Ceylon's P#69 sits in an awkward transitional moment: the island was still Ceylon — the republic and the Banque name change to Sri Lanka came only in 1972 — but the Central Bank had been quietly consolidating the security printing relationship with Bradbury Wilkinson that had defined the series since the early independence issues. Bradbury Wilkinson's New Malden facility was at this point one of the more technically conservative banknote printers in Britain, favoring intaglio-heavy work with restrained color palettes.
The single watermark is the only overt security feature — no security thread, no fluorescent elements — which was already becoming thin cover against increasingly sophisticated regional counterfeiting operations by the late 1960s.
Ceylon's P#69 sits in an awkward transitional moment: the island was still Ceylon — the republic and the Banque name change to Sri Lanka came only in 1972 — but the Central Bank had been quietly consolidating the security printing relationship with Bradbury Wilkinson that had defined the series since the early independence issues. Bradbury Wilkinson's New Malden facility was at this point one of the more technically conservative banknote printers in Britain, favoring intaglio-heavy work with restrained color palettes.
The single watermark is the only overt security feature — no security thread, no fluorescent elements — which was already becoming thin cover against increasingly sophisticated regional counterfeiting operations by the late 1960s.