Till times last sand a history of the bank of england 1694 2013

TILL TIME’S LAST SAND First published in Great Britain 2017 This electronic edition published in 2017 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (c) David Kynaston 2017 David Kynaston has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them For legal purposes the Acknowledgements constitute an extension of this copyright page The moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4088 6857 7 eISBN 978 1 4088 6858 4 To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters Thus at thy helm of Gold, thy short-liv’d Pride, No abler, trustier pilot-hand could guide: That fair Foundation Royal, that (if my Too poor Propheticks may dare speak so high) Beyond her yet too narrow lease shall stand With its unshaken head, till time’s last sand; Whose circulating warmth shall never cease, At once the nerves of War and veins of Peace: Commerce, Arts, Arms, all her own fair increase, A Treasury, from whose diffusive mine Our glebe shall fatten, and our Throne shall shine From Elkanah Settle, ‘Augusta Lachrymans: a Funeral Tear to the Memory of the Worthy and Honour’d Michael Godfrey, Esq.’ (1695) I once had the temerity to ask a central banker the secret of his craft ‘It all depends,’ he said, ‘on making the right-sounding noises at the right time.’ He then abruptly changed the subject, and started discussing with patently spurious animation the prospects of Sussex in the County Cricket Championship ‘Lombard Lane’, Punch, 14 August 1963 Preface I was honoured to be asked in 2009 by the then governor, Mervyn King, to undertake a single-volume history of the Bank of England Other commitments and unavoidable circumstances have delayed the book’s preparation, but the work itself has been both challenging and enjoyable From the start we were agreed that I would retain complete independence of judgement; and the Bank has admirably kept to its word We were also agreed that this would be a book for the general reader, not the specialist, and I am very conscious that - for all its length - this is a far from comprehensive account of the Bank’s activities over the years The reader who wishes to go wider and deeper should in the irst instance consult the notable series of books on speci ic periods of the Bank’s history: Sir John Clapham (1944) on 1694 to 1914; Richard Sayers (1976) on 1891 to 1944; John Fforde (1992) on 1941 to 1958; and Forrest Capie (2010) on the 1950s to 1979 In addition, on the domestic side of the Bank, the reader wanting more should go to W Marston Acres (1931) for the irst two centuries or so and to Elizabeth Hennessy (1992) for 1930 to 1960 I have drawn heavily on the pioneering work of all these historians, as I also have on my own four-volume history of the City of London, for each volume of which I did a considerable amount of archival research at the Bank At the end of writing this book, I ind myself thinking - not for the irst time - of the haunting words that Richard Sayers wrote on completing his history: ‘I am all too aware of its imperfections and shortcomings, and can only plead, in the phrase of Hippocrates and Chaucer, “so short the life, so long the craft to learn”.’ March 2017 PROLOGUE It Must Now Necessarily be a Bank ‘The Commissioners for the new Bank came this morning to Mercers’ Chapel, where the books were opened,’ noted the dogged chronicler Narcissus Luttrell on Thursday, 21 June 1694 ”Tis said,’ he added, ‘the subscriptions already amount to PS300,000.’ Luttrell was right: the capital-raising process for the putative Bank of England was off to a cracking start In addition to King William and Queen Mary (jointly contributing PS10,000, the maximum permitted), other irst-day subscribers included the irst lord of the Treasury (Lord Godolphin, PS4,000), a clockmaker (John Ebsworth, PS1,000), a salter (John English, PS500), an apothecary (Nicholas Gambier, PS600), a host of merchants, and a ‘gentleman’ from ‘the town of St Albans in the county of Hertfordshire’ (John Gape, PS500) The following Tuesday a friend told the political philosopher John Locke that he had subscribed PS300 - which, Locke then informed another friend, ‘made me subscribe PS500’ - while even before that, on the 25th, one of the opponents of the new institution had faced up to painful reality ‘I am informed,’ the Duke of Leeds wrote from his Yorkshire fastness to his London bankers, ‘That subscriptions to the Bank do ill so fast, that their is at this day near 700‘000 subscribed, so that it must now nesesarily be a bank I therfore desire that you will subscribe foure thousand pound for mee …’ The overall target was PS1.2 million (25 per cent payable in cash), and it was reached at Mercers’ Hall in Cheapside on the tenth day, 2 July, with the last of the 1,268 subscribers being Judith Shirley of Preston in Sussex, staking a modest PS75.1 Three men above all had been responsible