Mum tracks down lost bank account after 60 years to find it's worth hundreds of pounds

A woman discovered a 60-year-old bank account was worth hundreds thanks to added interest.

Carol Allison, from Edinburgh, was just six when she spent a year living with her gran and was taken along to the local bank branch every week to deposit a shilling into her account.

Over 60 years later she was shocked to find the bank book when cleaning up her house.

Carol took the book along to her local branch and was stunned to learn the £2.50 she had in the account has accrued 100 per cent interest and was now worth £250.

Now Carol is urging others to claim any old bank account they have lying around, reports Edinburgh Live.

The BBC report that when an account has not been used for 15 years, the UK’s banks and building societies send the money to the Reclaim Fund.

Carol was able to cash out the bank account (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

It has received more than £1.4bn from dormant accounts, and only £100,000 has been reclaimed.

Carol, who is now 74, lived in Manilla in the Philippines when she was young.

Every three years, she would travel home to Edinburgh with her mother, Anna Paton, and brother, Gerard.

They would spend a year at their granny’s house in Northumberland Street, Stockbridge. Her father, James Paton, would join them for part of the year.

During one of these trips, when she was aged six, her grandmother, Helen Ivory, would take them to deposit pocket money in the Trustee Savings Bank - which later became TSB. Carol paid in a shilling - now worth five pence - every week.

“I remember the big shiny wooden counter at the bank and granny introducing us to the teller,” she said.

“He would fill in the book by hand and then we would take our books back to granny’s again.

“It was a very grown up thing to do and on the way home she would stop in the bakers to buy us frosted cakes for our afternoon tea. We would never eat them in the street, we wouldn’t even think of that, we would wait for the afternoon tea.”

Carol was given the bank book when her grandmother died, aged 80, in 1969.

It was forgotten about until it was rediscovered - along with two other bank books - while she was tidying up in her house. The other books date back to the 1980s.