Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Odd Thoughts podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Allaway and I'm Joe wisnal Joe, Do you
Speaker 1: know the one thing that I love more than finance
Speaker 1: and markets? Um? Uh, I'm curious what you'll say I
Speaker 1: got to say about yourself, but I'm just gonna say no, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's the safe answer. All right. So I really like history.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I like about this particular podcast,
Speaker 1: other than the fact that I get the chance to
Speaker 1: talk with you for twenty minutes every week, is the
Speaker 1: fact that we can go back in time and every
Speaker 1: once in a while kind of delve into the history
Speaker 1: of finance and markets. I love the history of financial markets.
Speaker 1: I find, you know, it's kind of like with language,
Speaker 1: how etymology helped us understand certain aspects of the present
Speaker 1: better by seeing how these words evolved. I think there's
Speaker 1: a very clear analogy with the history of finance and economics.
Speaker 1: Seeing how some various institutions evolved can help us, uh
Speaker 1: understand their structures better today. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
Speaker 1: So what if I told you that on today's podcast
Speaker 1: we are going to have an almost perfect synthesis of
Speaker 1: history and finance and markets. I would tell you I
Speaker 1: am very excited for this conversation. Okay, alright, so am I.
Speaker 1: So today we are actually going to talk with a
Speaker 1: woman who is an archivist for the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Speaker 1: And I don't know about you, but I was kind
Speaker 1: of surprised to hear that RBS um as the bank
Speaker 1: is known, actually has an archive at all. I would
Speaker 1: not have guessed that at all. I mean, it sort
Speaker 1: of doesn't surprise to me. Maybe the banks have libraries
Speaker 1: and that there's some history stored at them, but the
Speaker 1: idea of a his Dorian or an archivist at the
Speaker 1: bank sort of whose job it is to um, you know,
Speaker 1: collect the bank's history, is uh, not something I would
Speaker 1: have guessed existed. Yeah, And I have to say, if
Speaker 1: you go on RBS's website and take a look at
Speaker 1: some of the items that they have in their archive.
Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about this later in the show,
Speaker 1: but they have some really fascinating, fascinating things, you know,
Speaker 1: things like customer ledgers that were kept during the Great
Speaker 1: Plague or to create Fire of London. Um old sort
Speaker 1: of filing systems that the bank used hundreds of years ago,
Speaker 1: and I have to say, this is one of Britain's
Speaker 1: oldest banks. Uh, so it's going to be really really
Speaker 1: interesting to hear from her. Well, I can't wait, So
Speaker 1: let's get started, all right. So our guest for today
Speaker 1: is Ruth Read. She's the head of Archives and Art
Speaker 1: for the Royal Bank of Scotland. Ruth, thank you so
Speaker 1: much are joining us, and these two thank you. So
Speaker 1: maybe just to begin, could you describe for us exactly
Speaker 1: what RBS's archive is, what it looks like, where it's kept,
Speaker 1: and what your role in terms of being an archivist
Speaker 1: actually is, because I can't imagine there are many people
Speaker 1: out there who have that job. Yes, So to start
Speaker 1: with physically what it looks like and where it is.
Speaker 1: We're in a pretty anonymous looking warehouse on the western
Speaker 1: edges of Edinburgh. From outside, you'd never really guessed that
Speaker 1: it was a historical archive. Um, and what we're keeping
Speaker 1: inside is the historical records of the Royal Bank of
Speaker 1: Scotland groups. So that includes quite a lot of present
Speaker 1: day banks. That's the Royal Bank of Scotland itself, but
Speaker 1: also NAT West, which is a major name. We've got
Speaker 1: some private banks all sorts of different businesses and actually
Speaker 1: more than two hundred historic banks that have come together
Speaker 1: over the centuries to make up those present day names.
