FAURESMITH
This is where I started my career in Barclays bank on 1st May 1965. I had been working for the O.F.S. Roads Department and staying in the Phoenix Hotel. I had started helping in the pub where I met the Barclays Bank manager, Oom Jaap Greeff. The town had the distinction of being one of only a very few places in the world, where the train line ran down the main street. When I was transferred, I left on that train and as it passed by the hotel, the staff members were standing outside waving me goodbye. A unique moment.
Many years later I returned to the old town to audit the branch. It was one of my early solo efforts and I spent much of my time sitting staring into space and letting my memories wash over me. The train had stopped running by then and one of the old engines was now on display in a little Karroo garden outside the hotel. Most of the people I had known, including my old nemesis, Tiens Viljoen and his buddy Abie Levin, had passed on. I ruefully recalled getting drunk in that very hotel for the first time and the horrific hangover I had the following day! And the day the vicar from Jagersfontein turned up to take me to church on a Sunday evening and I was sitting having a quiet beer with a fellow inmate of the hotel.
OURIESBURG
I started my career in Inspection Department right here. I joined Uncle Peter de Villiers and his wife Joan. I had met them once before when he had inspected my branch at Sterkspruit. (I was originally destined to join Willie Ackerman at Kuruman but he had taken leave and I was rerouted to Fouriesburg. Just as well as during Willie’s eventual inspection, the manager committed suicide. That would have been a nasty start to my new career.) I was so nervous that I could barely get the teller’s cash counted.
KROONSTAD
I visited this branch twice. A fair number of members of my family lived and worked in this town and in fact, I was actually born here in 1945! Another interesting fact is that my Great Grandfather King was the blacksmith of the town as well as the mayor from 1914 to 1916. I had heard that portraits of all previous mayors were displayed in the old sandstone town hall but found to my dismay that this was no longer so. One of the ladies on the bank staff was married to the Town Clerk and she asked him about the portraits. To my delight he phoned me and said that he had located the old man’s portrait in the archives and would I like to visit his office and view it. I took my camera along and took a number of photos of the portrait. He was a fine looking old gent, probably immensely strong from his blacksmithing.
WITBANK
I was somewhat startled in the ledger department where I was working, to hear Mrs Salton calling out, “Please bring me Mrs A**ehole’s ledger sheet. Mrs Salton was a tough ledger supervisor but she did not strike me as “rough” as well. I was about to say something but luckily I noticed in time that it was Mrs REGINA SOLE’S sheet which was being called for…… R. SOLE!
What’s in a name eh? Elsewhere I once struck a Mrs ROSEMARY THORN. Imagine that – they were definitely destined to marry.
STANDERTON
I called for the overdraft sheets in order to check the overdraft interest calculations. Dup, the accountant, dumped the substantial pile on my desk and with a smirk said that I would find no errors there. The sheets had been checked, the experienced ledger supervisor had spent weeks diligently re-checking everything and he personally had taken the sheets home and done his own check. I sat back, looked him in the eye and said, “Would you like to take a bet on it?” To give him a fair chance, I suggested we bet a beer on each mistake over R100 and he was happy to take me on. You should have seen that man’s face when I highlighted nearly 30 undercharges – several of hundreds of Rand. I knew I’d win because all branches recast columns but somehow failed to notice decimal shifts when they did. I used a totally different shortcut based on average balances which avoided the pitfalls and always showed the big mistakes, which were the errors most often missed.
I made Dup pay up and we “broached” that case of beer after work one day. Dup could not believe that so many mistakes had eluded detection. I must have seemed like some crazy magician to him!
BURGERSDORP
I felt a real clot here. One of the girls on the staff was mystified when I kept on calling her MIELIES. One day she plucked up courage and asked me why I was calling her that and surprised, I replied that I thought it was her nickname. “Nee Meneer” she said, “my naam is ELISE”. A bit later I happened to look up and there was “Mielies” dressed in a Volkskas uniform, standing on the customers’ side of the counter. Puzzled, I went up to her and asked her why she was suddenly wearing a Volkskas uniform. Was my face red when she said that she WORKED for Volkskas and that she was the identical twin sister of Elise.
