Treasures from the vault: Inside the RBS archives

At the official archive of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), a dedicated team of five archivists maintains a watchful eye over what constitutes an alternative biography of Scotland. Here the temperature is a steady 16C, humidity is 50 per cent and the lighting low, so as to best maintain these treasures for posterity.

For the historians, academics and ordinary members of the public who visit each day the archive is an Aladdin's Cave – if, that is, the Sultans of Arabia had invested in the benefits of barcodes, a central database and valued such items as a Woody piggy bank, an urn containing the ashes of the agreements and understandings among the banks in Scotland from 1965 and the world's first overdraft authorisation.

While the RBS archive stays cool and dim to protect its contents, it has recently stepped into the spotlight's glare by putting a range of historical documents on public display for the first time. In partnership with the National Library of Scotland, RBS has set up a new exhibition entitled The Key of the Universe: Scotland and Darien 1695-1707.

It was from the ashes of the disaster of the Darien Venture that RBS was born. Scotland's attempt to set up a trading company to rival England's East India Company, to be based at the isthmus of Panama, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Scots colonisers and the near bankruptcy of the nation. As a consequence of the site's abandonment in 1700, the Scots Parliament agreed seven years later to the union of parliaments – but the parliamentarians and Scottish nobility were granted financial compensation in recognition of their losses.

In Scotland, a group of fund managers was appointed to administer these payments from the new parliament of the United Kingdom. They discovered that they had spare money to invest and decided to set up a bank. After petitioning King George I for his approval, they received a royal charter in 1727 and established The Royal Bank of Scotland.

As a result, RBS has possession of many of the oldest documents related to the Darien venture, including the Records of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, its record books, its first minute book and letters from colonists who travelled in hope to the New World, only to be greeted with disappointment, despair and, for almost 2,000, death.

The colonists who received a rapturous send-off from Leith on 12 July, 1698 were unaware of specifically where they were going, as the captain was under orders not to open the sealed instructions until the ships called in at Madeira.

For Laura Yeoman, the RBS archivist who prepared the exhibition with Dr Ulrika Hogg of the National Library of Scotland, it is a fascinating period.

She says: "The records of the Company of Scotland are not just important in the history of RBS; they are important to Scotland as whole. The collapse of the Darien Scheme was a key contributing factor in the formation of Great Britain, the consequent dissolution of the independent Scottish parliament, and the resulting shift in Scots identity which as Robert Burns saw it turned his beloved homeland into 'England's province'. They also tell a fascinating story of adventure, dedication, courage and disaster. It's a story that deserves to be told."

As does the story of RBS itself, to judge by the fascinating array of letters, files and other items it has gathered up over almost three centuries of business.

In the early days after its foundation in Edinburgh with just eight members of staff, its older rival, Bank of Scotland regularly tried to put it out of business by hoarding RBS banknotes and suddenly presenting them for payment, in the hope that they would lack the necessary gold and so be forced to close.

In 1745, John Campbell, the bank's chief cashier, whose personal diary is in the archives, was forced to move funds and precious records into Edinburgh Castle when the Jacobites arrived. The bank was also forced to pay a large sum to Bonnie Prince Charlie – used to fund the Jacobite march on England.

The expansion of RBS began in 1783 when they launched their first branch in Glasgow – it quickly conducted more business than the head office in Edinburgh – while the first acquisition was the Dundee Banking Co in 1864.

Each successive acquisition saw the archive, then kept in the bank's headquarters at St Andrew's Square in Edinburgh, to swell. Finally, in 2006, the RBS archive – which by then included material obtained in the takeover of NatWest in 2000 – moved into specially designed quarters.

Among its treasures are a letter from Florence Nightingale to her bankers, Glyn, Mills & Co, in which she thanks them for their hard work in administering her complicated financial affairs which had accrued during her time nursing in the Crimean War. There is also the bank's original charter – which the archive describes as RBS's "birth certificate" – from 1727 and a 1 note from 1827, the first in Britain to be marked on both sides so as to better deter forgers. It also has the earliest set of banking records in Britain – a ledger which belonged to Edward Backwell, a London goldsmith banker whose clients included Samuel Pepys.

For the archivists at RBS each day is different, with a rota system in operation ensuring they spend one day a week dedicated to helping visiting members of the public and researchers. They also help branches celebrating important anniversaries and update the bank's website, which is currently compiling a list of 100 items that together tell the story of RBS.

Yet, with any discussion of RBS, the elephant in the room is the bank's near-collapse in October 2008 under the regime of Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive. However, future historians wishing to untangle the events of the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression may be disappointed at what the archives reveal. For while the archive has the private diary of chief cashier John Campbell from 1745, it will not be keeping copies of the correspondence and e-mails of Sir Fred, as the following exchange makes clear.

The Scotsman: RBS had its own Darien moment and is now recovering from that. So your job in October 2008 was to ask what would historians want to know in 100 years' time?

Yeoman: "Yes. We do that not just with that but with every major event in the bank's history such as acquisitions; we try and document everything going forward. You do have to sit now and think – as a historian it's too early to tell, or how to actually interpret (documents and events], but I can say, 'That is important' and, 'That is important' and we need to have it documented. It is important to have the positives and the negatives documented. It is one continuous story, so we need to have both sides documented."

The Scotsman: "Would that include Fred Goodwin's e-mails?"

Yeoman: "They would not be classed as historic documents so we wouldn't go for that at all."

The Scotsman: "His correspondence would not be classed as 'historical'?"

Yeoman: "No."

Public relations officer: "I think this is stepping in the grounds of governance, rather than archive."

The Scotsman: "I would argue that for future historians these elements would be historical."

Yeoman: "I'm not saying we wouldn't document high-level boardroom and committee decisions. We would be looking at the board minutes and committee minutes, but if we start getting into the realms of every piece of correspondence, it would be just enormous. So you have to take it down to what are the high-level decisions … most of the material we will take in is high-level boardroom and committee minutes. We don't collect staff records anymore or customer records. We keep the ones we have got, which ended in 1900."

The Scotsman: "Boardroom minutes, but not correspondence and e-mail?"

Yeoman: "None of that material… 95 per of archives would go by that basis. We would say that we only keep 1 per cent of what is actually produced but it is the core 1 per cent."

Under RBS's current rules, minutes of board meeting can be accessed by the public after 30 years, while personal records are protected for 100 years. Yet the fact that even a century from now historians will be unable to piece together using e-mails and personal correspondence the fateful governance of Sir Fred Goodwin seems a waste.

The Darien scheme dealt a bitter blow to Scotland's independence – in effect ending it. So, given that RBS exists today due only to the generosity of the British taxpayer, does the bank's archivist think RBS has endured its own "Darien moment"?

Laura smiles: "I knew you were going to ask me that. One of the main reasons that Scotland becomes a major powerhouse in business and banking with strict procedures in the 18th century is primarily due to the lessons learned from the Darien adventure. So it's too early to tell what will happen now, but definitely, you can draw parallels from how that progressed."

• The Darien Scheme exhibition runs at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh until 31 August.

• Explore the RBS archive items further online: http://www.rbs.com/about-rbs/g2/heritage/rbs-history-100.ashx