Do any of you know how long the Royal Mail has been offering savings account-style services? [am I right that they do? What do you call those accounts?]
I'm writing a WWII novel, by the bye, which is my excuse for posting this question here. 
They have had them since the 19th Century. At the time of the war they would have been called Post Office Savings Accounts. Today they are called National Savings Accounts.
I am too young to remember personally but I think at the time only very well to do people went into real banks. Riff Raff like my family only had post office accounts until the 1960s.
There were some war orphans from London who were living with families at the Horham air base. The airmen set up savings accounts for them and regularly passed the hat to newcomers to add to their little hope chests.
I'm working on the assumption those would have been post office accounts.
Thanks for the reply. 
I think most primary schools used to run a savings scheme. I remember we used to buy sixpenny savings stamps with a picture of Princess Anne and half-crown with Prince Charles, and stick them on cards (like trading stamps).
Then I guess the full cards got deposited in a regular post office savings account -- I don't quite remember! My experience would have been late 40s-early 50s.
What a cool reminiscence. Thanks for sharing that. It's a detail I hadn't heard before.
Do you remember ration cards at all?
There used to be an outfit all by itself called the Trustee Savings Bank, and you had a pass book. In his first two years at grammar school Creature had a book and every Monday he used to drop the book in an envelope with a few shillings in it into a special box that the school had on the way in to morning assembly.
It was never quite clear who owned the TSB, but in the end the Govt decided that they owned it and privatised it, and later on it ended up with Lloyds Bank. So these children could all have had TSB accounts.
Here the Wiki link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustee_Savings_Bank
I don't remember ration cards as I am much too young 
but
My parents and grandparents told me all about it ad nausem. It was the answer to every whinge. I don't like this foodstuff/clothing item , you would have been glad of it in the war my girl etc etc
You got a little card and stamps for food you were allowed to buy and had to use a stamp to get food in shops and each person got in a week what todays American would polish off for a breakfast at a greasy cafe.
However...
It was unfair because people who could get to the country could get food direct from the farms without using the ration cards , and people in the towns could buy from the blackmarket dealers if they had the money. The ration cards only applied to legal purchases from real shops, as is always the case with attempts at state control. Most poor people had good coping skills though because if you have lived your life with the rationing of poverty the rationing of war was a piece of cake. Food is food.
My mummy says sweets were the thing they really missed most.
Clothes were also rationed and people had to sew their own and wear a lot of second hand and worn out stuff. Again , the poor hardly noticed there was a war on that score.
More interesting information which I didn't know til now, and a useful link. Thanks MidgeKitty!
Furbs, my mom had a whole section of her recipe box devoted to baking with no eggs, which she had for when there was rationing. And she had a story wherein my aunt had shipped all her maternity clothes from USA transatlantic to my mom. And the customs people tried to charge her a ginormous import tax, and my mom being hugely pregnant and therefore more emotional than usual, burst into tears. And then the head of the customs department came down from his high office and told her, "there, there, not a problem, there's no import tax on used clothes, none at all." So there was a happy ending, which was my brother being born, heh. 