About the term 'Bank holiday'

Nessie · October 28, 2008, 4:50am

Hi,
I have some query about the term ‘bank holiday’. (In AmE it means ‘public hodiday’, doesn’t it?) ‘Bank holiday’ is surely not just a holiday for banks, so why is it called ‘bank holiday’? Is it because banking is the UK’s most important industry?

Many thanks,
Nessie.

Conchita · October 28, 2008, 10:21am

Good question and good point! Apparently, however, cricket (or rather, a fan of this sport) could well be the culprit:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_holiday

Jamie_K · October 28, 2008, 12:10pm

In the US, not all public holidays are called bank holidays. Bank holidays are the ones on which bankers, postal workers and people in other various services stay home from work, but which other workers don’t have free. Those would include days like Columbus Day, Presidents’ Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and a few others. Most people have to work on those days, but bankers and federal employees do not.

Nessie · October 30, 2008, 2:38pm

Thank you very much, Jamie and Conchita
But what about ‘why is it called ‘bank holiday’? Is it because banking is the UK’s most important industry’?

Many thanks,
Nessie.

Jamie_K · October 30, 2008, 2:39pm

Because the banks are the places that people most easily noticed are closed on a holiday like that.

MrPedantic · October 30, 2008, 10:44pm

Apparently the phrase “bank holiday” was first recorded in 1871, which is the date of the Bank Holidays Act in the UK. This act specified the four days on which banks were legally closed (thus e.g. a bill payable on one of those days would be paid next day).

Good Friday and Christmas Day (and Sundays) were already holidays; so they weren’t specified in the act.

Best wishes,

MrP

Nessie · November 4, 2008, 2:17pm

Thanks a lot for the information, MrP. However I still wonder why there is not an act for post office holidays or the like, but just specifically BANK holidays, and thus I still suspect that is because banking is one of the UK’s most important industry…

MrPedantic · November 5, 2008, 11:07pm

Hello Nessie,

I can’t find a copy of the 1871 Bank Holidays Act online; probably the preamble would explain matters.

However, the Banking and Financial Dealings Act of 1971, which superseded the 1871 Act, contains these statements:

An Act to make new provision in place of the Bank Holidays Act 1871, to confer power to suspend financial and other dealings on bank holidays or other days, and to amend the law relating to bills of exchange and promissory notes with reference to the maturity of bills and notes and other matters affected by the closing of banks on Saturdays, and for purposes connected therewith.

…

(4) No person shall be compellable to make any payment or to do any act on a bank holiday under this Act which he would not be compellable to make or do on Christmas Day or Good Friday; and where a person would, apart from this subsection, be compellable to make any payment or to do any act on a bank holiday under this Act, his obligation to make the payment or to do the act shall be deemed to be complied with if he makes or does it on the next following day on which he is compellable to make or do it.

The holidays relate specifically to banks because they relate to the notion of payment on specific dates. This is significant e.g. where large sums of money are involved: if I am due to pay £1m into your account on a date that happens to be a bank holiday, for instance, you can’t penalise me for late payment if I pay you on the next day. (There wouldn’t have been any effects of comparable significance at that time in relation to the Post Office.)

I can’t find any authoritative texts on this subject; but I should think that the establishment of bank holidays via the 1871 Act was the final stage in the replacement of “high days and holy days” with statutory holidays.

Best wishes,

MrP