ABSTRACT
In 1950s Britain, the high-street banks were on the verge of a crisis. Across London and other major cities, the busiest branches were struggling to fi nd space for the staff and accounting machinery required to cope with an escalating demand for banking services. Not only was there a lack of space in which to work, the banks also had to contend with a shrinking labour pool. The clerks performing the routine and often boring task of customer accounting were put under increasing pressure as they struggled to cope with weekly and monthly bookkeeping peaks. Bank costs in the form of overtime payments, and for recruitment and training, were in danger of spiralling out of control. The banks saw a way of averting this impending crisis, however, with the commercial arrival of large-scale electronic computing technology.1