I joined Mike de Villiers at the local golf club one Saturday night, at some local social event. In the course of the evening I was introduced to a Mr Forbes. He turned out to be the older brother of the famous South African tennis player, Gordon Forbes. I was delighted because I had just bought Gordon’s brilliant book, “A handful of summers” and rated it one of the best books I had ever read. I was hugely impressed with his writing talent – more so than with his tennis talent. When I started talking about the book, I was stunned when the man recoiled and said that the “family” had disowned Gordon because of that “shocking” book. Sure, the book had some saucy tales told in a hilarious, disarming manner but it most certainly wasn’t crude or anything like that. I was so angry that I packed it in at the party and went home. Gordon deserved better! He wrote two more books after that, which I’ve yet to read but I know they’ll be excellent. Heaven preserve us from old fuddy-duddies. (Gordon Forbes died in December 2020 at Plettenberg Bay)
MAITLAND, CAPE TOWN
I felt really foolish one day here. “Jumpy” Wilmot, (So named because he came from Springfontein) the manager, called me into his office and introduced me to a superfit looking fellow in a smart tracksuit. “This is Shaun Bartlett” he said and I shook the fellow’s hand. I’m no sport fan and know blowall about soccer but the name rang a vague bell. Struggling to maintain a semblance of awareness of who I was being introduced to, my opening salvo was asking him which team he played for! Jumpy tried to save face for me by saying “Bafana Bafana of course John”. I smacked my own forehead in dismay at my own stupidity and mumbled that I knew nothing about soccer as I preferred rugby. (I don’t actually – I’m not the slightest bit interested in any sport) Shaun, if you ever read this, my sincere apologies. My not knowing who you were was tantamount to not knowing that the Pope was a Catholic!
But that was not the only shock in this branch. At lunch time the young male staff members were passing a no-holds-barred girlie magazine around and gawking at the normally concealed pulchritude, here on full display in lurid colour. I’m not averse to admiring naked, well rounded ladies but I was taken aback by the amount of flesh on display and I’m sure I blushed. Wordlessly, one of the lads pointed to a demure young lass working quietly across the office and I realized with a start, that it was her assets that I was viewing. I had to stay well away from that part of the office after that – I couldn’t take the chance that she might look me in the eye and turn me into a mumbling, stumblefooted teenager ………..
TWEELING
If you don’t know where Tweeling is, I really don’t blame you. The town barely exists somewhere between Reitz and Frankfort and the main road bypasses the village completely. This was my second visit to the town and Nick Edmayr was the manager. He would go onto much greater appointments as he was a go getter who was really fighting a rearguard action here, trying to stop the branch from fading clean away. The Barclays News sheet was in production in those days and Nick and Tweeling rated a write-up which I had me chuckling.
To save you the trouble of trying to decipher the print. In the third paragraph it states
“Jy woon elke veiling op die dorp by en jy maak vriende met die mense. Elke moontlike geleentheid gryp jy met albei hande vas as ‘n HOER ‘n trekker of ‘n ding koop, herhinner hom (Haar?) net aan Wesbank finansiering….”.
The printing error leaves one with the comical mental picture of the ladies of the night getting around on nice new tractors. I was delighted with the picture.
GEORGE
I visited George branch on a number of occasions over the years and seldom had any major problems there. However, during one of those audits, I took up residence in the Hawthorndene Hotel which is situated at the foot of the Outeniqua Pass, in most pleasant surroundings. I was relaxing on my bed after supper and happened to glance down at my vest where I suddenly spotted a whole horde of little black spots coming up the vest. FLEAS! I always carried a can of Pyagra in my luggage back then and I quickly whipped out the can and let fly liberally all over the room. Fleabites have a nasty habit of manifesting a good while after the nasty little critters have drunk their fill and I went off to work the next day, scratching and pretty disgruntled. As my spray did not seem to be working, I bought a can of Doom Fogger and fumigated the room properly but unfortunately, I had already carried them into my car, so another Fogger was employed in my Beetle. I just could not seem to get away from them – even the branch was infested. In desperation one day, I stripped right down in the office toilet and commenced to methodically spray my clothes. But what was really mortifying was that word of my discomfort had got around and wags in the office kept bringing me fleas which they had caught and asking, “Is this perhaps one of yours Mr Lyle”. I’m a pretty easy-going guy but those jokes sorely tried my good nature.