Speaker 1: These are not a national records that the bank needs
Speaker 1: to keep to do business now. Um, these are the
Speaker 1: very few records that we've decided to keep for ever
Speaker 1: because they tell us who we've been and therefore who
Speaker 1: we are. My job in the archives could probably be
Speaker 1: summarized as capturing, protecting, and using the history of the
Speaker 1: bank and the historical records that pumped in that. So
Speaker 1: are these items in the archives things that the bank
Speaker 1: had held for a long time and then at some
Speaker 1: point that, oh, we should formalize this in an archive,
Speaker 1: or did the banks say we should have like sort
Speaker 1: of an archive of history or banking history and then
Speaker 1: go about finding the items that would make up that archive.
Speaker 1: There's there's a big change that happened probably in sort
Speaker 1: of mid late twentieth century. So the things that have
Speaker 1: survived from the eighteenth nineteenth century, yes, you're absolutely right.
Speaker 1: Those are things that pretty much either survived by accident
Speaker 1: or survived because it was so very obvious that they
Speaker 1: were important to business. And it's really only in the
Speaker 1: past forty to fifty years that companies have become more
Speaker 1: self conscious about needing to choose the right things and
Speaker 1: keep the right things. And that's become really important as
Speaker 1: to get into the present age, because now that records
Speaker 1: are digital, things don't survive by accident. You have to
Speaker 1: be deliberate about it. So is it unusual for a
Speaker 1: bank to kind of keep its own historic archive in
Speaker 1: in this manner, Like if we went over to Goldman
Speaker 1: Sachs or to Deutsche Bank or HSBC, would they have
Speaker 1: a similar thing in place or is this unique to RBS. No,
Speaker 1: I don't know about all of them. You would certainly
Speaker 1: find a very good and impressive archives at HSBC, and
Speaker 1: certainly all of the major British banks have got archives,
Speaker 1: and actually a lot of companies in general, supermarkets, drinks, companies,
Speaker 1: all sorts of businesses do have archives. In light of that,
Speaker 1: let's talk about some of the things that exist in
Speaker 1: the RBS archives and why they've been and one of
Speaker 1: what and what they tell us. So one of the
Speaker 1: things that you have is a ledger that was kept
Speaker 1: from the Great Fire of London in the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: What is that is from the sixteen sixties. What does
Speaker 1: it tell us? What does it what does a bank
Speaker 1: ledger from about four years ago even tell us? That's
Speaker 1: a really nice document to have because that goes all
Speaker 1: the way back to the very early history of a
Speaker 1: company called Child and Company, which is still exists as
Speaker 1: one of our banks today and is said to be
Speaker 1: the oldest name in British banking that's still trading. So
Speaker 1: it's really lovely to have some of those early customer records.
Speaker 1: And if we're looking at the Great Fire of London period,
Speaker 1: it's wonderful to see quite how business was managing in
Speaker 1: unbelievably difficult circumstances. You know, London had in sixty sixty
Speaker 1: five it had suffered from this plague, and then you
Speaker 1: get to sixty and sixty six and there's this terrible
Speaker 1: fire which literally stopped just before get team to the
Speaker 1: business premises of this bank, and you see that business
Speaker 1: surviving and coping through all those difficulties, and of course
Speaker 1: what it's telling us is what was going on for
Speaker 1: all of the customers of that bank at that time.
Speaker 1: So I've spent an inordinate amount of time browsing the
Speaker 1: items that you have in your collection, so rather than
Speaker 1: ask you about some of the ones that strike my
Speaker 1: interest the most. I wonder do you have some favorites
Speaker 1: that you could maybe point as to I have hundreds
Speaker 1: of favorites, and of my favorites, i'll tell you something
Speaker 1: different every week. Um. But I guess one that I
Speaker 1: love very much is we have some field service postcards
Speaker 1: that were written by one of our members of staff
Speaker 1: who was away on military service during the First World War. UM.
Speaker 1: So these were written between nineteen sixteen and nineteen and
Speaker 1: at that time, because soldier's letters were very heavily censored,
Speaker 1: they couldn't write anything they liked. So they'd have these
Speaker 1: post cards and they could just tick a box that
Speaker 1: said I'm fine, and it was a way of letting
Speaker 1: people back home know that everything was all right and
Speaker 1: they were you know face um. And we have several
Speaker 1: of these and the archives that were sent by a
Speaker 1: man called Samuel McKnight who had worked at the Royal
Speaker 1: Bank of Scotland's head office. And it's wonderful to have them.
