This admirable advice was not lost.  One institution after another embraced the plan, and preliminary savings banks were, shortly established in connection with the principal mechanics’ institutes throughout Yorkshire.  Those established at Huddersfield, Halifax, Bradford, Leeds, and York, were exceedingly successful.  The Penny Banks established at Halifax consisted of a central bank and seven subordinate branches.  The number of members, and the average amount of the sums deposited with them, continued to increase from year to year.  Fourteen Penny Banks were established at Bradford; and after the depositors had formed the habit of saving in the smaller banks, they transferred them in bulk to the ordinary Savings Bank.

Thirty-six Penny Banks were established in and around Glasgow.  The committee, in their Report, stated they were calculated “to check that reckless expenditure of little sums which so often leads to a confirmed habit of wastefulness and improvidence;” and they urged the support of the Penny Banks as the best means of extending the usefulness of the savings banks.  The Penny Bank established at the small country town of Farnham is estimated to have contributed within a few years a hundred and fifty regular depositors to the savings bank of the same place.  The fact that as large a proportion as two-thirds of the whole amount deposited is drawn out within the year, shows that Penny Banks are principally used as places of safe deposit for very small sums of money, until they are wanted for some special object, such as rent, clothes, furniture, the doctor’s bill, and such-like purposes.

Thus the Penny Bank is emphatically the poor man’s purse.  The great mass of the deposits are paid in sums not exceeding sixpence, and the average of the whole does not exceed a shilling.  The depositors consist of the very humblest members of the working class, and by far the greatest number of them have never before been accustomed to lay by any portion of their earnings.  The Rev. Mr. Clarke, of Derby, who took an active interest in the extension of these useful institutions, has stated that one-tenth of the whole amount received by the Derby Penny Bank was deposited in copper money, and a large portion of the remainder in threepenny and fourpenny pieces.

It is clear, therefore, that the Penny Bank reaches a class of persons of very small means, whose ability to save is much less than that of the highly-paid workman, and who, if the money were left in their pockets, would in most cases spend it in the nearest public-house.  Hence, when a Penny Bank was established at Putney, and the deposits were added up at the end of the first year, a brewer, who was on the committee, made the remark, “Well, that represents thirty thousand pints of beer not drunk.”

At one of the Penny Banks in Yorkshire, an old man in receipt of parish outdoor relief was found using the Penny Bank as a place of deposit for his pennies until he had accumulated enough to buy a coat.  Others save, to buy an eight-day clock, or a musical instrument, or for a railway trip.