Luckily the pressure eased on me when it was discovered that the manager, Tom Moolman also had an infestation at his house and could just as easily have been the one bringing the fleas to work with him.
NEWTON PARK, PORT ELIZABETH
I audited this branch several times over the years. The audit that really sticks in my mind was one which I undertook with Mike de Villiers in June, early in the ‘80s. The Durban July horse race fell in the middle of this audit and on the Thursday evening before the race, Mike spent hours in the Edward Hotel pub, carefully writing the name of each horse on matchsticks. On Friday he said that I was going to have to stop my job and so I could run his “sweepstakes”. For a small entrance fee (I forget how much) an entrant would be allowed to “throw” out the matches on a desk and as they fell, I would dot down the name of each of the first three horses under the name of the entrant. The fee would simply form a jackpot which would go to the person who predicted the first three horses in the actual race. Amazingly I don’t think any predictions were duplicated. The staff went bananas and I was hard pressed to keep up. It was a day of huge fun which ended that evening in the branch pub. The eventual winner was Millie Larkin who had simply flooded me with entries . I’m sure she remembers the occasion even though it took place nearly 40 years ago.
So you see folks, audits weren’t ALWAYS nervewracking, traumatic affairs – sometimes they were fun as well.
GREYTOWN
In 1976, Dave Sharp and I walked in on a Saturday at 11 am on the last day of the month. Willie Axford, the accountant was outraged that we could be so callous but he calmed down when he realized that we had timed things to save the branch from having to balance their books twice in quick succession. This was the only time in hundreds of audits that we started on a Saturday. While waiting for the branch to complete their balancing, I strolled into the ledger department and noticed a music cassette on the supervisor’s table. Being a music “freak” I picked it up – it was Led Zeppelin 4, an alltime classic rock album. I was quite surprised to find this quite radical album on her table and asked if she liked this type of music. Jo Hedges confessed that she and her husband loved Led Zep and she was equally startled to find that one of the dreaded Inspectors was also a fan. It secured me an immediate dinner invitation to the Hedges’ home and I turned up there in jeans with a bottle of Red Heart rum under my arm! I was greeted by diesel mechanic Grant in his Sunday best. I took one look at him and ordered him out of that “monkey suit” and into his civvies – a t-shirt and shorts. This started a friendship which lasted for more than 40 years. Grant has regrettably passed on but we still have contact with Jo.
I hope this settles it – we Inspectors were as human as anyone else. We even listened to rock music!
TROMPSBURG
I spent 8 years of my early life in this town. We stayed in a house right across the road from Barclays Bank and for all that time I did not realize there were other banks too. The bank was pretty much out of bounds for me in my youth, so imagine the frisson of wrongdoing I still felt, when I walked in there again but as a feared auditor this time. Our old house had gone and an old age home had been raised in its place but a number of the old residents still remembered my family and the house. I did little work some days, as I just stood yakking away at the counter all the time. Best of all was my chat with our then family doctor, Dr du Plessis (Retired). He had predicted, when I was a perpetually sick little boy, that I would not grow to adulthood and here I was now, a great big slob, as healthy as could be. He looked at me and seriously said that if we had not moved out of that old house when we did, neither I nor my mother would have survived. (The house, which was reputedly haunted, had served as a nursing home sometime in the past)
CLAREMONT, CAPE TOWN
We did not go down to the Cape much but whenever we had spare capacity in our Eastern Cape/Free State region, I would offer it to the Cape. So it came that I took a team into Claremont branch for their audit. I had ample reason to regret volunteering for that job because the branch was in the throes of being totally revamped and parts of the building were being demolished to make way for fresh additions. It was just my luck to get a table in the severely restricted office space, just inches away from a wall on the other side of which, jackhammers were thundering away breaking up the concrete. The noise and dust were just plain indescribable. I should have heeded the old army admonition about never volunteering! While we were there Archbishop Desmond Tutu popped into the branch to do some banking. What a charismatic man he is – the branch staff treated him royally and he bounced around cheerfully from counter to counter, talking away. I rather took to him when I heard that he enjoyed a drop of rum and coke occasionally! Well snap sir, so did I!
Across the road from the branch is St Saviour’s Anglican church. I discovered quite recently that this was where my Grandparents on my Dad’s side, were married in 1905. What a pity I did not know it at the time so I could have gone and had a look at the church.
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