LOSS OF BANK-NOTES

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 20826, 3 July 1942, Page 2

LOSS OF BANK-NOTES

£384 PUT ON FIRE WOMAN SEEKS REDRESS (P.R.) WELLINGTON, this day. The story of a woman’s partially successful effort to recover the value of a roll of Reserve Bank notes accidentally destroyed by fire was heard when the House of Representatives endorsed a recommendation of the Public Petitions Committee that the ’“ Government give most favourable consideration to a petition by Mrs. Byrde Myra Sinclair, a widow, of Wellington, seeking compensation for the toss by fire of Reserve Bank of New Zealand notes to the value of £207. These notes were part cf a roll which was put into a range by the petitioner’s daughter when she was living in Feilding. Mr. R. McKeen (Lab., Wellington South) related the events leading up to the petition. In September, 1140. because it was necessary for her to enter a hospital, petitioner handed to her daughter and her ’ate husband a wallet containing £384 in Reserve Bank notes for safe custody. The following month, when the petitioner’s husband and daughter were packing to go to another address in Feilding, the daughter took the wallet out of a drawer and placed it in a gramophone record cover. Ashes Retrieved

Later the same day the daughter, by mistake, put the gramophone record cover into the range and it was there for some time before she remembered that it contained the wallet. By .then the wallet had been burned completely through and the outside notes of the roll' were burned. The ashes were retrieved and put in water. Subsequently, the daughter took the notes .to the Reserve' Bank. It. was found that notes totalling £177 could be •identified by number and notes totalling £177 could be identified as Reserve Bank notes, but the numbers were either completely or in part destroyed. The balance of the notes, totalling £3O. had been reduced to unrecognisable ashes. Mr. McKeen said that the Reserve Bank treated the position well and paid opt £177 ip respect of the notes, the numbers of which were identifiable, and explained that it could not pay out on any notes which could not be identified by number, as they were required to be cancelled or written off the books in which a record was kept of the notes issued The notes represented the life sayings, of the petitioner, whose husband had since died. The petitioner asked for authority to be given to' the bank to pay her £207, being the equivalent value of the notes whose number were affected by the fire, and the House endorsed the committee’s approval of this course.