If one man saves sixpence a week, it would take him thirty-one weeks to get a One Pound War Certificate. But if thirty-one people each save sixpence a week, they can buy a Certificate at once and keep on buying one every week. Thus their savings begin to earn interest immediately. Thus every War Savings Association became a co-operative saving and investment syndicate--a pool of profit.
How are the Certificates distributed? The usual procedure is to draw lots. In a small Association no member is ordinarily permitted to win more than one Certificate in a period of thirty-one weeks, except by special arrangement. Each Association, however, can make its own allotment rules. The value of winning a Certificate the first week is that the winner's 15/6 will have grown to one pound in four years and a half instead of five. This is broadly the financial advantage gained by being a member of an Association, although the larger reason is that it is more or less compulsory as well as co-operative saving.
Britain is buzzing with these War Savings Associations. You find them in the mobilisation camps, on the training ships, on the grim grey fighters of the Grand Fleet, even in the trenches up against the battle line. The London telephone girls have their own organisation: sales forces of large commercial houses are grouped in thrift units: there are saving battalions in most of the munition works, and so it goes. In many of the big mercantile establishments that have Associations, the weekly drawings of Certificates with all their elements of chance and profits are exciting events.
Many Britishers shy at co-operation. For example, they like to save "on their own." To meet this desire, the War Savings Committee devised an individual saving and investment plan which begins with a penny, that is two cents. Any person can go to the Treasurer of a War Savings Association and get a blank stamp book. Each penny that he deposits is marked with a lead pencil cross in a blank square. When six of these marks are recorded, a sixpenny stamp is pasted on the blank space. As soon as the book contains thirty-one stamps it is exchanged for a War Savings Certificate.
Still another plan has been devised to meet requirements of people who do not care to affiliate with the War Savings Associations. Any post office will issue a stamp book in which ordinary sixpenny postage stamps can be pasted. When thirty-one have been affixed they may be exchanged at the post office for a pound Savings Certificate. These books have this striking inscription on their cover: "Save your Silver and it will turn into Gold! 15/6 now means a sovereign five years hence."