Romance Behind the Ledgers

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 358, 19 May 1928, Page 17

Romance Behind the Ledgers

Daring Attempts at Bank Robbery—Where Public Money is Guarded —Banks and Banking in Auckland

(Written for THE SUN by

J. G. McLEAN.)

—. HIRTY or so years ■|j ago, on a Satury Feilding bank y earlier than usual R to his quarters in JJ the bank prem- —' ises. Ten minutes later the peaceable burghers were amazed to see the bank clerk convoying a cowering stranger, at the point of a revolver, through the streets to the police station. Like the waters of the Red Sea, cleaving to permit the passage of the Israelites, they divided to watch the strange procession, the fixed mien and inflexible determination of the outraged teller — who had discovered the stranger, armed with a stone in a handkerchief, ransacking his room in search of the strongroom keys—and the pallid submission of the trespasser, who had wilted before the glint of a revolver barrel. History almost repeated itself a year or two back in Auckland, when a resident official of the Union Bank of Australia discovered that, during his absence on a Sunday, the premises had been entered through a rear skylight, and an effort made to drill the strong-room door. This bold enterprise, apparently begun in broad daylight, within call of New Zealand’s busiest street, was only frustrated through the return of the bank officer, before whose advances the intruders retreated, leaving a trail of broken glass to tell the story of their failure.

Kare as these episodes are, yet they represent one of the risks that every conscientious bank official must face. It is on such occasions that high points are touched in the record of a profession that otherwise demands of its followers only prosaic but steadfast thoroughness, accuracy, enthusiasm and a high standard of courtesy toward the subscribing public. Crime has only rarely cast its sinister shadow across the chapters of •\'ew Zealand banking, and the more sensational happenings are now ancient history. Nearly £2,000 in cash and gold dust was stolen from the bank at Okarita, on the West

Coast gold diggings, during the rollicking, riotous ' ties. The thieves tcere never traced, though it was believed that Burgess, Kelly, Levy and Sullivan, perpetrators of the ghoulish Maungatapu murders, had a hand in the business. After they had committed the series of murders which brought three of them to the scaffold and drove Sullivan, who had turned Queen's Evidence, out of the country, evil quartet planned to rob the

Bank of New South Wales at Nelson; | but the gang was arrested before the consummation of its plot. About that time, in the early sixties, j the Bank of New Zealand first opened j its doors in Auckland. The ledgers I from the year of its opening, 1861, are still arranged neatly in the vaults below the massive Queen Street building, and reveal many noted names. Alfred Buckland and John Logan Campbell, who were shareholders, ere among the first depositors. In its first year the bank paid a dividend of 6 per cent., but subsequently it fell on lean years, and in the nineties would have closed its doors but for the intervention of the Government. If to-day’s pessimists paused to recall those parlous days, when Parliament twice sat through all-night debates—with the grim knowledge that the bank might close its doors in the morning—before it agreed to make the grants which saved the country from panic and financial ruin, and gave the Government its now valued

interest in the Dominion’s largest financial institution, the rosy glow of optimism, inspired by the sharpness of the contrast, would steal through their frames.

Dark Moments In the vicissitudes of New Zealand banking there have been no moments more desperate than those, when economic security throughout Australia and New Zealand was imperilled through reckless borrowing, and Bank of New Zealand shares could be bought for one shilling, or even obtained for nothing if the attendant liability was taken over. After the war there were occasions when, owing to the temporary stringency, some of the banks could not buy and sell exchange with their usual freedom; but latterly the banks have preserved their stability and increased their strength. Auckland’s first bank was the Union Bank of Australia, which in 1542 opened in a tiny shack near the waterfront. In 1848 it shifted to a more pretentious building in Princes Street, near the present site of the Grand Hotel, and remained there until 1564, with the old regimental mess and club on one side of it, and the main post office on the other. The Auckland Savings Bank started modestly in 1847, and now its deposits amount to over £5.000.000. The records of its progress, and of its munificient gifts to community institutions, are alike notable, and among Auckland banks this bank has been foremost in providing staff facilities, including a pleasant, carpeted lounge, and an up-to-date gymnasium. Not all realise that paralysis of banking processes would plunge trade and industry into stagnation. Far from being mere deposit agencies, the joint stock banks are great international clearing-houses, trustees for the burden of international commerce, without which the business of the

I country would be a primitive and rei tricted enterprise. Oldest of the Auckland banks is the j Bank of New South Wales, founded in 1817. Of New Zealand banks the j first was the Colonial Bank of Issue, later absorbed by the Bank of New Zealand, which is 11 years older than the other New Zealand bank, the National. Formerly the National's Auckland branch, now housed in a spacious and handsome building with many interesting architectural features, occupied the corner at the foot of Wyndham Street. The section, now owned by the Bank of Australasia, was part of a property bought many years ago, under curious circumstances, by the late William Goodfellow, father of the present head of the New Zealand Dairy Company. Mr. Goodfellow, senr., was deputed by a syndicate to bid for the property when it was submitted at auction, but he exceeded his instructions not to pay more than £250 for the section, and the syndicate left it on his hands.

