The Warwick and Warwickshire Benefit Building Society held its first meeting in November 1853 and its rules were approved in February 1854.
In 1875 the society discovered that the Secretary had not paid over all the money he had received and payments to members were temporarily suspended.
No branches had been opened and the limited outreach of the society was illustrated by the instructions to the new secretary in 1920: to attend Subscription Meetings at Warwick, Leamington Spa and Stratford-upon-Avon each fortnight and Banbury and Kenilworth each fourth week.
In 1866 Dr Frederick Temple, headmaster of Rugby School and later Archbishop of Canterbury, chaired a public meeting to consider establishing a Freehold Land Society.
However, in the last two years of its independent existence, the society experienced financial irregularities in succession at Banbury, Stratford and Rugby involving police and prosecutions.
[1] The Rugby and Warwick Society started its merged life in 1967; in 1969 it decided to invest in branches in six nearby towns.
Six months after the acquisition of the Oxford, the enlarged Rugby and Warwick merged with the Walsall Building Society.
[1] Walsall Mutual Benefit Society held its first meeting in 1863 but little is known of its early history other than it was very small and stayed that way for a century.
[2] In 1993 there was an abortive attempt to sell the Society to the recently formed Bank of Edinburgh.
By then, the Heart of England had become the 25th largest society with 230,000 savers and a billion pounds of assets.