The TSB (Scotland) archive

Duncan Ross, Head of School of History and Archaeology, University of Glasgow

(First published in Dunaskin News, February 2003)

Some parts of the curate’s egg in the famous Punch cartoon were very good indeed, and the TSB (Scotland) archive deposited at Glasgow University Archive Services is a curate’s egg of a collection.  Some parts of it are fantastic, offering untold riches for the academic researcher willing to put in the effort of wading through the enormously detailed customer ledger and declaration books that make up a very large part of the collection.  Some parts, however, are far less likely to satisfy the historian’s hunger for context, interpretation and exposition.  But more of them later; the good bits really are very good indeed.

Founded in Ruthwell, Dumfries, in 1810, the Savings Bank movement is a quintessential Victorian achievement: it spread very quickly through the UK and flourished most spectacularly in Scotland.  Glasgow was the largest and most successful savings bank in the United Kingdom for most of the nineteenth century.  The records, which came to the University in 1997, reflect their Victorian provenance.

Very large ledgers, containing enormously detailed material on the operations of millions of individual accounts, as well as the addresses, occupations and in some cases the dates and places of birth of the account holders, offer some unsurpassed material for historians seeking to contribute to debates as diverse as the economic role of women in the nineteenth century working class, the impact or extent of life-cycle saving as a response to the exigencies of urban living, the role of penny and school banks in encouraging children to become model citizens throughout the twentieth century, or even the characteristics of those involved in bank runs in the 1840s and 1850s.  Be warned, however: the richness and detail on offer demand the hard slog of extensive data entry and aggregation before they yield their particular secrets.

Organised by bank, the TSB collection covers most of the country, rural as well as urban, highland as well as lowland, and the twentieth century is as well covered as the nineteenth in many respects.  It is, however, in the twentieth century that some of the more disappointing aspects of the collection are to be found.  Letter and minute books there are for many of the individual banks, but the process of amalgamation that dominated the TSB’s history since the 1950s can only be constructed from very disparate and scattered sources.

Many of the administrative and strategic records are missing, and this is particularly pronounced for the very recent period when the unification and flotation of the TSB were being considered and carried out.  As a business, as well as a banking historian, I would greatly value access to more of the papers detailing this process, and the means by which the TSB changed radically in the 1970s and 1980s from being largely a single-product (savings) institution to a fully commercial clearing bank and then was merged with Lloyds.  Although some of the relevant material is listed in the catalogue it is invariably accompanied, in bold text, by the single word ‘WANTING’.  This, I am told, indicates that the records were once surveyed and identified but have since disappeared.  I would love to know to where.

As the curate understood, however, it is as well to concentrate on the good things in life.  This is a fabulous collection: offering huge amounts of fantastically rich and detailed records covering the entire country on a small-town by small-town basis over the period of almost 200 years.  The possibilities for scholarly research as well as local history and genealogy are very great indeed.  I have also found this collection to be a first class teaching resource: many of my students have cut their archival teeth, not to mention developed their database and statistical analysis skills, on TSB material.  Even they, with none of the self-deprecating good manners to be expected from junior clerics in Punch magazine, have been greatly impressed by the insight afforded by this material into not just the past, but to individual lives in the past.