50 Pounds Sterling 2021, Kingdom of Great Britain
| no number in katalog | - |
| Years of issue: | 23.06.2021 |
| Edition: | |
| Signatures: | Chief Cashier: Sarah John |
| Serie: | England |
| Specimen of: | 2019 |
| Material: | Polymer |
| Size (mm): | 146 х 77 |
| Printer: | Bank of England print works, Loughton (Debden), Essex, UK |
* All pictures marked 
are increased partially by magnifying glass, the remaining open in full size by clicking on the image.
** The word "Specimen" is present only on some of electronic pictures, in accordance with banknote images publication rules of appropriate banks.
Description
Watermark:
Her majesty The Queen Elizabeth II. A portrait of the Queen is printed on the window with "£50 Bank of England" printed twice around the edge.
Look at the metallic image over the main window. Check the foil is gold and green on the front of the note and silver on the back. Within the two gold foil squares on the front of the note, the image changes between '50' and a '£' symbol when the note is tilted.
On the front of the note, above the see-through window, is a silver foil patch containing an image of the coronation crown which appears 3D. When the note is tilted a multi-coloured rainbow effect can be seen.
At the bottom - Tilt the note from side to side. Check the words change between 'Fifty' and 'Pounds'.
Nearby is the Logo of Bank of England - sitted Britania.
Avers:
HM The Queen Elizabeth II.
In preparation for the "E Series" of notes, issued by the Bank of England, photographs of The Queen were especially commissioned by the Bank. The photographs were taken by Don Ford in 1985-1986, one of the Bank’s technical photographers, under the direction of Roger Withington. Mr. Withington designed the notes of the "E Series" and prepared the engraving of the Queen, which appeared on this series of notes, from one of the photographs taken by Mr. Ford. The portrait shows Queen Elizabeth wearing Queen Mary’s "Girls of Great Britain and Ireland" Tiara, Queen Alexandra’s cluster earrings and, although difficult to identify, Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee necklace.
The engraving on banknote is, probably, made after this photo by Don Ford, 1985-1986.
Queen Mary received this tiara as a wedding gift in 1893, from a committee representing "the girls of Great Britain and Ireland". The funds for the purchase of the tiara were raised by a committee, formed by Lady Eve Greville. The tiara was purchased from Garrard, the London jeweler.
It featured pearls on top and a detachable base; Mary removed the pearls. She gave it to her granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth, as a wedding present in 1947. The Queen originally wore it without the base before reuniting the pieces in 1969.
Said to be light and easy to wear, the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland Tiara seems to be the Queen's favorite - she's said to call it "Granny's tiara", and it is her most frequently worn diadem.
The "Girls of Great Britain and Ireland" Tiara can be worn with or without a bandeau base and, in this portrait, the tiara is set into its base. (Portrait of Dorothy Wilding, 1952, shows the Tiara being worn without the base). (From her Majesty's jewel vault)
To mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, a committee of ladies was formed to raise money for a commemorative statue of Victoria’s late husband Prince Albert. The committee’s fundraising was quite successful, and they ended up raising far more than was required for the statue. An agreement was formed with the Queen that the excess should go to the St. Katherine’s Fund for Nurses. At the same time, some members of the committee decided that a portion of the funds should be used to purchase a necklace for the Queen - and this was also approved by Her Majesty.
The trouble was, the committee did not agree on the necklace. Some felt it would be wrong to spend the funds which had been previously devoted to charity on something else. Much discussion and debate ensued, as is described in depth in Hugh Roberts’ book The Queen’s Diamonds. (My favorite tidbit: Queen Victoria, angry that she wouldn’t get her promised necklace, shot down the prospect of a diamond badge commemorating the nursing fund by declaring she would “at once exchange it for another jewel”.
In the end, a compromise was reached and this necklace, made for £5000 (far less than the necklace originally proposed) from gold, diamonds, and pearls by Carrington & Co. was presented to Queen Victoria in 1888. It features a central quatrefoil diamond motif with a large pearl in the middle, topped by a crown and underlined with a drop pearl. The next four links in either direction are graduated trefoil motifs; the central piece and the six largest trefoils can also be worn as brooches.
