5 Pounds

Gibraltar's £5 notes of this long series span an extraordinary range of political history — from colonial interwar routine through the 1967 sovereignty referendum, in which 99.6% of Gibraltarians voted to remain under British rule rather than pass to Spain. The same basic design persisted through all of it, printed by Waterlow & Sons in London, a firm whose own history ended in scandal: in 1925, just before this series began, Waterlow had been defrauded by Artur Virgílio Alves Reis in the Portuguese banknote affair, one of the most audacious counterfeiting schemes of the twentieth century.

The series ran across multiple reign changes, requiring successive portrait updates as monarchs changed.