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Bank Vehicles

M

mewla4

proper brummie kid
Hi folks thanks all the thought provoking threads. My grandad was on the buses for 35 years upto 1961 when he retired with a canteen of cutlery ( which i still have ), I remember him driving the "bank" bus from Acocks Green Garage to the bank in the village with the takings which were in wicker hampers and would cause chaos while it was parked outside the bank. Also remember going to the garage at christmas and being bussed to another garage for a christmas party.

Can any body confirm what i seem to remember was that there was a number inside the bus that was the numbers from the registration and another number was this used to identify the garage it was stationed at.
 
mewla4 welcome. My husband drove Birmingham buses out of Washwood Heath but this was over 35 years ago. He said that there were fleet numbers inside the bus and if he remembers right it incorparated the registration number. He can't remember where it was located in the bus!
 
The fleet number was just 4 numbers situated on the bulkhead facing you as you walked down the bus.
 
The Bank bus was a 1935 Daimler double decker (no. 679 - AOG 679) which after its normal life as a bus was given a van body to collect the large amount of (mostly copper) coin collected as fares and take it to the bank. When it finished its second career, it was bought by an enthusiast for preservation, and is now in the care of Aston Manor Transport Museum, here is a link to their web page about it.
https://www.amrtm.org/BANKBUS.htm

Every bus is allocated a 'Fleet' number to identify it, in many cases the registration number is similar for convenience, so Birmingham Corporation bus no. 1685 was HOV 685, no. 2245 was JOJ 245 and 3225 was MOF 225.
I attach pictures of 1934 Daimler 596 (registration AOG 596 - the plate is at the bottom of the radiator) to show what the bank bus looked like in its first life as a double decker, and the fleet number on the side; and the lower deck inside front with the number and 'No Smoking' and 'Spitting prohibited' signs on the varnished woodwork.
 
Thanks Lloyd
Didnt realise that there was an official vechicle for this job as far as my recollections go they just used to use an ordinary bus with the wicker hampers stacked on the platform, I seem to remember that there was only a couple of staff,on of which drove, and an inspector who used to stand on the pavement guarding the hampers while the other two took them inside.mind you i was only 3 or 4 at the time
 
they just used to use an ordinary bus with the wicker hampers stacked on the platform
Yes, that happened as well. Nobody would dream of stealing it, it would be too heavy to take far anyway! If there was a lot, the van was needed.

Incidentally, the bank bus van body (and some similar ones which carried equipment for tramway track welding) were by a Birmingham firm called 'Riverlee'. I have never been able to trace them, has anyone else heard of them? The van bodies were built, or just possibly rebuilt from earlier ones taken from 1930 AEC former bus chassis, in 1947.
 
And here is a photo of one of the 1930 AEC bus chassis converted to a van in 1939. It had been bus 357, registered OF 3989 so the numbers didn't always match! The numbers when Vans was in different series, this is 61 and AOG 679 was 83. *Looks in wardrobe for anorak!*
The 1947 ones looked almost identical, but checking on the dates these ran until 1953 so they couldn't have been converted to Daimler chassis in 1947.
 
I've found a picture of it at last!
Here it is, taking a rest from carting tons of coin about from garages to the bank.
 
It looks to be thankful for the 'rest':)

I think it is in Bennetts Hill, outside Commercial Union where family used to work.
 
Very interesting thread indeed about the "Bank" Bus, etc. I don't suppose many people gave much thought to what happened to all the coins that were taken every day in Birmingham for bus fares. Did anyone work at the garages counting the coins before they were picked up by the "Bank" bus? Did the
"Bank" buses just have boxes and boxes of different denominations for the bank to sort out or where they rolled before they left the garages? Just curious. Also, what sort of security, if any, was there?
 
Cash Counting

If it was done like at Digbeth, where I worked in the 70s onward, the cash was counted twice - once to agree the conductor or driver's pay in sheet, then again as a 'Bank' total. It was bagged in (say) £20 of 1d coins, £10 of 1/2d coin, and probably £50 or £100 of 2/6 coin, for example. The bags were then put in wicker baskets on castor wheels, which the Bank Van took away.
On the Midland Red we put the baskets on the platform of a spare bus, and a Traffic assistant or Inspector and a couple of spare drivers would take them to the bank, wheel the baskets in and do the necessary paperwork.
Those baskets would hold £2-300, but were far too heavy to lift and run off with - almost all takings were small denomination coin, you see! Weight and bulk for a small value was a good deterrent!
I would guess that BCT would do one or two garages at a time, and the banks would charge for recounting the coin!
We changed to the post office bank in the 80's, they would buy coin at slightly over face value to reuse on the post office counters! About 103/104p to the £ I seem to think.
Who would have guessed that bus fares would be over £1 today! It used to cost me 2 1/2d childs from home to town on the No.9 when I was young.
 
