The gleaming pedestal on which banking once stood may have been covered in brambles and graffiti, but TSB had a statue of its patron with a plaque that was well worth reading. The virtues of its very first trustee in 1810, the Reverend Henry Duncan of Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire, was that the banks’ original purpose was “for his poorest parishioners and to serve the local people in the community”. This was the perfect mantra on which to base a new beginning.