The world’s first cash machine is in Enfield, and a bus driver opened it
Every cashpoint on earth is descended from one machine in a wall on Enfield High Street. The man who switched it on went on to play Britain’s most famous bus driver, which we choose to take personally.
There is a bank at 20 The Town in Enfield. It is a Victorian building, put up in 1897 to a design by William Gillbee Scott, and until fairly recently most people walked past it without looking up. In March 2023 it was given Grade II listed status — not for the architecture, particularly, but for what was bolted to the side of it fifty-six years earlier.
27 June 1967
On that morning Barclays switched on the first automatic teller machine anywhere in the world. It was not a hole in a wall as we would recognise it. There were no plastic cards: a customer bought a paper voucher in advance, fed it into the machine along with a personal identification number, and the machine returned £10 — the maximum, and worth something like £159 today.
The PIN survives. Everything else about that first machine is gone, and the whole of modern banking has been built on top of the idea it proved: that people would trust a machine with their money if the machine was reliable enough.
The man who opened it
Barclays needed someone to press the button in front of the cameras, and they chose a local resident: the actor Reg Varney, who lived in Enfield. In June 1967 he was known for a sitcom called Beggar My Neighbour. Two years later he became Stan Butler in On the Buses, and for a generation of Britain he simply was a bus driver.
So the first person to be handed money by a machine, in front of the world’s press, was a man who would shortly spend four series driving passengers around for a living. We have no professional stake in this whatsoever. We just like it.
Where to find it
The blue plaque went up in 1992, and in 2017 — the fiftieth anniversary — one of the machines on the wall was painted gold and given a plaque of its own. Both are still there on Enfield Town, a couple of minutes from where our coaches set down at Enfield Town station, and free to look at, which is more than can be said for most things a coach party is taken to see.
It takes four minutes and costs nothing. If your group is in Enfield Town with time to fill before the coach, we will point them at it.