Lloyd. many thanks for that outline for the banking of the coins collected for fares.
Since there were lots of buses every day on so many routes there must have been a lot of money riding round in baskets on those special buses. Like you say they would have been heavy and a good deterrent for robbers, etc.
I expect the conductors and conductresses had to account for all the tickets they sold as well.

Yes, the fares were very low decades ago but once they started rising
they just kept on going it seems. You also had to watch out for "fare stages"
and the Bus Inspectors who were very efficient back then .
 
Hi Lloyd

Never really thought about the weight of coins collected daily think that copper coins were bagged in £1.00 and silver in £5.00 ( if you can remember there were 240 old pence to the pound so to bag in £20 would be a bit much ) they were paper bags and there was a nack to folding the topover so that they didnt spill. when i first went to senior school itused to cost 4d to get from Acocks Green to Sparkbrook on the No. 31 and then another 4d from Sparkbrook to Bordesley Green on the No.8 those were the days
 
copper coins were bagged in £1.00 and silver in £5.00 ( if you can remember there were 240 old pence to the pound so to bag in £20 would be a bit much ) they were paper bags and there was a nack to folding the topover so that they didnt spill.
Click to expand...
Yes, several of those paper bags were put into the cloth bags I was describing - I didn't go into too much detail for brevity!
There were also tokens - Birmingham used plastic, but (on Midland Red) some districts e.g.Worcestershire used aluminium coin types - all had to be bagged separately & sent to head office to be returned to the appropriate area councils for payment. Digbeth was the coach station as well, and until National Express came along and legally 'stole' the express coaching side of the company, there was a lot of 10/-, £1, £5 and £10 notes in the garage cash, too - and a few cheques. With the separation off of coaching, and the loss of Birmingham and the Black Country routes and garages to the WMPTE, Midland Red became an unviable leviathan. Urban areas had subsidised rural routes before, now cross-subsidy is illegal and councils have to pay to subsidise lightly used routes and (e.g.) evening journeys.
That's why you see buses of various colours (competing companies) on daytime busy routes and some villages get nothing now.
 
I did a short spell as a driver for the BCT at Yardley Wood Garage in 1966/7 and drove their bank bus most weekdays duty permitting. This was because it was Guy No.95, a wartime utility used as a driver trainer, fitted with a "back to front" full crash gearbox that nobody else wanted to drive. It didn't bother me as I had come off the Midland Red where we were used to such things. The old Guy had to be tow started as there was no starter motor fitted and the engine then had to be kept running at all costs. No fanbelt was fitted so within about 10 minutes it started to brew up. We took the cash to the Midland Bank in Kings Heath High Street and by the time we got back to the Wood it was really hot but still kept going. I got paid one hour overtime every time for this cushy little outing.
 
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A fascinating thread, I had never heard of the Bank Bus before. I presume the bus companies have long since switched to 'Securicor' so this is a piece of history well worth recording.

Lloyd mentions the plastic tokens. I've got a couple of these, one says Birmingham City Tramways and the other Birmingham Corporation Transport. They were obviously much lighter than proper pennies but I can't remember them. Who used them? I presume the general public would't accept them in change so were they for staff perhaps?

Bob
 
No Bob, the tokens were not given out in change, but paid in with the days takings of cash. I remember four different values in use in the early 60's - 1d, 2d, 3d and 5d, each a different colour although there may have been more as well as some with additional halfpennies on when fares included them. Tokens were distributed to special needs schools by the education dept for fares of children accompanied to and from school by a supplied adult referred to as a "Guide" who carried a travel pass. When the WMPTE took over in 1969 they replaced the tokens with a small a paper pass enclosed in a clear plastic pendant on a string that the child could wear around their neck. These were renewed annually with a different colour pass. Nowadays most special needs children are conveyed by hired in minibuses. Those that are not still have a Guide with them but are issued with a Network travelcard type pass.

Mike
 
I used to go to George Dixon school on City Road, and we used the old King Edward's building at Five Ways as an annexe. If we had to go there during the day we got tokens to use on the Portland Road bus, those plastic ones. I managed to keep some, they went to Wythall museum some time ago.
 
I remember driving the bank bus on many occasions on 'The Red' at Tamworth in the 70's and 80's.
 