She is also wearing Queen Alexandra’s Cluster Earrings. The wedding gift from the future King Edward VII to his bride, Alexandra of Denmark. Also known as Queen Alexandra's Cluster Earrings, these two button earrings have large pearls surrounded by diamonds - 10 larger stones each plus smaller filler stones to create a full diamond ring. Like the brooch, these passed to the Queen via Queen Mary. They're now worn primarily at evening functions.
On patterned background is a building of Bank of England. Above the building are 4 coat of arms - left to right - England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland (North).
The history of the Bank is naturally one of interest, but also of continuing relevance to the Bank today. Events and circumstances over the past three hundred or so years have shaped and influenced the role and responsibilities of the Bank. They have moulded the culture and traditions, as well as the expertise, of the Bank which are relevant to its reputation and effectiveness as a central bank in the early years of the XXI century. At the same time, much of the history of the Bank runs parallel to the economic and financial history, and often the political history, of the United Kingdom more generally.
For the first forty years of its life the Bank rented premises to carry on its business, firstly, in the hall of the Mercers' Company in Cheapside and moving in January 1695 to the larger premises of the Grocers' Company in Princes Street. In 1734 it moved to purpose-built premises in Threadneedle Street which were approximately 80 feet wide (25m.) and 300 feet (90m.) long. Over the next one hundred years the site was gradually extended until by 1828 the current outline was achieved.
The Bank has been served by a distinguished line of architects:
1732-1734 George Sampson's Bank of England
Scant details of George Sampson have survived. Even his dates are not known for certain. He appears to have held the post of Clerk of Works at the Tower of London and Somerset House before becoming Surveyor to the Bank. His only major work is the 1734 Bank, arguably the first purpose-built bank in the British Isles. He is thought to have died in 1764.
1765-1788 Sir Robert Taylor's Bank of England.
A sculptor who turned to architecture later in life, he extended the Threadneedle street façade of the Bank firstly eastwards and, after the demolition of the church of St Christopher-le-Stocks in 1781, westwards. In order to avoid piercing the outer walls with openings for light he introduced top-lighting to his new banking halls which were dominated by his centrally-placed Rotunda.
1788-1833 Sir John Soane's Bank of England.
Sir John Soane was one of England's greatest architects. His appointment in October 1788 as "Architect and Surveyor" to the Bank was the most important of his distinguished career. The Bank was his main pre-occupation for the ensuing 45 years until his retirement in 1833 when he described it as "...a situation which has long been the pride and boast of my life". He extended the Bank's site and eventually enclosed it in 1828 with a windowless wall.'
The structure of "Soane's Bank of England" remained more or less untouched until it was demolished and a new building erected by the architect Herbert Baker between 1925-1939.
1833-1855 Professor C R Cockerell.
1855-1883 P C Hardwick.
1883-1899 Sir Arthur Blomfield.
1899-1919 A C Blomfield.
1925-1939 Sir Herbert Baker's Bank of EnglandBetween 1925 and 1939 he demolished what had become known as 'The Old Bank' or "Soane's Bank" (then regarded as one of London's architectural gems) and built a new headquarters for the Bank on the same 3 ½ acre Theadneedle Street site. The "Old Bank" had been in the main no more than three storeys high; Baker's new building rose seven storeys above ground and dropped three below to accommodate the extra staff required to tackle the Bank's rapidly increasing volume of work and responsibilities. (Bank of England)
The Bank Nun.
On November 2nd 1811, Philip Whitehead, "a man of genteel appearance" who had been employed in the Cashier’s Office at the Bank of England, was brought to the dock of the Old Bailey, charged with forgery. Found guilty, he was sentenced to death and was duly hanged in early 1812.
