Curious Bank Notes of the World

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 123, 27 May 1933, Page 18

Curious Bank Notes of the World

The recently-discovered specimens of emergency bank notes issued by General Gordon nearly half a century ago, when the Mahdi's forces outside Berber seized Ms troops' pay, are to be offered for sale in London in aid of the Gordon memorial appeal fund, and it is expected that competition will be keen. The notes, writes a correspondent in the " Manchester Guardian," were discovered in the archives of the Caisse de la Dctte, in Cairo, and courteously given to the Governor-General of the Sudan. They have been sent to the United Services Museum, where they are to be sold. Old bank notes of yesteryear are in stronger demand than prints or pictures. Their discovery and accumulation have proved an absorbing hobby for sundry little-known connoisseurs. The Catling (or Avonmore) collection, for instance, comprising 27,000 specimens and constituting the most wonderful hoard of its kind in the world, was declared a few years ago by its owner, Mr. F. Catling, to have been seen by only six or seven persons since his grandfather began to make it. The hoard was added to by his father and himself. The face value of the Catling notes is a matter of some £000,000,000. They are contained in about a huu-' dred volumes. The oldest were current in China more than 500 years ago; they are made of mulberry leaf paper. Some of the other treasures include the first Exchequer note of which there is any record in England, dated 1697, and the earliest English bank note. It is for £100, and was issued in 1713. An English "fiver," of IS2I is printed in colours. A series of forged Bank of England notes includes one of an issue whose producers, a couple of women, were hanged at Newgate in George Ill's reign. A melancholy series is that of a note from every British bank known to have failed. Hundreds of notes were issued in Georgian days by private banks, the very names of which have long since been forgotten. One note is a relic of rare triumph of an alleged forger. Thomaa Ransom was tried at the Old Bailey about a century ago on a charge of manufacturing it. Acquitted—the note was found to be genuine—ho obtained compensation of £100 from the Bank of England. Bansorn appears to have _ had quite modern ideas about capitalising his jlight, to judge from a steel , ca-

graving by himself to be found in the Catling collection. Dedicated, "without permission, to the. Governor and Company of the Threadneedle Street Paper Establishment," it depicts him sitting in his cell in Cold Bath fields prison, awaiting trial. There is a flue representation of early American bank notes of colonial times, and of Civil .War emergency notes. Mafeking siege notes are represented, and there is a, remarkable series of beautifully-designed notes made of silk and linen, kid, aluminium, and leather, issued in Germany during and after the Groat War. The silken notes are daintily embroidered at the edges! There are some 1400 different notes used to pay prisoners of war in France and Germany, and an emergency bank note engraved in the battleship Hindenburg for use in paying the crew. The world's chief collection of purely British bank notes, however, is that in the archives of the Institute of Bankers in London. Some of the oldest are notes for 5s and 2s 6d issued by the Birmingham Workhouse, and some others of low denominations issued by a Wcdnesbury manufacturer, "redeemable in pounds of rod iron." t There are notes from the earliest £1 and £,5 issues of the Bank of England,- a thir-teen-pence Irish (Is in England) issued in 1804 by enterprising Denis O'JTlyn, a grocer of Cork; and a "fiver" issued in 1794 by the Corporation of Liverpool. It was not until 1826 that jointstock banking was allowed. Hundreds of banks, which appeared all over the country during the Napoleonic wars, went smash, their notes still coming to light now and then in old archives. The preservation in a bank at South-end-ou-Sea of one of the only three one-guinea notes known to be in existence is reported. Issued by a bank in Yorkshire on April 18, 1815, it was found in an old family Bible at Newcastle. (That bank was closed in the following year for over-generosity in the issue of paper money.) The North of England has an interesting hoard of old paper currency in the Blackhouso collection at Leeds City Museum; it includes the amusing Fort Montague notes for "Five half-pen-nies." It was in Leeds that a tramp dropped into tho Pineapplo Inn and tendered in exchange for a pint of beer a Woodmancote, Gloucestershire, bank's note for "twopence." It was numbered D.320, so presumably the issue had been considerable. Tho dato was 1795.