1 Pound

The African Banking Corporation was a British colonial bank incorporated in London in 1891 — which creates an immediate puzzle for any note dated 1890. The most likely explanation is that the date refers to the authorized series rather than the actual issue date, a practice Bradbury Wilkinson used when engraving plate dates ahead of a bank's formal operations. The ABC operated primarily in South Africa and Rhodesia, eventually absorbed into the Standard Bank in 1920.

Bradbury Wilkinson's intaglio work on colonial bank notes from this period is consistently high quality, but surviving ABC issues are genuinely rare — the bank's relatively short independent existence meant small print runs and limited redemption infrastructure.