News of his crime and execution was, however, kept from his devoted sister, Sarah Whitehead, who was removed by Philip’s friends to a house in Wine Office Court, off Fleet Street. But one day, Sarah turned up at the Bank of England to enquire of her brother’s whereabouts, and an unthinking clerk promptly blurted out the story of Philip’s crime and ignominious death.
The shock of the discovery turned the poor woman’s mind and thereafter she took to turning up at the Bank everyday asking after her brother in the belief that he still worked there. She became known as the “Bank Nun” on account of her peculiar attire that consisted of a long black dress and a black crepe veil worn over her face and head. The city merchants took pity on her and never let her pass “without extending their assistance,” whilst the Directors and clerks of the Bank of England saw to it that she was frequently provided with “sums of money in compliment of her misfortune.”
But she became convinced that the Bank governors were keeping an immense fortune from her and this led to her frequently hurling insults at them during business hours. On one occasion Baron Rothschild was going about his business at the Stock Exchange when she suddenly appeared and called him a “villain and a robber” telling him that he had defrauded her of her fortune and demanding the £2,000 he owed her. He responded by taking half a crown from his waistcoat pocket, handing it to her and telling her as he did so “There, then, take that and don’t bother me now; I’ll give you the other half tomorrow.” Accepting the money, she thanked him and went away.
By 1818 the Bank governors had grown tired of her daily disturbances and so gave her a sum of money on condition she agreed never to return to the bank again. In life she kept that contract, but in death her wraith has broken it many times. More than one late night wanderer, wending their weary way home along Threadneedle Street has been surprised by her ghostly figure appearing before them and, with downcast eyes enquiring sadly, though politely, “have you seen my brother?” (Haunted historic buildings)
In lower left corner is a Bank seal with sitting Britannia (as logo of Bank of England).
Denominations in numerals are in top corners and lower right. In center in words. Many denominations in numerals are in lower right corner.
Revers:
Lower, under the Alan Turing's portrait is a quote: "This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be.", it was given in an interview to "The Times" newspaper on 11 June 1949.
Above the qoute is Turing’s signature from the visitor’s book at Bletchley Park in 1947, where he worked during WWII.
Centered is a photo of Turing taken in 1951 by "Elliott&Fry", which is part of the Photographs Collection at the National Portrait Gallery.
Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
Born in Maida Vale, London, Turing was raised in southern England. He graduated at King's College, Cambridge, with a degree in mathematics. Whilst he was a fellow at Cambridge, he published a proof demonstrating that some purely mathematical yes–no questions can never be answered by computation and defined a Turing machine, and went on to prove the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable. In 1938, he obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University. During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here, he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Axis powers in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic.
After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948, Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Machine Laboratory, at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s. Despite these accomplishments, he was never fully recognised in his home country during his lifetime because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act.
Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts. He accepted chemical castration treatment, with DES, as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as a suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.
In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated". Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous pardon in 2013. The "Alan Turing law" is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. Turing has an extensive legacy with statues of him and many things named after him, including an annual award for computer science innovations. He appears on the current Bank of England £50 note, which was released to coincide with his birthday. A 2019 BBC series, as voted by the audience, named him the greatest person of the XX century. 
A metallic, red foil patch contains the letters 'AT'. You will find this on the back of the note, directly behind the silver crown on the front of the note.
On background are a table and mathematical formulae from Turing’s seminal 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. This paper is widely recognised as being foundational for computer science. It sought to establish whether there could be a definitive method by which any theorem could be assessed as provable or not using a universal machine. It introduced the concept of a Turing machine as a thought experiment of how computers could operate. (numismag.com)
On background is, although,
The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) Pilot Machine which was developed at the National Physical Laboratory as the trial model of Turing’s pioneering ACE design. The ACE was one of the first electronic stored-program digital computers.
The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was a British early electronic serial stored-program computer designed by Alan Turing. It was based on the earlier Pilot ACE. It led to the MOSAIC computer, the Bendix G-15, and other computers.
