If you’re on holiday in another country and you lose your cards, you can just order new ones, and if your money gets stolen, your travel insurance will generally cover what you lost. But in the first half of last century, servicemen and women who were posted overseas had to rely on travelling bank ‘paymasters’ and ‘gold carriers’ to physically bring them their pay – even if that meant setting up banking agencies on Australian warships and sailing through some of the world’s most dangerous waters at the time!
Risking their lives to deliver pay
One of our paymasters stationed on the H.M.A.S Perth during World War II managed to keep the pay records intact when the ship sank by storing the records in his “Mae West” lifebelt. When he then became a prisoner of war for three and a half years, the paymaster still managed to keep the records safe.
Even after being forced into labour for nine months on the Burma Railway, the paymaster kept the records intact by burying the papers. He even managed to remember the precise location so the records – still legible after several years buried in the earth — could be dug up after his release. Now that’s customer service.
Striking gold in Gallipoli
During the Gallipoli campaign, five bank officers, carrying £5,000 in gold, were sent to Egypt to help out the Australian troops. When they arrived, they found the campaign was over and the bulk of the Australians were being transferred to France or for training in England. Unperturbed, the officers, still carrying the gold, continued on to London to help out there instead.
No doubt the paymasters and gold carriers would probably think we have it easy these days, with all these new-fangled ATMs everywhere you go, as well as travellers’ cheques and Travel Money Cards. What’s more, the emergence of virtual cash has made it so you no longer even have to deal in hard money. Various apps and peer-to-peer payment systems mean you don’t even have to handle cash to pay a person or bill. The days of the ‘middlemen’ are officially over.
Experience more stories from our 100-year history at: 100yearstogether.com.au