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Hi Yes you are right about the BANK buses, the hampers were full of coins,very heavy it would of been very difficult to steal one because of the weight,the bus was manned by an Inspector,driver and about four mail traffic staff(drivers or conductors) The notes were put in a random hamper,there wasn't many notes in the 60's the maximum fare was about a shilling,except the long routes I.E 7. 15/16. 28 & 29 Dave
 
From 1953-5 I worked in the Cashier's Office at BCT Head Office and we were the recipients of hundreds of, predominantly Irish, foreign coins that had been inadvertently accepted as payments for fares and not spotted until they reached the various branches of the Midland Bank. Periodically quantities of coins were returned to us by the Bank's Head Office (then in Stephenson Place). Frequently traffic staff of Irish origin, who had either resigned or had been fired (generally for excess shortages), returned immediately to Ireland and asked that the balance of their wages be sent on by mail. That was the only mechanism we had for getting rid of all the Irish coins. I can't remember whether the cost of postage came out of their wages, but I would imagine so! :P

One of the things we quickly discovered was that one of the otherwise valueless Cyprus coins was exactly the same size as a two shilling piece, the standard coin used in the cigarette machines in every coffee bar in town! 2 x 2/- pieces bought a packet of 20 cigarettes in those days! No doubt several of those coins went full circle from cigarette machine to bus fares to cigarette machine several times over. :D

After my return from National Service in 1957, I was one of five staff riding the bankbus every Wednesday to collect between 100,000 and 110,000 pounds which were used to make up the weekly paid staff's wages on a Thursday ready for distribution to the garages and depots on the Friday. On these occasions another couple of guys ran shotgun in one of BCT's private cars behind us. :P

From my recollections, BCT had a fleet of about 230 private cars in those days, many of them kept at Miller Street. I know that whenever we replaced one, the order for the new vehicle was routed via the Police Dept because they got a bigger fleet owner's discount than we did!

Happy Days!

Maurice :cool:
 
Just come across this interesting thread.
What I haven't seen mentioned is that Corporation bus and tram receipts were taken to the Municipal Bank, once it was founded around the end of World War 1.
Another speciality was the ticket vans, which issued all the tickets in bulk to the garages and depots. This operation was based on the site of the old cable tram winding engine house at Whitmore Street, Hockley, from whence until 1939, ticket van 10 took tickets to all the tram sheds. I always thought that a 'bank bus' was used for distributing tickets to bus garages as well. Peter
 
I can remember Saturday mornings when if I went to the Midland Bank at Bearwood and I saw a Midland red bus parked outside, I used to go away and do some shopping because I knew that there would be a delay whilst they paid in the takings from the Midland Red's Bearwood garage. Midland Red also used large wicker hampers.

I remember seeing the BCT Bank Bus several time when I was working near Five Ways in the late 1960s as it used to back into the yard at Lloyds Bank Five Ways which in those day was where Lloyds Bank had their cash centre. If you look at the bank today you will not see the yard as the bank has been extended into that area
 
Hi Peter W:

Use of the Municipal Bank would certainly make sense, though by the time I joined BCT in 1953, we were exclusively using the Midland. In 1957 or 58, one of the Accounts Office staff came back from the Midland one day with the story that one of the senior tellers at the Midland had been hauled over the coals for referring to the Municpal Bank as "Fred Karno's Bank"! :redface::D

Maurice :cool:
 
I worked for the Bullion Department of one of the big banks when I first left school more years ago than I care to remember and as a main city branch we had to supply all the other branches over a wide area with their coin requirements . The money would come in from the Regional Bank of England in canvas bags of different denomination coins on our own Bullion Cash Vans and was off loaded across the pavement and stacked on trolleys against the wall of the building before being taken inside when unloading was completed and down to the vaults in the basement . With coin going out as well the same procedure happened in reverse and this was going on all day Monday to Friday .

There was certainly the odd dent in the wall or you could see where a trolley had scraped against it when being moved but the trollies very rarely were loaded to the identical height and tended to be put as near to the entrance as practical due to the fact they were very heavy to move when loaded.

The mark on the wall is far too regular to be made in that way both from a height and length point of view and consistant depth of the groove which suggests to me it was not made over a period of time but perhaps just on one or a couple of occasions .

Just my opinion and I have no proof either way but its an interesting reminder of the past history of the building whatever caused it.
 
One of the reasons I remember how the grooves were caused was the van with the money would park up in Stephenson Place and cause a minor traffic problem.
 
Bullion Vans as I remember the ones operated by Midland Bank in our area were smaller than ours (Westminster Bank) and as far as I remember they were a sort of cab. I dont remember who made the vehicles , didnt do to show too much interest as your motives may have been misconstrued . I do recall they had bespoke bodywork as depending on how much cash was being carried so the size of the escort crew increased and it wasnt unusual for ours to have a crew of six or seven clerks and messengers plus the driver. I have a vague memory the bank didnt actually own the vehicle but it was on some sort of contract hire agreement which included the driver. Most road deliveries to branches were in a 25 mile radius and the branches further afield were supplied by the railway and we just took the parcels and canvass bags of money to the Secure section of the local Sorting Office who transferred them to the trains.

I can see why the wall near the entrance may have got damaged but I am still dubious about the length of wall away from the entrance being damaged to the same extent as I still think that the further away the less damage you would expect.. In the absence however of any other possible explanation I am happy to bow to your local knowledge.
 
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