The project was managed by John R. Womersley, superintendent of the Mathematics Division of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). The use of the word Engine was in homage to Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. Turing's technical design Proposed Electronic Calculator was the product of his theoretical work in 1936 "On Computable Numbers" and his wartime experience at Bletchley Park where the Colossus computers had been successful in breaking German military codes. In his 1936 paper, Turing described his idea as a "universal computing machine", but it is now known as the Universal Turing machine.
Turing was sought by Womersley to work in the NPL on the ACE project; he accepted and began work on 1 October 1945 and by the end of the year he completed his outline of his 'Proposed electronic calculator', which was the first reasonably complete design of a stored-program computer and, apart from being on a much larger scale than the final working machine, anticipated the final realisation in most important respects. However, because of the strict and long-lasting secrecy around the Bletchley Park work, he was prohibited (because of the Official Secrets Act) from explaining that he knew that his ideas could be implemented in an electronic device. The better-known EDVAC design presented in the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (dated 30 June 1945), by John von Neumann, who knew of Turing's theoretical work, received much publicity, despite its incomplete nature and questionable lack of attribution of the sources of some of the ideas.
Turing's report on the ACE was written in late 1945 and included detailed logical circuit diagrams and a cost estimate of £11,200. He felt that speed and size of memory were crucial and he proposed a high-speed memory of what would today be called 25 kilobytes, accessed at a speed of 1 MHz; he remarked that for the purposes required "the memory needs to be very large indeed by comparison with standards which prevail in most valve and relay work, and [so] it is necessary to look for some more economical form of storage", and that memory "appears to be the main limitation in the design of a calculator, i.e. if the storage problem can be solved all the rest is comparatively straightforward". The ACE implemented subroutine calls, whereas the EDVAC did not, and what also set the ACE apart from the EDVAC was the use of Abbreviated Computer Instructions, an early form of programming language. Initially, it was planned that Tommy Flowers, the engineer at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in north London, who had been responsible for building the Colossus computers should build the ACE, but because of the secrecy around his wartime achievements and the pressure of post-war work, this was not possible.
On background, although are the Technical drawings for the British Bombe, the machine specified by Turing and one of the primary tools used to break Enigma-enciphered messages during WWII.
The bombe was an electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, albeit engineered differently both from each other and from Polish and British bombes.
The British bombe was developed from a device known as the "bomba" (Polish: bomba kryptologiczna), which had been designed in Poland at the Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher Bureau) by cryptologist Marian Rejewski, who had been breaking German Enigma messages for the previous seven years, using it and earlier machines. The initial design of the British bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman. The engineering design and construction was the work of Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company. The first bombe, code-named Victory, was installed in March 1940 while the second version, Agnus Dei or Agnes, incorporating Welchman's new design, was working by August 1940.
The bombe was designed to discover some of the daily settings of the Enigma machines on the various German military networks: specifically, the set of rotors in use and their positions in the machine; the rotor core start positions for the message—the message key—and one of the wirings of the plugboard.
On background, across all banknote, is the Turing Pattern.
The Turing pattern is a concept introduced by English mathematician Alan Turing in a 1952 paper titled "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" which describes how patterns in nature, such as stripes and spots, can arise naturally and autonomously from a homogeneous, uniform state. In his classic paper, Turing examined the behaviour of a system in which two diffusible substances interact with each other, and found that such a system is able to generate a spatially periodic pattern even from a random or almost uniform initial condition. Turing hypothesized that the resulting wavelike patterns are the chemical basis of morphogenesis.
Turing patterning is often found in combination with other patterns: vertebrate limb development is one of the many phenotypes exhibiting Turing patterning overlapped with a complementary pattern (in this case a French flag model).
Ticker tape depicting Alan Turing’s birth date (23 June 1912) in binary code. The concept of a machine fed by binary tape featured in the Turing’s 1936 paper.
Denominations in numerals are on top, repeated 2 times. At the bottom - in words.
Comments:
Bank of England Governor Mark Carney presents 50 Pounds 2021 note in 2019.
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