Forty years ago, in December 1984, the last one-pound note was printed. It ceased to be legal tender in March 1988. It seemed as though an old and venerable item had been stripped from our culture. We could, for example, look back to May 1828, when a petition was announced, signed by ‘a numerous body of the most opulent and respectable inhabitants of Cheltenham’, against a bill to withdraw the one-pound note from circulation. A century and a half later, in Putney in February 1978, the Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher, held up a pound note and, to demonstrate how badly the government had allowed its value to fall, cut it in half with a pair of scissors. The Cheltenham petitioners failed. The pound note they supported had been introduced in 1797. It was the consequence of a diminishing gold supply, caused by war with revolutionary France, but was...
I’m afraid this isn’t one of our four free articles available in full, which are set out in the first two rows of the ‘Magazine’ page.
Please click here to find them.
To buy a digital version of this issue for just £2.99, click here
