John Shepherd-Barron:JOHN SHEPHERD-BARRON, who has died aged 84, invented a device that has had a profound effect on people's everyday lives almost the world over.
Few people in advanced countries would nowadays tolerate having to queue in banks to obtain cash, as they would have to do without this device. Also, access to funds while abroad without it would mean a return to the dreary bureaucracy of travellers’ cheques and other similar means.
John Shepherd-Barron was the man who invented the first operational cash dispensing machine – the famous “hole in the wall”.
There was no single inventor of the cash machine – there were several parallel developments (three in Britain alone), and they all involved costly research and development, dealing with public acceptance and security issues.
Shepherd-Barron's machine was developed when he was managing director of De La Rue Instruments – a subsidiary of the banknote-printing firm. The first model was installed at a branch of Barclays Bank in Enfield, London, where it was inaugurated on June 27th, 1967, by Reg Varney, star of the television sitcom On the Buses.
The familiar plastic credit card had not yet arrived, so the machine used specially printed “Barclaycash” vouchers for £10, which were exchanged for a packet of 10 one-pound notes.
Why £10? Shepherd-Barron thought that was sufficient for “a pretty wild weekend”.
John Shepherd-Barron was born in Shillong (now Meghalaya), India, where his father, Wilfrid Barron, was chief engineer of the Chittagong Port Commissioners and later a president of the Institution of Civil Engineers. His mother Dorothy Shepherd was an Olympic tennis player who won the Wimbledon ladies’ doubles in 1931.
Shepherd-Barron was educated at Stowe school in Buckinghamshire, Edinburgh University, and Trinity College, Cambridge. His studies were interrupted for second World War service with the airborne forces, finishing as a captain with the 2nd Indian Airborne Division.
In 1950 Shepherd-Barron joined De La Rue as a management trainee. In 1953 he married Caroline Murray, daughter of Sir Kenneth Murray, one-time chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Between 1957 and 1959 he set up the North American division of De La Rue. He also established a joint venture between De La Rue and Wells Fargo to create Britain’s first armoured-truck cash transit service, Security Express, and became its chairman in 1963.
In 1964 Shepherd-Barron was appointed managing director of De La Rue Instruments, an eight-person division with a brief to develop systems for automation.
He attributed the idea of a cash machine to his frustration at not being able to get access to his money one Saturday when he arrived at his bank a minute after closing time. He needed a technology-adventurous bank to act as a customer for the machine, and Barclays was the obvious target – it was the most automated and computerised of all the British banks.
Shepherd-Barron recalled that the deal was sealed in a 90-second conversation “over a pink gin” with a senior manager of Barclays. The first machines were installed two years later. The machine was officially marketed as DACS (De La Rue Automatic Cash System).
Shepherd-Barron likened his concept to a chocolate vending machine, but instead of a bar of chocolate, the customer received a packet of money in exchange for a voucher. To prevent fraud, the cheques were impregnated with a mildly radioactive chemical, which encoded a personal identification number that the user had to key in. The De La Rue machine was not patented, as this would have meant disclosing its security mechanisms. The cash machine was not “online” like today’s systems.
In 1969 he described the system to the conference of the American Banking Association, but achieved only one sale. Somewhat later, an American inventor, Don Wetzel, of the Docutel Corporation, developed a rival cash dispenser. At that time plastic payment cards were coming into widespread use in the US following the formation of Visa and Mastercard. This enabled the Docutel machine to use a payment card, making the machine considerably more practical.
But even in America the cash machine revolution was slow to catch on – by 1975 there were only 5,000 machines in use. But the number of machines grew exponentially in the 1980s. The manufacture of Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs), as they came to be called, became a huge industry and there are thought to be approaching two million ATMs in use today. It was an industry dominated by American giants, and De La Rue never became a major force in ATM manufacture.
Shepherd-Barron and his wife retired to a cottage on her father’s estate in Portmahomack, Ross-shire, where he occupied himself with shooting, fishing and salmon farming. He was chairman of Ross and Cromarty Enterprise from 1990 to 1995.
Shepherd-Barron’s role in the development of cash machines came to the fore in 1992 with the 25th anniversary of the original Enfield cash machine.
There was subsequently some controversy in the complex history of the cash dispenser as to who was its true begetter, though he was certainly first with an operational machine.
John Adrian Shepherd-Barron: born June 23rd, 1925; died May 15th, 2010