I started my first job 40 years ago today. My career began at Nationwide Building Society as a management trainee at 34 Commercial Street, Newport, South Wales.

It was not an auspicious start. I was 30 minutes late arriving because my train from Cardiff – a high speed train between the Welsh capital and London – was delayed. I uttered my apologies to the branch manager, John Griffin, who took it in good grace. Little did he or I know that things would get a lot worse.

This was the appointment letter that launched my career. It’s amazing to think that it was sent just four days before I started, but presumably I’d already been told by phone as even in 1986 the post wasn’t foolproof.

On my first morning, one of the staff mentioned that I’d received a phone call. That seemed unlikely, but true: T Mervyn Jones, one of the directors on Nationwide’s divisional board for Wales, was a friend of my father’s, and was ringing to wish me luck. Mervyn was one of the stars of Welsh corporate life, chairing Wales Gas when that industry was nationalised in 1948, and later the Wales Tourist Board. I was a little uneasy about the call, as it may have suggested that I got the job through family connections.

Soon after I arrived, I was given a cashier’s card, seen above. This logged me into the big Nixdorf computer terminals by each cashier’s desk. I still have it – dated 40 years ago today, in the writing of the assistant branch manager, Dave. He came to despise my incompetence during my 22 months working at the branch…

After a week, I was feeling rather low, fearing that I wasn’t suited for this job. I travelled home to Cardiff by train, as usual. I was in a subdued mood when Dad picked me up from Heath High Level station, and felt worse after he told me that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded soon after take off, killing the crew. It put my own career concerns into perspective.

I’ll never know how I passed Nationwide’s aptitude test for management trainees. Trainees spent time in each area of the branch’s operations, starting as cashiers, before moving on to branch management. Cashiers took in customers’ cash and cheque deposits, and made their withdrawals – again, usually as cash and cheques. After the branch closed at the end of the day, we had to ‘balance’ our till, totting up the money we’d taken in and paid out. Far too often I found my till didn’t balance – I’d obviously missed something. Ironically the one time I really needed to balance – the day in March 1986 I was taken ill with a sickness bug, and needed to go home early – everything tallied perfectly.

I kept a small pot of coins to ‘smooth out’ balancing errors, but usually my difference was far too large for a few coppers and silver coins.

A balancing act

If I couldn’t balance one till, there was no chance I’d balance a whole branch, but I had to try. I was taking my turn as ‘bankage officer’, whose job was to supply cashiers with money from the safe when they were running low, and place their takings back in the safe at the end of the day. I had to combine this with my ‘day’ job on mortgage accounts.

This was one of the most stressful times of my working life. Whenever I was settling into my mortgage work, one of the cashiers would appear at my desk asking for more money, or some travellers’ cheques for a customer. After the branch had closed for the day, I’d break out in a cold sweat as I found the branch figures made no sense. Where had I gone wrong? It took Siân Armstrong and Shan Roper, the senior branch supervisors, two weeks to solve the mystery.

Around the same time, I lost the safe keys. Mortified, I raced over to Woolworths where I’d bought my doorstopper sandwich lunch, but the keys hadn’t been handed in. They were found weeks later in a mortgage file.

Have you ever dreamed of having your mortgage paid off? One morning I accidentally paid off one Nationwide customer’s home loan. I was meant to key in the redemption (repayment) of another mortgage, but must have typed in a wrong digit. I discovered that it;’s very difficult to unredeem a mortgage. But my pioneering Nationwide mortgage lottery didn’t benefit the borrower – somehow, my despairing supervisors managed to unscramble the mess.

The world of work was very different 40 years ago. On Friday lunchtimes we’d go down the pub for a few pints – even those of us serving customers. Soon after I started at Nationwide the branch installed a cash machine (ATM) on the side of the building. After one of those Friday pub visits an old lady asked me to show her how to use it, and as I guided her she asked whether I’d been drinking whisky. ‘No, beer – now put your PIN number in here!’ I replied, covering my eyes as she typed the four digits.

There were two customers no one wanted to serve. Mr J-E was a pedantic man who was a right pain. One Friday afternoon, my friend and fellow trainee Glesni was waiting to lock the branch door the moment the clock showed 4.30pm: closing time. Moments before the magic time, she spotted Mr J-E walking towards the door – and smartly locked it to stop him entering. She shouted to one of the cashiers to move the clock hand the extra minute from 4.29pm to justify her action. Our ‘favourite’ customer banged on the glass door in frustration, as we hid our smiles.

As we prepared to open the branch the following morning, Saturday, Mr J-E was first in the queue. We braced ourselves for an explosion and a complaint. But he was as meek as we’d ever seen him.

The other customer we dreaded was very different. He regularly visited to pay thousands of pounds in cash into his account. We hated having to serve him as he smelt like he’d not had a bath for a year – and the banknotes he paid in were just as filthy.

One of my more unusual challenges was dusting off my memories of ‘old money’. One morning, a customer brought in an account passbook (in the days before cash cards these gave a record of transactions) that hadn’t been touched for over 15 years. Normally, customers brought their passbooks in once a year for them to be ‘made up’ – with that year’s interest added to the book. Yet this one hadn’t been updated since we went decimal in 1971. I had to dig out the branch microfiche and convert the interest paid in pounds, shillings and pence to decimal money for entry in the passbook.