for getting the Bank (as the Bank of England would in time be familiarly called) to this promising point William Paterson, a remarkable and resilient Scot, is best described as a ‘projector’ - or, in the words of one of his biographers, someone ‘more skilful at promoting his plans than at executing his projects, and more interested in his own self-advancement than in carrying through the consequences of his ideas’ In any case, whatever the motivation, it was Paterson who had the persistence and the lair to put the idea of an English bank of credit - note issuing and able to lend to the state, unlike the Dutch model - irmly on the table Such a bank would, he insisted in his key pamphlet A Brief Account of the Intended Bank of England, be ‘for the convenience and security of great Payments, and the better to facilitate the circulation of Money, in and around this great and oppulent City’ By 1694, and probably earlier, his two key allies were Charles Montagu, a dif icult but hugely able Treasury minister who marshalled the political support, and Michael Godfrey, a substantial merchant who did much the same in the City of London On 25 April, the much contested Bill that became generally known as the Tonnage Act passed through both Houses of Parliament Among other things it declared that if half the pledged sum of PS1.2 million was lent to the state at 8 per cent by the start of August, the subscribers were to be incorporated under the Great Seal as ‘the Governor and Company of the Banke of England’.2 There followed the successful subscription of late June and early July, ensuring that it would be a certainty On 5 July, three days after the books had closed, an announcement in the London Gazette summoned all subscribers of PS500 or more to meet on the 10th at 8am at Mercers’ Hall There, after swearing that the sum subscribed had been their ‘own proper money’, they were to ‘give in Riting, Rolled up, the Names of Two Such Persons as they think it’, one to be governor of the new bank, the other deputy governor The election duly happened, resulting in Godfrey (an PS8,000 subscriber) being named deputy governor, with another prominent City merchant, Sir John Houblon (a PS10,000 subscriber), as governor Next day the process was repeated, with twenty-four of the subscribers being chosen as the Bank’s irst set of directors Governor, deputy governor and most of the directors then assembled at Mercers’ Hall just over a fortnight later, on the afternoon of Friday, 27 July, for their irst ‘Court’, hours after the Bank’s Charter had been formally sealed at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields house of Sir John Somers, lord keeper of the Great Seal The immediate issue faced by the ledgling body was to determine the appropriate method ‘of giving Receipts for running Cash’: Upon putting the Question after a long Debate, It was Resolved, That these three Methods shall be observed & none other 1st To give out Running=Cash=Notes, and to endorse on them what is paid off in part 2nd To keep an Accompt with ye Creditor: in a Book or Paper of his owne 3rd To accept Notes drawn on ye Bank And it is Ordered that no Creditor shall use any two of the said methods … The second option was in effect pass-book banking, the third option cheque-book banking; but almost certainly the preferred option was the irst - a recognition of (in Derrick Byatt’s 1994 words, referring to the goldsmith-bankers who had emerged in London since the 1630s) ‘the advantage to commerce generally of the goldsmith’s note payable to a named depositor or order (later, or bearer)’ And ‘thus,’ he added, ‘was laid the foundation stone for the Bank’s series of note issues down the centuries’.3 On the occasion of an earlier anniversary, the 250th in 1944, a more celebrated historian of the Bank, Sir John Clapham, opened his account with a sentence that would become much quoted: ‘The establishment of the Bank of England can be treated, like many historical events both great and small, either as curiously accidental or as all but inevitable.’ And he went on: ‘Had the country not been at war in 1694, the government would hardly have been disposed to offer a favourable charter to a corporation which proposed to lend it money Had Charles Montagu, a Lord of the Treasury, and from [May] 1694 Chancellor of the Exchequer, not thought that, out of several scores of inancial schemes submitted to him, this was on the whole the most promising, there would again have been no charter or perhaps quite a different one.’ Context is often all, and perhaps peculiarly so in the case of this quasiaccidental institution that would achieve a rare permanence The cardinal context was indeed war - speci ically, the Nine Years’ War against France that followed on from William and Mary’s accession to the throne in 1688, a war that resulted in public expenditure during the 1690s running at well over twice the level it had in the 1680s Taxation naturally increased, up to around PS4 million a year by the mid-1690s, but that still left an annual shortfall of some PS2 million Given that the King had no intention of making what he saw as a premature peace - and given the underlying truth of the political economist Charles Davenant’s contemporary observation that ‘the whole Art of War is in a manner reduced to Money’, so that ‘that Prince, who can best ind Money to feed, cloath, and pay his Army, not he that has the most Valiant Troops, is surest of Success and Conquest’ - the need to ill the gap was, to put it mildly, urgent What to do? With means of repayment increasingly non-existent, and a range of short-term expedients already tried, the obvious answer was long-term borrowing: the beginning, in effect, of the funded (aka national) debt Lottery tickets and lottery-like tontine annuities were tried, with mixed success, before inally the ‘special bonds’ solution: namely, PS1.2 million bonds, not only (in the words of the inancial historian Larry Neal) ‘carrying a guaranteed eight per cent rate of interest and funded from speci ic taxes assigned to that purpose by Parliament’, but ‘sold only to subscribers in the proposed new Bank of England’ This did not quite meet the shortfall, but crucially it meant that the King’s will could be done and the war continue Not that the King’s will was quite what it had been, given that 1694 was only six years after England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ - that decisive shift towards constitutional monarchy and in due course something starting to resemble parliamentary democracy, a shift that William himself had no alternative but to accept as the price of his kingship Undoubtedly, the Bank itself was one of the most palpable immediate consequences of the revolution; and it was explicitly in relation to this new institution and its likely inancial muscle that on 8 July, six days after the subscription books had closed, the future Duke of Chandos, James Brydges, candidly informed his Jacobite-inclined father that ‘the opinion of most persons here as well as strangers abroad’ was that there was now ‘no likelihood’ of the government of the day ‘ever changing in favour of King James’ There was also by this time a speci ically party political aspect: whereas the Tories stood foursquare for the primacy of land and were instinctively hostile to the City and all its inancial wiles - incomprehensible, dangerous, even republican the increasingly powerful Whigs were developing a political economy that (in the words of Steve Pincus, historian of England’s ‘First Modern Revolution’) ‘embraced urban culture, manufacturing, and economic imperialism’ In short, the Bank was ‘a Whig creation against Tory resistance’, a creation that marked the triumph of the commercially minded and the unsentimental forces of the new.4 Arguably paramount among those forces was what was rapidly emerging by the late seventeenth century as a profound inancial revolution, parallel to the political one Key elements included a rapidly growing securities market, now poised to trade in long-term government debt; Lloyd’s insurance, with Edward Lloyd in 1691 moving his coffee house from near the river to Lombard Street in order to be close to the General Post Of ice, a prime source of shipping intelligence; and an increasingly enmeshed web of bankers and merchants, enjoying a symbiotic and mutually bene icial relationship The glaring absence was clearly a national bank, call it the Bank of England But as to precisely what sort of animal it was at the point of creation in July 1694, that was less clear-cut Partly through the legislation, partly through the Charter and partly through what was tacitly understood, the following (baldly summarised) seems to have been the case: that the Bank, in return for its PS1.2 million loan, not only received 8 per cent annual interest and a PS4,000 annual management fee, but a range of privileges, including a) seldom accorded jointstock status; b) in effect limited liability; c) the right to maximise its pro its through undertaking a general banking business, including through issuing paper money, taking deposits, lending on mortgages and dealing in bills of exchange as well as gold and silver; and d) the right to choose its own top personnel The deal was not quite open sesame - the Charter was guaranteed for only eleven years, the Bank was not yet formally the government’s banker, and it did not yet have a monopoly on either joint-stock banking or note issue - but this was still a pretty attractive package.5 Looked at in the round, from a larger viewpoint as well as just the Bank’s, the temptation is to see the whole process as smooth, Whiggish (literally) and inevitable, all coming together to form a virtuous circle ‘The state’s blessing afforded general circulation to the Bank’s notes,’ comments Felix Martin on this ‘public/private’ partnership ‘The commercial ownership and management of the Bank improved the state’s creditworthiness.’6 Yet ultimately, as economists and even economic historians sometimes forget, it takes people to make something work - and people, mercifully, are neither uniform nor predictable Who, to start with, were the 1,268 initial subscribers? We know quite a lot.7 One hundred and ninety ‘esquires’ contributed 25 per cent of the total PS1.2 million; 201 merchants contributed 21 per cent; sixty-three titled aristocrats contributed 15 per cent; almost 70 per cent of subscribers contributed under PS1,000; 12 per cent of the subscribers were women, responsible for about 6 per cent of the capital; some 123 of the subscribers were Huguenots (PS104,000), but only about half a dozen were Jews (PS4,100); and although the lists did feature a range of tradesmen and artisans, including carriers, clothworkers, embroiderers, farmers, mariners and whar ingers, generally the subscribers (in the words of Anne Murphy) ‘belonged to the mercantile middle classes of London’, albeit with ‘important ancillary contributions from lawyers, of ice-holders, and clergy of the Church of England’ Barely 2 per cent of the capital was subscribed for from abroad; over 87 per cent of the subscribers lived in London, Middlesex, Surrey and Hertfordshire; and almost 55 per cent of the subscribers were based in the City itself, the historic square mile As to motivation, what Jonathan Swift would recall as ‘the bait of large Interest’ was almost certainly the prime inducement, at a time of war and dislocation drawing in ‘a great Number of those whose Money by the Dangers and Dif iculties of Trade lay dead upon their hands’ Or as the anonymous author of Remarks upon the Bank of England would recall in 1706, ‘the 8 per Cent Alone, (when the Legal Interest was but 6, and the clear produce of Land seldom 4) was of itself a suf icient Encouragement to this Undertaking; especially considering that this was Exempt from Taxes, to which other Money, and Stock, and Land was liable’ Even so, for many of the subscribers it was not just about the per cent - it was also about getting in on the ground loor of an incorporated joint-stock company with rich inancial potential ‘They were attracted,’ as Sir Albert Feavearyear wrote many years later, ‘by the opportunity which the foundation of the irst joint-stock bank in England provided of taking a hand in the business of banking, a business which in the last ifty Front Hall Court Room Garden Court Bomb damage to Bank station, January 1941 On the seventh floor, c 1942: Messengers’ Quarters Kitchen Waiting for nationalisation: Lord Catto, 1944 Bank Note Office, 1942: prickers and stampers Bank Note Office, 1961-2: paid notes for destruction Bullion Office, 1960s: gold vault A future governor, Leslie O’Brien, holding aloft a presentation book of signatures to the retiring governor, Lord (‘Kim’) Cobbold, June 1961 Dividend Preparation Office, New Change, 1962: the Bank’s first computer Lord Cromer, 1961, with Pitt the Younger continuing to keep an eye on the Old Lady Personification of the Discount Office: Hilton Clarke, 1967 Printing works at Debden, c 1960 The first two post-independence governors: Eddie George, 1990s; Mervyn King (next), April 2013 (The painting above George is Johann Zoffany’s portrait of Abraham Vickery.) Governors during turbulent years: Gordon Richardson, July 1973; Robin Leigh-Pemberton (next), c 1990 South front, 1990s Picture Credits Extract from the original book of subscriptions, June-July 1694 (The Bank of England Archive (M1/1)) Grocers’ Hall, Poultry (Bank of England Museum (0003) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) Sir John Houblon (Bank of England Museum (0248ii) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) Gilbert Heathcote (Bank of England Museum (0244) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) The original west wing (Bank of England Museum (902) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) The Pay Hall, 1808 (Bank of England Museum (0820) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) Samuel Bosanquet (Bank of England Museum (0236) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) Abraham Newland (Bank of England Museum (0498 (i)) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) Midas, transmuting all, into paper, James Gillray, 1797 (The Bank of England Museum (0276) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) Soane’s Bank: Rotunda (Bank of England Museum (0172) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) Soane’s Bank: Accountants (later PS5 Note) Of ice (The Bank of England Museum (1993/234) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) Soane’s Bank: Threadneedle Street front (The Bank of England Museum (0087) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) Soane’s Bank: Bank Stock Office (The Bank of England Archive 