Speaker 1: But what I love most about them is the story
Speaker 1: about how they were found. They were found by one
Speaker 1: of my predecessors in the nineties in the head office
Speaker 1: building wrapped up in a little piece of paper that
Speaker 1: said something like these cards were placed here by John
Speaker 1: Smith's messenger in the hopes that perhaps long after this
Speaker 1: dreadful war, the name of one may again be honored
Speaker 1: who was loved by all. And he did that just
Speaker 1: after the First World War. He obviously had these cards
Speaker 1: and he wanted future generations to remember. And I took
Speaker 1: for me that summarizes what's so great about archives, because
Speaker 1: because of what he did, I remember Samuel mcnight's name,
Speaker 1: and now because as an archive here you know his
Speaker 1: name as well. That is really cool that you have
Speaker 1: that stuff, you know. I mentioned in the intro that
Speaker 1: I thought looking at the history of banking and the
Speaker 1: sort of artifacts of historical banking might help us understand
Speaker 1: the current the present tense And of course I think
Speaker 1: probably a lot of people when they think about a bank,
Speaker 1: they imagine maybe a vault or something like that where
Speaker 1: their money is, and then they go to the bank
Speaker 1: and then their share of the money has taken out.
Speaker 1: But as many of us know, that's really not how
Speaker 1: bank works or banks work at all, and that essentially
Speaker 1: banks are mostly digital and they're most of our money
Speaker 1: exists on a spreadsheet and so you know, just it's
Speaker 1: just sells, you know, numbers in a cell. And so
Speaker 1: looking back at some of the documents on your website
Speaker 1: and people should check it out at Heritage Archives dot
Speaker 1: RBS dot com a lot of that. It's basically the
Speaker 1: same story that the fundamental aspect of the bank is
Speaker 1: not the money that is kept there, but the written
Speaker 1: down records of what people are entitled to. I think
Speaker 1: that's right. Um it certainly look at the essence of
Speaker 1: what banking is, that business of putting things that you
Speaker 1: value somewhere safe and keeping them safe and being able
Speaker 1: to trust. You know, there's an awful lot of crust
Speaker 1: which is necessary for banking to rum. So that's what
Speaker 1: I love about archives and business archives is you see
Speaker 1: these footprints of people all through time using different technologies.
Speaker 1: They used what they had available at the time, but
Speaker 1: they're doing the same thing. So in terms of the
Speaker 1: lessons that we can glean from those records, you know,
Speaker 1: things that show who owes which person what, what are
Speaker 1: some of the applications of the archive and has the
Speaker 1: archive ever contributed to any interesting research or interesting historical
Speaker 1: conclusions to your knowledge, Well, we're open to members of
Speaker 1: the public. So academic research has come in very frequently
Speaker 1: to work on projects, and they are often about financial history,
Speaker 1: about the history of lending structures, for example, and how
Speaker 1: they have evolved over time. But also there might be
Speaker 1: um garden historians or furniture historians can come in and
Speaker 1: use the records to find that footprint is something they're researching.
Speaker 1: It's quite nice about business records that those are quite solid,
Speaker 1: factual based records compared to somebody's diary, which is always
Speaker 1: you've got to think about what that person's agenda was
Speaker 1: in a different way from when it's simple accounting records.