Back in the 1980s, Nationwide had a number of agency branches in towns in the Gwent valleys, including Crumlin and Risca. These offices were typically run by firms of solicitors and accountants, and weren’t connected to Nationwide’s computer system. The agents would record transactions in pen on pads, before dropping the entries, cash and cheques into the branch in Newport. For a time, to keep me away from the counter, I was consigned to a room on the loft of the branch building to enter all these manual transactions into the computer system. But – no surprise here – my agency returns didn’t always balance either.

In May 1987, Nationwide expanded into banking with the launch of its first current account. It was a bold move, as FlexAccount paid interest, unlike current accounts from the traditional clearing banks. As a Nationwide advert put it, ‘You should earn interest on your money. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a banker’. I opened a FlexAccount, which I use to this day. But I also opened one for my 96 year grandmother, Nan. This was a gimmick to get coverage for the branch in Nationwide’s staff magazine: as I was applying for a job in the press office I thought the stunt might help my prospects. Read on to find out if it did…

Towards the end of my time at the branch, Nationwide merged with the smaller Anglia Building Society to create Nationwide Anglia. (The society reverted to plain Nationwide a few years later.) The merger led to a wave of retirements, and we welcomed a new branch manager, who’d previously served as Newport’s assistant branch manager. The tradition was that everyone called the branch manager Mr Jones* (the boss was usually a man in those days) and the assistant manager by their first name. We had a bizarre discussion about whether those who’d worked with the new manager in his previous spell in Newport should call him by his first name as they were used to, or as Mr Jones. It was decided that the more formal address was appropriate. I found this weirdly old fashioned at the time, and even more so the following year after I’d moved to head office in London and always called chief executive Tim Melville-Ross by his first name.

* Note: I can’t remember the returning manager’s name, but have called him Mr Jones!

Escaping the axe

I was on borrowed time. Such incompetence couldn’t be tolerated for long. My appraisal in August 1987 was a demoralising business, and stings even after 38 years. I can still hear the contempt in the voice of Dave, the assistant branch manager who hated me as an overpaid, useless trainee. To be fair, I couldn’t argue with the verdict.

The following month brought the hope of redemption. When I returned from holiday in West Wales supervisor Siân pointed out an internal job vacancy: Nationwide was looking for a press officer at head office in London. She typed my application – I think she genuinely felt sorry for my plight – and a month later, just after the branch closed for the day, I had a call telling me I’d got the job. It was my job that evening to take the branch post to Newport post office, and I threw the mailbag in the air in an act of pure joy and relief. My ordeal was coming to an end. I could tell my luck had changed: I caught the bag with skill. Had I tried the trick a month earlier, it would have landed under a bus.

Newport: reflections, 40 years on

Despite my troubled time there, I found Newport a friendly place to work. I enjoyed chatting to customers – with the exception of Mr J-E. One day when I was cashiering I decided to keep the queueing customers occupied by getting them to restock the sales leaflets. (As I joked, a busy customer is a happy customer.) They were happy to comply. I can’t imagine doing that in Tunbridge Wells.

I took solace from my plight by browsing Newport’s Bookmark bookshop and learning about the city’s history. One lunchtime, I was intrigued to find a plaque that commemorated the massacre of protesters in the Newport rising of 1839 – the last armed uprising in Wales. The Chartists were campaigning for democracy, and around 20 of them were killed by British soldiers. The leaders of the rising were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered – the last time that prisoners were sentenced to that barbaric punishment in Wales – but they were saved and transported to Australia instead. The main square in Newport is named after the rising’s leader John Frost, who was pardoned in the 1850s and returned to Britain, dying aged 93 in 1877.

At the end of November 1987, I set off for London for a new life. Nationwide had just set up its own press office to manage its relationship with the media, and I was the new press officer. A few months in, I spent an enjoyable evening writing an article about the new function for Nationwide’s internal newspaper – seen above.

My old nemesis, 37 year old assistant branch manager Dave, may have been pleased to see the back of me. But he was less pleased that his 24 year old former trainee was now earning more than him. I was later told that my meteoric promotion was talked about across the branch network. In turn, I joked that Nationwide decided that I’d do less damage talking to the media than in the branch!

I returned to Newport branch just once, almost a year after I left. It was a happy reunion, and I thanked Siân and Shan for their heroic patience with me. It may have been a painful 22 months, but I never forgot what it was like to serve the public, with a queue to the door on a Saturday morning. My 37 career in PR was hugely enhanced by the bullshit detector the Newport experience gave me.

UPDATE: 21 JANUARY

I was thrilled to hear from Siân Armstrong, who is a heroic player in this story:

‘Loved this Rob! I am so glad you found a successful career that was more suited to your talents. I remember all the incidents you refer to very well, and despite the frustrations at the time, I remember you with fond memories.’

My blogpost has jogged a lot of memories amongst the Nationwide community on Facebook, and I’ll update this post further over the coming days. I should have mentioned Debbie, another supervisor at Newport, who also spent a long time clearing up after my disasters. Debbie went on to run the short-lived Nationwide branch in British Home Stores (BHS) in Cardiff.