Folklore expert and Tanners Events Manager, Alix Chidley-Uttley guides you through the historical ledgers at Tanners.
The ledgers here at Tanners date from the late nineteenth century and were used into the 1960s. Hailing from Pullings Distillery, now Tanners Hereford, these beautiful old ledgers were found in the storeroom. The lads went back to Wyle Cop to ask Mr Clive and Mr Frank Tanner, “what should we do with them?” It was decided they should come to Wyle Cop, which is where they remain to this day. It’s a stroke of good luck that they survive at all; many were recycled during WW2. Open them and you will find not only beautiful handwriting but listed are the names of customers, cases of Claret and Port amongst other items, deliveries, wages and debts accumulating or cleared and more besides. These grand old ledgers are tangible records and working documents of the world a lifetime ago.
If this has whet your appetite, here is a more in-depth look at ledgers in general:
Looking at these beautiful old ledgers today, they seem to belong to a world long since passed, but these were used well into the 1960s. Over the years, many visitors have used such ledgers in their working career, and the flush of nostalgia is palpable. In Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the ledger formed the backbone of financial record-keeping. It stood at the centre of any organised system of accounts, much as Excel does today - drawing together transactions from day books or journals and arranging them by account. This structure allowed balances to be tracked over time, bringing clarity to what was owed, what was held in stock, and how money moved through a business or private estate, where such records were also commonly kept. The Housekeeper and the Butler of larger houses would be very well-versed in such a system. From the Clark keeping records in town to country houses in the depth of Shropshire, these ledgers were once ubiquitous. Its wide use reveals the expansion of industry and trade across the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century. As transactions increased in volume and complexity, the ledger provided a system that could cope with scale – the person responsible knew exactly who owed what. Double-entry bookkeeping was central to this. Each transaction was recorded as both debit and credit, creating an internal check that improved accuracy and made discrepancies easier to identify – and, of course, easier to chase payments owed.
To the materials these grande dames are made of, most were bound in calf leather over thick boards; reinforced spines supported their substantial weight. The paper was often rag fibre (cotton or linen) based rather than wood pulp, prone to foxing in later life, but ensuring longevity and giving it strength and a slight flexibility. No doubt this has allowed many examples to survive just as the Pullings Ledgers survive here at Tanners. Pages were ruled either by hand or through early printing, often using red and blue lines to structure entries. Edges were sometimes marbled or speckled; in fact, there was a practical logic to all this decorative splendour – it made forgery and ‘cooking the books’ very difficult as it was very apparent when pages had been removed. Clever and decorative!
Arguably, one of the defining features and one most commented on is, of course, the handwriting. Entries were made in ink, often from pewter inkwells (of which we have some remaining here at Tanners) in enviable handwriting. Copperplate was the original and as time moved on, the Palmer Method took over – still beautiful but a little more practical and condensed on the flourish front, which no doubt took its toll on the clerks who found themselves writing many, many lines! An interesting aspect of this handwriting is that even across different clerks, there is often a shared discipline in layout and form, reflecting the discipline in handwriting. Many of us today are guilty of much sloppier efforts on the handwriting front!
Although associated with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ledgers remained in active use well into the mid-twentieth century. Many firms, estates and institutions continued to rely on handwritten account books into the 1950s and 1960s, even as typewriters and early accounting machines became more common, and even computers. These grand old survivors represent both continuity and gradual transition in record-keeping practice. Cheers to them and their timeless elegance!