Speaker 1: But also ways that we use the archives are a
Speaker 1: lot more intangible, so they might be something about building
Speaker 1: colleague engagement, helping our colleagues to feel proud of our business,
Speaker 1: helping them to feel the importance of doing a good
Speaker 1: job for our customers by having that weight of history
Speaker 1: and understanding how many generations there are behind us who've
Speaker 1: been doing this job all this time. I wanted to
Speaker 1: pick up on that sort of heritage point because I
Speaker 1: did notice that one of the items listed in the
Speaker 1: archive is a letter from someone who has employed wid
Speaker 1: at the bank in the early nineteen hundreds or actually
Speaker 1: for most of the century, who was an Olympic runner Um,
Speaker 1: And he actually ran in the Olympics that were made
Speaker 1: famous by the Chariots of Fire movie. And it's interesting
Speaker 1: if you read the letter from him, he's responding to
Speaker 1: congratulations from his employer at the bank, where they recognize
Speaker 1: his running achievement. Um. But the Olympic aspect of it
Speaker 1: is almost um, it's almost uh, what's the word subordinate
Speaker 1: to the fact that he works at the bank. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, the fact that he works at the bank
Speaker 1: is something to be proud of. Do you think the
Speaker 1: role of banks and bankers in society has changed over
Speaker 1: the past hundred years or so, given the you know,
Speaker 1: the events of two thousand and eight and things like that.
Speaker 1: Of course it changes at the time, and of course
Speaker 1: where at a point at the moment where banker's reputation
Speaker 1: isn't particularly high, and there are very good reasons for that.
Speaker 1: And that's actually something that again I think the archived
Speaker 1: brings value because it hasn't always been easy to work
Speaker 1: for a bank in the last few years. You know,
Speaker 1: we see the things that people say about us, and
Speaker 1: we know that there's a lot of justification in it,
Speaker 1: and having that three year long history or longer which
Speaker 1: talks about good things bankers have done. It gives people
Speaker 1: a context that I hope and think helps people get
Speaker 1: out of bed in the morning and come to work
Speaker 1: and do a good job as a banker. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: looking at another thing that Tracy had discovered on the website,
Speaker 1: This letter from our Florence Nightingale talking about a way
Speaker 1: for soldiers to send money home more effectively. You know,
Speaker 1: a classic example of a financial institutions the role that
Speaker 1: they play in society. But what is you know that's
Speaker 1: you know, we sort of take it for granted, this
Speaker 1: idea that if I want to send money to Tracy
Speaker 1: right now, you would be a little bit of a pain,
Speaker 1: but I could probably do it without too much issues.
Speaker 1: But it's sort of mind boggling to think how people
Speaker 1: would have sent money across borders two hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: What are some of the interesting technologies that you we
Speaker 1: discover when you look back at the archives about sort
Speaker 1: of solving these really difficult problems. You see it changing
Speaker 1: all the time, and you can see banks trying to
Speaker 1: to use the new dodges that are emerging and bring
Speaker 1: them in. One example I think of that's relatively recent
Speaker 1: is from the eighties when our bank No West was
Speaker 1: wanting to bring in a telephone banking service for the
Speaker 1: first time. Um, so you could you know, you could
Speaker 1: phone up and you could press buttons on your phone
Speaker 1: to choose whether you wanted a balance or to make
Speaker 1: a payment, all of those things. But this being certainly
Speaker 1: a lot of people in Britain still have the type
Speaker 1: of phone that you had to turn a dial on
Speaker 1: to get the I remember that. So, Um, they didn't
Speaker 1: work with this tone, with with this kind of button
Speaker 1: pressing technology. So the bank introduced this little thing that
Speaker 1: was like a small calculator that had the buttons on
Speaker 1: and you could hold it up to the mouthpiece of
Speaker 1: your phone and then press those buttons and it would
Speaker 1: make the right beats to go down the line to
Speaker 1: make the phone banking work. And I really like that
Speaker 1: insight into a moment where a good technology was nearly
Speaker 1: there but not quite so the bank had to find
Speaker 1: some intermediary method of making it work. I remember their
Speaker 1: technology only because my grandfather was a criminal defense lawyer
Speaker 1: and he only had rotary phones and when he would
Speaker 1: need to place calls to his clients who were in jail.
