The giant wall banner outside Bradford & Bingley’s West Yorkshire head office is a proclamation of faith in a secure and certain future.

“Forget gimmicks and overseas call centres. We offer our customers a good night’s sleep.”

The assurance sounded hollow yesterday morning, not least for the former employee of 30 years’ standing who arrived at one of the bank’s branches intent on withdrawing his life savings.

“I worked damned hard for that money. I just don’t want to see it go down the pan,” explained Marc Lawrence, who promptly crossed the road to deposit the money in the Skipton Building Society.

His gesture would have seemed almost treacherous once because the road in question was Main Street in Bingley, the small market town that gave birth to the former building society 157 years ago. It barely raised a local eyebrow yesterday because the earthquake had already happened.

Overnight, an institution that for generations had seemed to epitomise those deep-seamed Yorkshire values of thrift and prudence, had been subjected to a humiliating carve-up.

The bits that no one else wanted had been nationalised, the rest sold to Spain. And this was the bank that mocked call centres based in foreign countries.

Nature lagged behind the local mood yesterday. The 1,400 Bradford & Bingley staff employed at the company’s office complexes in Bingley and nearby Crossflatts arrived for work in bright sunlight.

By lunchtime driving squalls of rain - far more appropriate for the occasion - greeted those brave enough to venture outside for a drink or a sandwich.

Most remained taciturn, although one woman said that it had been the longest morning of her career. Everyone felt that their job was hanging by a thread.

In the town (pop 28,000) was uncertainty, sadness and anger. If you don’t work for the Bradford & Bingley, you almost certainly have a relative or a next-door neighbour who does.

You put your money in the Bradford & Bingley because that is what your parents did. One man estimated yesterday that 80 per cent of local mortgages had just been nationalised.

Bradford & Bingley celebrated the centenary of its annual sponsorship of the Bingley Show last month. It is also a leading financial supporter of local sports clubs, arts organisations and charities.

Among older residents, anger was directed very specificially at those responsible for the demutualisation in 2000, which turned Bradford & Bingley from a rock-solid building society into a risk-taking bank.

“They gambled all our money and the town’s heritage. They earned fortunes for themselves but b******* the business in the process. This could never have happened when it was a mutual,” one local said.

Bingley Building Society and the Bradford Equitable Building Society were both formed in 1851, two years before the creation - 12 miles down the Aire Valley - of the future Halifax Building Society. They offered a chance of home ownership to skilled workers in the region’s burgeoning textile mills and factories.

In Bingley today you can see some of the first properties built for them to live in; sturdy but attractive stone terraces with two-bay frontages, their front doors opening on to the pavement. Built with modest aspirations, but built to last.

The town is still dominated by the towering, blackened mill chimneys of its industrial past. Their only rival on the skyline is the concrete monstrosity built to serve as Bradford & Bingley’s head office after the Bradford and the Bingley merged in 1964.

The building had never won a place in local hearts, but for decades the twin bowlers of Mr Bradford and Mr Bingley offered a reassuring, deeply conservative symbol of permanence, safety and solidity.

So much for the power of advertising. The workforce at Bradford & Bingley now embarks on the journey started two weeks ago by the HBOS staff in nearby Halifax.

Twenty-first century Bingley may be a relatively affluent commuter town, but it stood diminished yesterday. The institution that bore its name had been brought to its knees. Here was a collective loss of pride. And for Yorkshire folk, that hurts deeply.

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