Cashing in! By Steve McCabe Airdrie Savings Bank 1861-83 The last independent Savings Bank in Scotland I


N A SMALL corner of north Lanarkshire Airdrie Savings Bank is a local institution. It has recently been in the


press for all the wrong reasons – four branch closures and twenty jobs shed as part of a cost-saving exercise – but it


remains a force for good. Today it is the last of its kind.


The revolutionary fervour which swept across Europe towards the end of the 17th


century was due in no small part to the relentless, endemic poverty then gripping the continent.


One response to this chronic poverty was the savings bank movement which was started by individual philanthropists in an atempt to tackle the issue. These enlightened pioneers saw savings banks, not as repositories of money for safe- keeping, but rather as a way to stimulate thriſt among the poor.


Their goal was to liſt them out of poverty. To them, thriſt was nothing less than a moral crusade.


The first true savings bank was established by the Rev. Henry Duncan in the Dumfriesshire village of Ruthwell in 1810. But Duncan’s model was rapidly adopted across Scotland, the rest of the UK and continental Europe.


In 1924 the world’s first International Thriſt Congress was held in Milan, Italy, and there were representatives present from 350 institutions around the world.


At the start of the 19th 92 century Airdrie was a thriving town of weavers, growing rich on the Napoleonic war economy. September 2015


With Wellington’s victory at Waterloo, the weaving industry collapsed and Airdrie’s future looked bleak.


But within a decade the discovery of ironstone beneath the ground transformed the town’s fortunes. Airdrie once again became a booming industrial community. It was against that backdrop that the Airdrie Savings Bank was forged.


Te first true savings bank was established by the Rev. Henry Duncan in the Dumfriesshire village of Ruthwell in 1810. But Duncan’s model was rapidly adopted across Scotland, the rest of the UK and continental Europe.


The bank was instituted in 1835 by the efforts of four “founding fathers” – the Rev. John Carslaw (a local church minister and strong advocate of the temperance movement); Dr William Clark (a retired doctor and member of a wealthy, old Airdrie family); the Rev. Andrew Ferrier (another local minister); and James Knox (a local hat and cap manufacturer).


In keeping with the spirit of the bank’s ethos, the first Board of Directors included several weavers, a blacksmith, a schoolmaster, a stone mason, a tailor and a salesman. Indeed, the blacksmith was Vice-President of the bank for more than 20 years.


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