Speaker 1: He had to go through a tone operating system, and
Speaker 1: so he had one of those handheld devices that mimicked
Speaker 1: the tone of the one through zero keypad. So yeah,
Speaker 1: quite a breakthrough. You might be one of the as
Speaker 1: people have spoken to. I haven't thought about that in
Speaker 1: a long time. Um, well, I think Joe brings up
Speaker 1: a really good point. There has been so much technological
Speaker 1: advancement in the fields of banking and finance. You know,
Speaker 1: a hundred years from now, assuming that RBS is still
Speaker 1: running an archive, what is it going to look like,
Speaker 1: because you know it's easy to gather Well, it's not easy,
Speaker 1: but the idea of gathering old historical documents into one
Speaker 1: place is a common one. How do you start to
Speaker 1: tell the story of digital finance. Well, for one thing,
Speaker 1: you can take in digital documents. Most of what we
Speaker 1: take in now is actually taken in electronically rather than
Speaker 1: as physical documents, so that is certainly no impediment. And
Speaker 1: actually the same things that we want to document are
Speaker 1: still done. People still have to meet together and talk
Speaker 1: to each other and say are we going to do this?
Speaker 1: How are we going to do it? And they have
Speaker 1: to prepare for it. So in fact, we're not keeping
Speaker 1: transactional records. We're not interested in the kind of it happening.
Speaker 1: We're interested in why and how and how they make
Speaker 1: it happen, and all of that stuff will happen the same.
Speaker 1: It might be that it's an electronic file rather than
Speaker 1: a paper file, but that's not intellectually different from our
Speaker 1: point of view. You know something that I'm interested in
Speaker 1: in terms of history of finance technology is a tally sticks.
Speaker 1: And you mentioned that there was the fire in London
Speaker 1: or we talked about that in the sixteen hundred, But
Speaker 1: is it is it true? Is it like in the
Speaker 1: eight hundreds that a big fire was caused in Parliament
Speaker 1: by the burning of a bunch of these sticks that
Speaker 1: were used hundreds of years earlier to keep track of credit?
Speaker 1: Am I making that up? I feel like I've heard
Speaker 1: something about that one. No, you're absolutely right, um. But
Speaker 1: the tally sticks were used for keeping track of debts.
Speaker 1: When somebody borrowed money, there would be a tally stick
Speaker 1: and they would split it down the middle and to
Speaker 1: borrow and the lender would get a half each so
Speaker 1: that you could read in them. It was a way
Speaker 1: that you could track debts, uh in a world where
Speaker 1: lots of people weren't literate apart from anything else. So
Speaker 1: there were thousands of thousands of these stored in the
Speaker 1: House of Parliaments in London, and I think they stopped
Speaker 1: using them in the early nineteenth century, and somebody, I
Speaker 1: assume you could possibly say he was an archivist in
Speaker 1: that he was responsible for looking after them, decided to
Speaker 1: clear out some space by burning them, uh. And the
Speaker 1: fired that out of control and did indeed burn down
Speaker 1: the House of Parliament. That's why the House of the
Speaker 1: Parliament we have now are a Victorian building, because that's
Speaker 1: the replacement. A good lesson to all subsequent archivists not
Speaker 1: to just burn, not to just burn their stuff for
Speaker 1: space for storage reasons. Ruth, I want to ask you
Speaker 1: one more question. You know, when you go over the
Speaker 1: entirety of RBS's archive, is there one particular item that
Speaker 1: to you is kind of most important when it comes
Speaker 1: to the history of the bank or the history of
Speaker 1: banking overall, something that kind of hints that maybe an
Speaker 1: important transformation that took place in either of the company
Speaker 1: or the industry. I think it would be really hard
Speaker 1: for me not to choose the Founding Charter of the
Speaker 1: Royal Bank of Scotland from seven. So that's the company's
Speaker 1: birth certificate. That's where it all starts as far as
Speaker 1: the Royal Bank of Scotland goes. And I think why
Speaker 1: I would really pick that out is not so much
Speaker 1: for the document itself, but my experience is showing it
Speaker 1: to colleagues when they come to visit the archive and
Speaker 1: I showed them this document and by far the most
Speaker 1: common question they asked me is can I touch it?
Speaker 1: Because they want to make that connection with the past.
