For the better defining of the three clearing areas—town, metropolitan, and country—the letters T M C have been placed in the corner of all bank checks. From February 19, 1907, the date of the initiation of the Metropolitan Clearing, up to December 31 of that year, £482,227,000 was paid in this clearing, while for the year 1908 the total was £647,842,000, as compared with the town clearing total for that year of £10,408,254,000 and the country total of £1,064,266,000, making in all a grand total of £12,120,362,000, which figures, vast as they are, were a decrease of £610,031,000 on the total £12,730,393,000 for the previous year, 1907.[137] The work entailed by such vast figures as these could scarcely have been dealt with by hand alone, but by the installation of adding machines the work is easily and quickly done.
It must not be thought that all checks on London are presented through the clearing house, for checks on the London branches of the Scotch banks and of the colonial and foreign banks are still presented over the counter.
Moreover, though it is mutually understood between the clearing banks that checks on each other will only be presented through the clearing house, this agreement has no legal binding.
Two exceptions are continually made; documents or goods have to be taken up against cash, and the owner before parting wishes to be certain of his money. In this case the presenting banker either presents his check for marking—that is to say, the paying banker having ascertained from his customer's account that there is sufficient money thereon, marks the check for payment, which has the same effect as if the banker had accepted it; or, as is becoming more usual, the paying banker gives one of his own drafts on the Bank of England in exchange for the check.
PROVINCIAL CLEARINGS
Besides the London clearing house, which is an irregular building of no architectural features whatever, there are eight provincial clearing houses in England—Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield.[138]
Two only of these clear over £100,000,000 in the year. Manchester cleared £320,296,332 in 1907, with an average weekly total of £6,159,545 and an average daily total of £1,039,923, and Liverpool £196,325,829. The others cleared in the same year from £12,000,000 to £61,000,000. Small figures, indeed, compared with London, where the highest total paid on any one day was, in 1907, £106,703,000. In 1908 the highest total paid in one day in the London clearing was £85,833,000 and the lowest £24,903,000.
In London, as in the provincial places, the object of the clearing house is primarily the convenience of exchange of checks, not the regulation of banking, and little is regulated save, perhaps, the rate of interest to be paid on deposits at seven days' notice.
In these days, too, when the tendency is strong for amalgamation, the local banks are dwarfed by their gigantic competitors, with their branches in many counties and head offices in London, with the result that London each year controls more of the banking in England and the provincial clearings cease more and more to be under local control, but are controlled by their London head offices.
This may, if the present tendency of amalgamation continues,[139] result in the committee of London clearing bankers becoming an important controlling body, but that time is not yet at hand, and though, as we have said, an expression of opinion on the part of the committee carries very great weight, yet anything like dictation would very properly be resented by the important and old-established banks in both London and the provinces that are outside the clearing house.