I was going to write a nostalgia piece, but I could not find confirmation of the fact, so I just left it
Events now have certainly confirmed my feeling
Ever since childhood, the Halifax has meant respectability & security to me, learned by osmosis from a family who would not have dreamed of entrusting their hard earned savings to any one else
I still have the pass book I acquired when I was introduced as a customer by my father when I was 16. It was not my first encounter with financial services – I had had a Post Office account since I was 7 – but this was definitely a step into the world of grown ups finance
Not that I would want to return to that world. Apart from the fact that there was a vague feeling that you had to pass some kind of fit & proper person test to be a saver, you certainly had to jump through hoops to get a mortgage. To have been a saver with the society for a certain amount of time, to be holding a proper job, & have accumulated a 25% deposit. Only certain kinds of property would be considered – basically family homes, built in the 20th century.
The only alternative to a straight repayment might have been an endowment, but this was only worthwhile if you were father to a family who needed a guarantee that the roof would remain over their heads if Daddy died. The fact that so few children are left fatherless through mortality these days is just one more measure of how the world has changed
And for me, personally, there would have been next to no chance of getting a mortgage in my own right, at least until I had reached an age where I was clearly on the shelf, past child bearing, & had made the best of it by getting a good job in teaching. By the 1970s, more enlightened institutions might have started taking my income into account for a joint mortgage with my husband, but only at a multiple of 1, compared with his 2½ or 3. It took the Sex Discrimination Act to put women on an equal footing with men as far as house purchase went.
We would have expected to move perhaps once or twice, to accommodate a growing family or to reflect increased prosperity through career progression. Only people who were forced, for job reasons, expected to have to move more frequently. Nobody talked about what their house was ‘worth’, one worried about prices only as a measure of how much you needed in order to acquire a home of your own
Now that everybody is turning round & blaming the bankers, the finance industry, derivatives & rocket scientists for the current difficulties, it is important to remember how much we gained from these relaxations of ‘moral’ approaches to the provision of financial services
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