RARE BANK NOTES.

Shannon News, 18 September 1925, Page 4

RARE BANK NOTES.

COLLECTION OF A LONDON MAN. Heavy insurances have recently been taken out in London to safeguard the most astonishing collection of its kind in the world. It consists of 27,000 historic banknotes, the property of a business man whose office is near Temple Bar The face value of the notes is no less than £600,000,000,000. What the , aJctual value is no one can tell, for a similar collection has never come into any auction room.

A remarkable fact aobut th« collection is that only six people a part from th 0 collector, have ever seen it. "My grandfather began the collection," said Mr. C. Catling, the owner of the notes, to a Daily Express representative. "My father continued it, and I have thrown myself into the •work as a hobby. I regarded it as a private matter until I happened to show the collection to a friend, who is a solicitor.

"He at once impressed on me the neied of insuring the collection, a point Avhich had never occured to me. He also brought the manager to a city bank to see my notes. "The bank manager was so exeited that he stayed until midnight going through the albums,. He told me that none of the great banks of the world possessed anything like the rare specimens which I have, and that, to a banker, the collection was beyond price." Hundreds of the specimens in Mr. Catling's collection are unmatched anywhere. He has,, for example, n»tes issued in China 600 years ago, and printed on paper made of mulberry leaves. There is a whole series of forged bank of England notes, including a note of the kind for making which two women were executed at Newgate in the reign of George 111

The earliest British note is one for £IOO, issued by the Bank of England 1613.

There are hundreds of the not§s issued by English private banks of Georgian days, whose names have long been forgotten. The collection holds a note issued by every bank which has failed in England. American collectors woul gasp with envy to see the United States notes held by this London business man. There are notes of the time when America was still a British possession, and a wonderful series of currency used during the American Civil War, bearing the portraits and signatures of Northern and Southern generals.

War notes are, indeed, a feature of the collection, ranging from those printed during the French Revolution to samples of every town and national note issued in Germany, Austria, and France during the. Great War. Some of the German war notes are engraved on leather, white kid, silk, linen and many of them bear caricatures of John Bull. Mr Catling has also 1400 different kinds of notes or token given in payment for work done by the prisoners in the war camps of Germany and France. There is one note which was engraved in the German battleship Hindenburg and used for paying the crew. The Boer War is represented by the Mafeking siege notes.