THE BANK-NOTE CATACOMBS.

Southland Times, Issue 930, 8 April 1868, Page 3

THE BANK-NOTE CATACOMBS.

The library of cancelled notes covers an enormous area under the offices of the Bank of England. These catacombs are filled with wooden racks, in which are placed more than 16,000 deal boxes of about Ift. in height and breadth, and 18in. iri length. In these boxes or coffins lie, carefully packed, bundles of assorted notes, and on the outside are painted certain letters and figures, which, to the officers of these gloomy abodes, tell of the date and rank of the deceased. These notes are. kept, for seven years, and so complete is the arrangement that any single note, the date and number of which may be known, can be produced in five minutes by. the person in charge of this department. The nominal value of these buried notes at the present time exceeds •£3,ooo,ooo,ooo— the actual number of notes being 100,000,000. Strange^and curious instances of the longevity of some of these flimsy bank-notes are continually occurring, and their histories, if one could trace them, would afford abundant materials for romance. -jBl-notes, which have long since passed away from circulation on this side ofthe Tweed, and which are now mainly associated in the minds of Englishmen with forgery aiid capital punishment, present themselves for recognition and payment at the average of about two per month. During the thirty years preceding that pf the abolition of capital punishment for forgery, there were not less than 1816 convictions for this crime, the majority of orgeries being of £1 notes ; and of the persons so convicted, 627 were hung in various parts of the.! country. A few weeks since a £2 note, a kind of which a very small number were printed at the commencement of the present century, presented itself to claim its long-promised two soyeHgnsYorgdld. Some are worn to almost undistingishable rags — the amount of the note has disappeared, but the date and signature affords the clue to its identification in the bank ledgers. The eldest note in the possession of the Bank of England is one of 1798. A £25 note, of more than a century old, was presented a short time since, when it was calculated compound interest on its amount, sup. posing it to have been recoverable, would have been over £6000 !