breathing space for the expanding Bristol City Office and the Trustee and
Tax departments. No. 48 stands next to the Corn Exchange just across the street
on a narrow site of great depth, outwardly a beautiful Georgian structure
but inwardly… just a minute
now! New premises should, ideally,
be big enough to allow for expansion ten or even twenty years ahead: in
design and architecture the same intelligent guesswork is required. One can
estimate growth with reasonable accuracy 'other things being equal', and
the new office has been taken and planned accordingly.
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But how can one plan or
even guess in matters of design where tastes, fashions and personal
preferences can change almost as quickly as a government's policies? We are almost prepared to lay a prudent 6
to 4 that in ten years' time most of No. 48 will be in fashion and of those
parts that are not people will be saying 'What a pity we don't see that
sort of thing in today's buildings'.
Being narrow-waisted, the building presented a problem at the start
and so from the entrance one must go right, left or upwards. On the right are the glass-enclosed
rooms of the Superintendent and the Inspectors with loads of space for a
waiting room, the 'desk men' and the typists. To the left of the entrance
lie Reception, Interview, Staff, Visiting Inspectors and Premises, all
these rooms and the connecting passage at the back being carpeted in a
highly original blue-green hog's hair on blubber which, with occasional
dampening, retains its spring indefinitely.
The lift and the staircase wrapped round it take one to the District
General Management suite on the first floor, Mr Clarkson's room being
combined ingeniously with the Board Room.
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There have been
suggestions that this room may be too sombre even in daylight, yet most of
the 150 guests at the reception on the evening of January 23 persisted in
crowding in and staying there despite the seemingly limitless space
elsewhere. To the observer that might be puzzling, but there are more
things in design and architecture than are dreamed of in the minds of mere
businessmen and one of these things is that one should not be consciously
aware of one's surroundings. Perhaps John Crowther, the Truro architect,
was secretly delighted to see this proved so convincingly. In contrast
there is the lightness and warmth of the almost Western Desert tone of Mr
Milburn's room across the building—a room which at first surprised one but quickly attracted
much favourable comment. On the second floor, to the front of the building, is the
management dining room with an attractive ante-room lit from what we
fondly, if irreverently, term 'tiddler cans'. The dining room, panelled in
the knotted pine of No. 47, is a delight and Mrs Bryant's culinary kingdom
which adjoins it is a model of efficient modernity. At the back of the building, still on the
second floor, is an unoccupied room of the same dimensions as Mr Milburn’s
beneath it. Since nobody named Parkinson has commanded the District his Law will not affect that vacant
space. So far as is known there is no Clarkson’s Law but we suggest that it might well be ‘Time,
money and staff put to the best use bring their own reward’, simply because
that is the unwritten law by which the Board, the management and the staff
have brought this District to its present eminence.
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