Speaker 1: Are they allowed to touch it? They are allowed to
Speaker 1: touch it at the edge, as long as they don't
Speaker 1: touch the ink, because to go away with with a
Speaker 1: feeling of having touched the past and having been inspired
Speaker 1: by that. So I think if a document can do
Speaker 1: that job for them, then I'm really glad to see
Speaker 1: it's still working three years after it was drawn up.
Speaker 1: That's very cool, uh. I like the idea of people
Speaker 1: touching the document is a direct link to history. Ruth
Speaker 1: read the archivist at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Really
Speaker 1: cool discussion. Your website is awesome and hopefully one day
Speaker 1: me and Tracy can come visit and we could do
Speaker 1: a long thing and go through all of what you have.
Speaker 1: But I really appreciate you joining us on the odd
Speaker 1: Loads podcast. Great, thank you, Joe. I love that conversation.
Speaker 1: And I have to confess I'm still looking at the
Speaker 1: Harveys Archive website and right now I'm looking at a
Speaker 1: picture of a bank manager's hat from the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: and all I can think is, this is what George
Speaker 1: Banks would have worn in UH. Mary Poppins, you remember
Speaker 1: that I'm looking. I'm on the website too, I'm looking
Speaker 1: at the UH and this is another one that you
Speaker 1: found earlier, the spike file, like this gigantic iron spike
Speaker 1: that they used to put papers over, just essentially glorified
Speaker 1: or a sort of a primitive filing cabinet. But no,
Speaker 1: I really like that conversation as well, and I do
Speaker 1: think everyone should check out their website Heritage Archives dot
Speaker 1: RBS dot com because it's uh, it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: a great example of how banking is widely different and
Speaker 1: also exactly the exactly the same that essentially, you know,
Speaker 1: as we were saying, a bank is a spreadsheet or
Speaker 1: mostly something digital and a bank used to be pieces
Speaker 1: of paper on an old iron spike. But though what
Speaker 1: really matters to the bank is not necessarily what they
Speaker 1: have an a vault or anything, but what they the
Speaker 1: history that they have recorded. Yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 1: I just wonder that, you know, as things become more
Speaker 1: electronic and as they become more digital. Um. And we
Speaker 1: did just discuss this with Ruth, but I wonder if
Speaker 1: some of that that tangentity kind of gets lost, and
Speaker 1: if finance becomes more and more abstract and kind of
Speaker 1: more unwieldy as a result. And I also wonder, like,
Speaker 1: because I like history and I like antiques, um, I
Speaker 1: think there's something about human nature where we actually want
Speaker 1: to go out and as Ruth was saying about the
Speaker 1: original bank charter, you kind of want to go out
Speaker 1: and connect with the past, and the easiest way of
Speaker 1: doing that is seeing or touching or interacting with something
Speaker 1: that's actually old. And I just wonder if you know,
Speaker 1: seeing a digital ledger is going to have that same effect. No,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a really good point. So it's like,
Speaker 1: even though we know that money is kind of this
Speaker 1: imaginary thing, there's still some value in a thing, even
Speaker 1: if it's just a book or a piece of paper
Speaker 1: or a filing cabinet that we can see, and so
Speaker 1: it's really going to be like this weird thing when
Speaker 1: that really just doesn't exist in any formula, and it's
Speaker 1: purely like, yep, this thing in the this thing on
Speaker 1: the web, or this thing and spreadsheet is really all
Speaker 1: there is and there is not it's not the representation
Speaker 1: of anything. Joe, I can see you're about to turn
Speaker 1: this into another What is Money? Podcast? I can feel
Speaker 1: it coming. Let's yeah, well, of course we'll we'll have
Speaker 1: to let's revisit this one in ten years and we
Speaker 1: can ask Ruth what she saved from the year seventeen.
Speaker 1: Oh that's a good idea. All right, all right, I'm
Speaker 1: marking my calendar. Sarah, our producer, I'm reminding her right
Speaker 1: now to uh schedule that one seven. But in the meantime,
Speaker 1: this has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: the Stalwart and I'm Tracy Alloway. I'm on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Tracy Alloway. And you can follow Sarah on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Sarah pat with two Teas. Thanks for listening.