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5 Pounds Barry & Nephews
| Issuer | Barry & Nephews |
|---|---|
| Year | 1850-1859 |
| Type | Local banknote |
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| Obverse description | Central oval intaglio vignette engraved by Royston & Brown of London shows an ox wagon drawn by a team of oxen before a Cape Dutch building with a mountain in the background, captioned SWELLENDAM below. The issuer name BARRY & NEPHEWS arches in bold letterpress across the top, flanked by serial number panels at upper left and right, with large script £5 denomination numerals at each side. Below the vignette, a promise-to-pay text in mixed script and letterpress reads On Demand We Promise to pay the Bearer at our Office here, or at CAPE TOWN, the Sum of FIVE POUNDS Sterling, with place and partial date Swellendam, 185_ at lower centre; a decorative guilloche cartouche bearing the word Five appears at lower left. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | BARRY & NEPHEWS SWELLENDAM On Demand We Promise to pay the Bearer at our Office here, or at CAPE TOWN, the Sum of FIVE POUNDS Sterling. Swellendam, 185 Five Royston & Brown, London HARD STEEL PLATE |
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| Comments |
Barry & Nephews was a Hobart-based merchant house, and this note belongs to a generation of pre-banking-reform private issues that circulated in Van Diemen's Land before the colonial banking sector consolidated enough to crowd out trader-issued paper. Merchant notes like this one operated on the issuer's commercial reputation alone — no charter, no government backing, no reserve requirement.
Royston & Brown produced a number of antipodean private issues from London during this period, working from engraved plates shipped or carried to the colony for local signing and issue. The physical distance between printer and issuer created obvious opportunities for fraud, and colonial courts dealt with several such cases in the 1850s.