Bank notes

Coin dealership Coincraft has welcomed four new members of staff and launched a new website.

Plastic money has been a bone of contention recently thanks to the strange revelation that the new UK £5 notes include animal fat. But one day the polymer notes will surely be as normal and accepted as the existing paper examples, assuming physical money has not all but disappeared anyway by then.

The excitement around the new polymer fivers, which were launched by the Bank of England last month, helped boost interest in new and old £5 notes for philatelic and numismatic specialists Spink.

Auction specialists in Australia have found a rare Ming Dynasty banknote hidden within a Chinese wooden sculpture. The discovery came at Mossgreen as they were cataloguing the extensive collection of Raphy Star – one of the most important collections of Asian art ever to be offered in the country.

The man himself may have disappeared in 1974 but a series of cheques showing Lord Lucan’s spiralling gambling debts have now emerged and will be offered at auction later this month.

The highest denomination note issued by the Bank of England, this £1000 banknote is a rare survivor of a limited run that was cut short as the Nazis tried to destabilise the British economy.

The big question at David Lay’s auctioneers in Penzance next week: Are these bonds worth a few hundred pounds or up to £3.6m each?

It has a face value of ten shillings but a price tag of Aus$3.5m (£2.3m) at Coinworks, the specialist dealers and auctioneers of Melbourne.

Recent years have seen a massive increase in the offerings and prices realised by banknotes.

AFTER 2010 saw the London market grow by a third it would have been a bold commentator to predict a further substantial rise in 2011. Nonetheless, coins and medals auctions in the capital saw totals rise by almost a quarter on the previous year.

FROM 30 June, the £20 banknote carrying the portrait of composer Sir Edward Elgar is to be finally withdrawn from circulation.

FROM May 1913, the first distinctive Commonwealth of Australia banknotes were issued. They were controversial in that no portrait of the reigning monarch, George V, was included in the design.

MORE than a year after his county court victory against Royal Mail, coins and banknotes dealer Bruce Goulborn is taking them to court again.

Today Robert Baden-Powell is best known as the founder of the Boy Scout movement in 1908, but in the Edwardian era his name was synonymous with the Boer War, and specifically the 217 wretched days from October 1899 to May 1900.

A Bank of England £1m Treasury note sold at Spink on October 1 for £68,000.

Spink are to offer a £1m Treasury Note. Dated London 30 August 1948, and printed with the red serial number 000008, it is one of only two surviving examples from the nine thought to have been printed in connection with the Marshall Plan.

This $1000 Straits Settlement bill was described by Spink specialist Barnaby Faull as “the holy grail of Asian Pacific banknotes” after it had sold for Sin$420,000 (£180,000) plus buyer’s premium in Singapore on July 5.