Farewell to the Provvy, the loan that lent an air of respectability (at 170pc interest)

For decades it was up there with the mail order catalogue or the likes of Paddy’s Market as the only route to respectable things for the respectable poor. Gerald and Vera Weisfeld built What Every Woman Wants on it. Millions everywhere remember how their parents resorted to it at such financial pinchpoints as Christmas, or the August purchase of new school uniform.

But it left others, such as the young Jackie Bird, with a lifelong horror of the ‘never-never’ – and uneasy recollections of how, once the ‘Provvy’ was in your life, how hard it was to break the habit.

Anyway, ‘Provvy cheques’ will soon be no more. After 141 years, Provident Financial is disposing of its doorstep lending business and is already closed to new customers. Some 2,100 jobs are at risk and even those who have long criticised Provvy for its oh-gosh interest rates fear the cash-strapped may resort to far more sinister lenders.

‘It is probably preferable,’ intones Justin Modray of Candid Financial Advice and in words which to many Glaswegians will be the understatement of the decade, ‘to old-school moneylenders who are unlikely to be sympathetic when a loan cannot be repaid.’

Say what you like about the Provvy: there was never any risk of being nailed to your door. But many still recall the stigma. The more pan-loafy shops refused to accept Provvy vouchers and the least clue that one had secured your new school blazer was grounds for pitiless playground mockery.

When I was a boy, the brown garment decreed by Jordanhill College School could be had from only two outlets – Paisleys of Jamaica Street, and Birss of Partick. Paisleys, one safely assumes, would not countenance Provvy cheques.

Birss of Partick probably did. Unfortunately, their blazer had a faint purple tinge – and never quite cut it in G13.

‘As a child, I vividly recall my mum and I scanning shop windows for a little card with a tick,’ broadcaster Jackie Bird recalled in 2013.

‘This meant the shop accepted something called the Provvy cheque.

‘The Provvy – or Provident – lending experience meant you’d borrow a certain amount, spend it in shops that stamped your card and you’d pay it back weekly to a collector who came to the house. It’s how I got everything, from my school uniform to most of my Christmas presents.’

BUT the whole process could be excruciating. ‘I remember my mum’s embarrassment when we went into a shop that didn’t accept the Provvy. The assistant would shake her head and we’d awkwardly scuttle out.’

‘It was used as an insult by other working-class kids,’ she added, ‘if they discovered that was the source of your new dress or shoes.’

The Provident Financial market was, of course, those with no other source of credit or assets against which money could be borrowed and whom, today, would be sniffily described as ‘sub-prime’.

We forget that, as recently as 1980, half the adult population did not have a bank account and most workers were paid weekly and in cash.

We also forget the fiercely proud ethos of that past, respectable working class.

They set great store in neat, sparkling homes and wellscrubbed doorsteps.

They dressed as formally and well as they could afford.

Mothers would never go shopping without their good gloves and at least a knotted scarf as head covering.

There was a sense of ‘best’ – the best room, your Sunday best (most had some sort of church connection – at least, Easter Mass, or shoving your sons into the Boys’ Brigade) and a real fear for reputation.

There was dread, too, of things that could threaten parlous financial security, such as betting, or drinking, or a child conceived out of wedlock.

Provident Financial did its best to make credit painless.

It lent only modest sums – in the 1970s, typically £10. Its carefully trained agents (who, until 2017, were self-employed) were always well turned-out, affable and respectful.

It did not have the sub-prime market quite to itself – you may remember its chief rival, the Caledonian cheque – but both were certainly an improvement on the pawnshop, or the quietly loathed ‘tallymen’ who sold goods directly and had ways and wiles of ensnaring households in perpetual debt.

The voucher, too, gave you a sense of choice – and, when Vera and Gerald launched What Every Woman Wants, they were happy to take Provvy or Caledonian cheques. From its first Glasgow store, What Every Woman Wants brought affordable fashion for the first time to lasses of modest means in an inspired business model.

Gerald Weisfeld scurried about looking for the latest fashion, bought an item, went the round of city textiles factories to find who could knock out copies cheapest, and had a rail of the garments in the store as soon as possible.

HE found in Vera McDonald, a driven young single mother, a retail genius who made the shop bright, appealing and fun.

‘There were a lot of Provident cheques and Caledonian cheques around,’ Vera recalls.

‘It wasn’t long after people had been moved out of the city to housing estates.

‘There weren’t so many people living in the city centre and people were finding it hard.

‘I remember people coming in clutching their £10 Provident cheque, wearing duffel coats. They’d ask: ‘Do you take the Caledonian cheques?’ I’d tell them: “I’ll take your milk tokens, hen...”’

Within a few years she was Mrs Weisfeld and in 1990 the couple shrewdly sold the discount chain for £50million.

The Provvy and its doorstep army – by 2000, it was increasingly female – might not bear the closest moral scrutiny. Typical borrowing by 2004 was £100, repaid at £5 weekly over 30 weeks.

The APr could be up to 170 per cent but, for the sub-prime, as someone said, the only paperwork that mattered was the cash.

‘Campaigners say the 12,400 strong Provvy doorstep army are themselves exploited,’ a London paper reported that year. ‘often the neighbours of borrowers, they earn an average £160 a week, part-time, according to the company.

‘Campaigners are pushing for a legal ceiling on loan rates...’

Provident Financial was once a huge concern – its 2003 pretax profits were £202million and it had only just slid out of the FTSE Top 100 of Britain’s largest companies.

Still, many respectable bodies – from the Quakers to the Church of England – refused to touch its shares, not least as the Provvy moved into Eastern Europe and explored the possibilities of Mexico.

Yet by 2013 the antics of, if anything, still creepier outfits such as Wonga – especially TV adverts deliberately stirring the ‘pester power’ of children – were attracting the real opprobrium.

Now that Provvy cheques are gone, forces unregulated and even criminal may slither onto its manor – as yet another little part of Scotland’s social tapestry disappears.