Subsequent progress justified the purchaser’s judgment, as in later years the land brought £BO,OOO. Conditions in banking, as in everything else, have changed. There is a tendency toward amalgamation, and the day of the small family bank is passing. Then there has been a change in the banks themselves. Formerly the clerks were a race set apart, expected to preserve their dignity in sombre suitings and stiff collars, and maintain unimpeachable integrity on salaries often most meagre. At last, defying tradition, the bank

officers formed guilds, sought better salaries, and in return agreed to raise the standards of service. To-day they may wear soft collars to the office, and a susceptible clerk may air his latest fancy in a spring suiting of

dazzling woof. Coats come off after closing-time, and pipe-smoke ascends into the dim heights of the lofty banking chambers. All these innovations represent the concessions of a broadminded age, but the service is still backed by the high traditions of old. Colossal sums are handled daily. In the Bank of New Zealand one teller is permanently engaged on the pay-in from the tramways. In the National Bank the work of the New Zealand Dairy Company is of immense bulk. Racing clubs are other big clients. For the Ellerslie meetings something like £60,000 in change is taken out for the gates and totalisator, and the final pay-in runs into hundreds of thousands more. Big city business concerns are others which handle huge sums, and two or three such firms may keep one teller going all the time, while on Fridays their own staffs go into the bank basement to count the wherewithal for the ghost to walk. Methods have changed. There were even lady tellers in New Zealand during the war, and one or two still survive. Every big bank has its battery of adding machines, each worth up to £l5O, and their clatter is sometimes as the clatter of a foundry. Some people, usually women, still cherish the fond belief that when they deposit money it is at once placed in their own particular tin, there to remain inviolate until a cheque is drawn and some mysterious adjust-

happens is that each teller keeps his own cash, under the supervision of the head teller, in a small movable safe which is locked away each night. In his little trolley, behind the grill through which the customer peers, the teller may carry up to £150,000, and, though New Zealand banks are not spectacular in their methods, the teller usually has a revolver handy.

Cancelled Notes

Cancellation of old notes is going on all the time, some banks cancelling as many as 50,000 note forms a month. This process is effected by means of a stamp, printing "cancelled” across the face of the note, and a punch, which cuts a hole in it. Thus mutilated, the notes are sent to Wellington, crossed off the register and burned. Soiled notes, some of them bearing tender, tearful, laughable or supremely idiotic notices, are never re-issued, and the public often complains rather

unjustly of dirty notes, without considering that a note may quite easily not go near a bank for six mouths or a year at a time. * * * Day by day the banks, with their remittances, cheques, bills and exchanges, conduct the assorted busi ness of a busy city. A tourist drops in; “I want a thousand pounds. My bank is Barclay’s.” So a cable flashes along 12,000 miles of wire, and next morning the money is paid to him. Gold is handled only rarely by the New Zealand banks, though each of them has a substantial gold reserve; but sometimes in their vaults are carried sealed boxes of ingots and large quantities of silver; as well as gems lodged by clients, and immense sums in negotiable scrip. Fortunes won and lost, heirlooms mellowed by age and associations, bonds bought only through a patriotic impulse—in all these is visible the romance that clings about money and banking. Auckland’s largest banks are the Bank of New Zealand—known in the profession as “the Zed”—which employs a staff of 170, and the National Bank, which has very up-to-date premises. The Bank of New Zealand has always been on Queen Street, and the dignified facade of its stately building—one of the few perfect speciments of Italian Renaissance work in this country—is a familiar mark in the business area. The

frontage was not always of its present length, and the interior, also, has been subjected to a good deal of alteration. Below it, three or four years ago, was carried out an extension of the vavlts, necessitating excavation that was particularly difficult on account of the risk of disturbing the foundations. In the roomy sepulchre thus created was built a most elaborate series of

chambers and strongrooms, only paralleled by the corresponding apartments hidden beneath the National Bank. Here, in these wide, whitewashed cellars, lies wealth that staggers th® senses. Such treasure might justify the enthusiasm of the two plotters who set out, only a few years ago, to rob the Bank of New South Wales at Eltham. Starting beneath the floor of a convenient billiard saloon they burrowed for weeks, working only at night, until they were within sight of success. Fired with intemperate gratification at the approaching con elusion of an arduous task, one of the m n hied himself to a tavern, drank deeply, and made rash promises of imminent opulence; so that suspicions were excited, and a “promising effort” failed. Many a good conspiracy has been marred by similar loquacity. In Auck.and, to carry such an effort to success, a bank robber would need

the perseverance of a mole, the in- ; stinctive sagacity of an earthworm, and a good powerful pump to handle the tidal seepage in the depths below sea-level. Given this diverse equipment, he would need some means of piercing concrete that is many feet thick, and reinforced with iron as tough as armour.

We wh>, lacking such attributes, remain honest men, descend to the vaults by a little crooked stairway, or sink below floor level in an elevator that twice daily is a moving Golconda. Down in the white-washed caverns we are greeted by a whispering echo, the faint dampness inseparable from even the best-behaved cellars, and long, grilled vistas that convey a vague impression of Mount Eden gaol. Behind a grill or two gleams a monarch among doors, a great massive portal that seems mostly wheels and dials. Each dial has a combina tion, and each combination is the secret of a trusted officer, who commits it only to the tablets of the memory. Such a key cannot be stolen by a thief armed with a stone in a handkerchief: nor can torture wring his secret from a courageous man. Every working morning the guardians of the secret, like priests in a temple, go down to do brief worship before the god among doors. They twist the little dials, move them this way and that way, according to the mystic formula, and so the door is ready to be opened, a process completed by a turn or two on a wheel • hat is as big as the steering wheel of a car, and much better polished. So are exposed the secrets of the inner temple. Even within the big

door there are smaller doors, subtreasuries, strongrooms, and sturdy little chests. One room is the holy of holies, and through the inevitable grill may be seen a jrast array of money-bags. Do they hold simoleons, doubloons, pieces of eight, or other jingling currency of romantic fact and

fancy? No; but there is a hoard of golden sovereigns in yonder casket, and the notes in the adjoining cabinet represent more than a prince’s ransom. One stack is all shillings—£loo to a bag, ten bags to a pile, and 580 bags in the stack. Think quickly; it is £58,000 in shillings. Fifty-eight thousand pounds in shillings! Now, what about a “bob-iu”?