15A13/1/1/4/4) Samuel Thornton (Bank of England Museum (0843) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) John Horsley Palmer (Bank of England Museum (0257) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) William Cotton (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/13/2/8)) William Lidderdale (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/13/2/1)) G E Hicks, Dividend Day at the Bank of England, 1859 (The Bank of England Museum (0187) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) Front Courtyard, 1894 (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/7)) Consols Office, 1894 (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/7)) The Bank en fete for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897 (The Bank of England Archive (NON ST 68)) Threadneedle Street south front, from across the steps of the Royal Exchange (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/2/11)) The Court of Directors, 1903 (The Bank of England Archive 15A13/13/3/1)) Staff singing the National Anthem, August 1916 (The Bank of England Archive (HOCO/963)) King George V and Queen Mary leave the Bank after their visit, December 1917 (The Bank of England Archive (NON ST 49)) Bank Stock Office, 1920s (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/3/18)) Rotunda, 1920s (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/3/43)) Caryatids, made in 1795, being taken away from the Consols Transfer Of ice (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/3/63)) Printing dividend warrants at St Luke’s, 1920s (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/6/1/11)) Committee of Treasury, painted by A.K Lawrence, 1928 (The Bank of England Museum (1090) (c) The Governor and Company of the Bank of England) Taking the Paris air, May 1930 (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/3/18)) Baker’s Bank: Portico (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/2/6)) Baker’s Bank: Front Hall (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/1/58/6)) Baker’s Bank: Court Room (The Bank of England Archive (STAFF 15A13/1/1/67/48)) Baker’s Bank: Garden Court (The Bank of England Archive (15A13_1_1_68_41)) Bomb damage to Bank station, January 1941 (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/4/39) (c) London News Agency (LN14213B)) Messengers’ Quarters Kitchen, c 1942 (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/4/44)) Lord Catto, 1944 (The Bank of England Archive (STAFF C3)) Bank Note Of ice, 1942: prickers and stampers (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/1/27/4)) Bank Note Of ice, 1962: paid notes for destruction (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/1/27/4)) Bullion Office, 1960s: gold vault (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/1/8/31)) Dividend Preparation Of ice, New Change, 1962: the Bank’s irst computer (The Bank of England Archive (NC 8)) Leslie O’Brien and Lord (‘Kim’) Cobbold, June 1961 (The Bank of England Archive (E8/164)) Lord Cromer, 1961 (The Bank of England Archive (STAFF C30)) Hilton Clarke, 1967 (The Bank of England Archive (STAFF C10)) Printing works at Debden, c 1960 (The Bank of England Archive (BkC001)) Gordon Richardson, July 1973 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images (c) Central Press/Stringer) Robin Leigh-Pemberton, c 1990 (The Bank of England Archive (STAFF L11)) South front, 1990s (The Bank of England Archive (15A13/1/2/57)) Eddie George, 1990s (Getty Images (c) Gemma Levine/Contributor) Mervyn King, April 2013 (Getty Images (c) Bloomberg/Contributor) Also available by David Kynaston Modernity Britain: A Shake of the Dice, 1959-1962 By 1959 consumerism was inexorably taking hold, relative economic decline was becoming the staple of political discourse, immigration was turning into an ever-hotter issue and traditional morality was under threat (Lady Chatterley’s Lover freely on sale after the famous case) Traditional working-class culture was changing even as Coronation Street established itself as a national institution, but the greatest shake of the dice concerned urban redevelopment: slum clearance was intensi ied, and the skyline became studded with brutalist high-rise boxes This profoundly important story of transformation from the old to the brink of a new world is now told brilliantly and in full for the first time ‘He compresses the vivid fragments so that a subtle but irresistible narrative emerges from them: more mosaic, perhaps, than collage’ Andrew Marr, New Statesman ‘Triumphant … A historian of peerless sensitivity and curiosity about the lives of individuals’ Financial Times ‘Wise, funny, impeccably researched and beautifully written’ Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday Click here to order Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-1959 The late 1950s was an action-packed, often dramatic time in which the contours of modern Britain began