Bank Of England Printing Works At Debden

A Memory of Debden.

I was priviledged to be given a guided tour of the Bank of England Printing Works at Debden. I had just started work at the Bank in the City in 1963 and my tour formed part of the induction process for all new staff. Our group of a dozen new staff were given directions to take a Central Line tube train from the Bank station in the City out to Essex where the Bank's Printing works had been built just ten or so years earlier. We walked by fields from Debden station to the works where we were very closely shepherded around the first floor gallery of the main printing hall and were able to watch through one-way darkened glass and see the printing staff minding the machinery as new bank notes were produced.

The security was immense as you can imagine and this left a lifelong impression of the seriousness of the Bank's responsibility to produce our country's money. There were other functions carried out, as much of the Bank's stationery was produced here as well (I hope I am not giving away any state secrets now!). I took away a souvenir of my tour - no not a parcel of freshly printed money unfortunately! It was a metal stamp bearing my name as an example of the hot lead printing in use at that time. I still have that stamp saying J H Norfolk almost fifty years later!

It was fascinating to watch money being being produced. Years later I worked at the Bank's "Economic Intelligence Department" and one of my responsibilities was to produce statistics of the bank notes in circulation together with best estimates of the average "life" of each denomination before they were considered too dirty to be allowed to circulate further. At that time we had "ten shilling notes" (remember them?) which had a hard life being crumpled up in peoples pockets. They lasted a mere ten months before needing to be replaced! The move to our decimal currency in 1971 meant that these notes were no longer printed but I think the Bank would have considered withdrawing them anyway as they had such a short life and were an expense that could not be justified. Now of course we have £20 and £50 notes which back in Debden 1963 I could not have dreamed of!

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