The first cash machine in history was first used by a British actor in Enfield
On 27 June 1967, a Barclays branch in Enfield installed the world's first cash machine, and the actor Reg Varney was the first to use it. It was one of several banking firsts from a firm that began more than three centuries ago with two Quaker goldsmiths on Lombard Street.
The business dates to 17 November 1690, when John Freame and Thomas Gould began trading as goldsmith bankers in the City of London. In 1728 it moved to 54 Lombard Street, marked by the Sign of the Black Spread Eagle, a symbol that became central to its identity. The Barclay name arrived in 1736, when Freame's son-in-law James Barclay joined as a partner, and it has never carried an apostrophe.
Growth came through mergers. In 1896 twelve banks, several with Quaker roots, joined forces as Barclays and Co., holding around a quarter of deposits in English private banks. Acquisitions followed, from the British Linen Bank in 1919, which kept printing its own notes, to the Woolwich Building Society in 2000 for £5.4 billion. In 2005 the headquarters left Lombard Street for Canary Wharf.
Barclays liked being first. In May 1958 it appointed the first female bank manager in the UK, Hilda Harding, who ran the Hanover Square branch until 1970. It launched Barclaycard, the country's first credit card, in 1966, followed the cash machine a year later, and in June 1987 introduced the Connect card, the first British debit card. In 1999 it even briefly ran a free internet service, Barclays.net, before selling it to British Telecom.
Its history also includes darker chapters. Members of the Barclay family engaged in the slave trade in 1756, though David Barclay of Youngsbury became an abolitionist who freed his own slaves, and in 1986 the bank sold its South African business after protests over apartheid. Today it is a systemically important bank employing over 80,000 people in more than 40 countries, and S&P Global's April 2026 report ranked it Europe's fifth largest bank by assets, at $2.078 trillion.
Source: Barclays