to take shape These were the ‘never had it so good’ years, when the Carry On ilm series and the TV soap Emergency Ward 10 got going, and ilms like Room at the Top and plays like A Taste of Honey brought the working class to the centre of the national frame; when the urban skyline began irresistibly to go high-rise; when CND galvanised the progressive middle class; when ‘youth; emerged as a cultural force; when the Notting Hill riots made race and immigration an inescapable reality; and when ‘meritocracy’ became the buzz word of the day The consequences of this ‘modernity’ zeitgeist, David Kynaston argues, still affect us today ‘Volumes full of treasure, serious history with a human face’ Hilary Mantel, Observer, Summer Reads ‘It will surely come to be seen not just as one of the present era’s most important histories, but as one of the most illuminating works of literature’ Jonathan Coe, Prospect ‘Modernity Britain is both even-handed and exhilarating, a rare combination … When he expresses overt opinions, they are always thoughtful, and arrive like thunder- lashes, illuminating the pages around them … Was ever a history book so authoritative and, at the same time, quite so entertaining?’ Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday Click here to order Family Britain, 1951-1957 As in Austerity Britain, an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices drive the narrative The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s We also encounter well-known igures on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger’s Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester) All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive lavour: Butlin’s holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock’s Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skif le and teddy boys Deeply researched, David Kynaston’s Family Britain offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence ‘This wonderful volume is only the irst in a series that will take us to 1979 and the election of Margaret Thatcher When complete, Kynaston’s skill in mixing eyewitness accounts and political analysis will surely be one of the greatest and most enduring publishing ventures for generations’ Brian Thompson, Observer ‘Even readers who can remember the years Kynaston writes about will ind they are continually surprised by the richness and diversity of his material … mouth-watering’ John Carey, Sunday Times ‘The book is a marvel … the level of detail is precise and fascinating’ John Campbell, Sunday Telegraph Click here to order Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 A Sunday Times bestseller Coursing through Austerity Britain is an astonishing variety of voices - vivid, unselfconscious, and unaware of what the future holds A Chingford housewife endures the tribulations of rationing; a retired schoolteacher observes during a royal visit how well-fed the Queen looks; a pernickety civil servant in Bristol is oblivious to anyone’s troubles but his own An array of working-class witnesses describe how life in post-war Britain is, with little regard for liberal niceties or the feelings of their ‘betters’ Many of these voices will stay with the reader in future volumes, jostling alongside wellknown igures like John Arlott (here making his irst radio broadcast, still in police uniform), Glenda Jackson (taking the 11+) and Doris Lessing, newly arrived from Africa, struck by the levelling poverty of postwar Britain David Kynaston weaves a sophisticated narrative of how the victorious 1945 Labour government shaped the political, economic and social landscape for the next three decades Deeply researched, often amusing and always intensely entertaining and readable, the irst volume of David Kynaston’s ambitious history offers an entirely fresh perspective on Britain during those six momentous years ‘This is a classic; buy at least three copies - one for yourself and two to give to friends and family’ Guardian ‘The book is a marvel … the fullest, deepest and most balanced history of our times’ Sunday Telegraph ‘A wonderfully illuminating picture of the way we were’ The Times Click here to order https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/david-kynaston/ ... increasingly act as banker to what Clapham calls the great national accounts’, such as ‘during Marlborough’s wars the Paymaster of the Army, the Paymaster of Guards and Garrisons, the Treasurer of the Ordnance Of. .. prophetic pamphlet called The Trial and Condemnation of the Land Bank at Exeter Change for murdering the Bank of England at Grocers’ Hall The level of personal abuse was high even by the standards of the day - there... increasingly enmeshed web of bankers and merchants, enjoying a symbiotic and mutually bene icial relationship The glaring absence was clearly a national bank, call it the Bank of England But as to precisely what sort of animal it was at the