5 Pounds Sterling 1963, Kingdom of Great Britain
| in Banknotes Book | Number: BE99b |
| Years of issue: | 02.1963 - 12.1966 |
| Edition: | |
| Signatures: | Chief Cashier: Mr. Jasper. Q. Hollom (02.1963 - 12.1966) |
| Serie: | England |
| Specimen of: | 02.1963 |
| Material: | Cotton fiber |
| Size (mm): | 140 х 85 |
| Printer: | Bank of England print works, Loughton (Debden), Essex, UK |
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Description
Watermark:
Repeated Britannia with a laurel wreath on her head.
Avers:
HM The Queen Elizabeth II.
Following the disappointment over Robert Austin’s portrait of The Queen, the Bank of England decided to prepare a new portrait of The Queen for the higher denomination notes in their "C" series of notes. This portrait was drawn by Reynolds Stone, who was responsible for the design of the 5- and 10-pound notes in the "C" series. The engraving of the portrait was executed by Alan Dow of "Bradbury Wilkinson and Company".
Stone’s portrait depicts Her Majesty wearing the George IV State Diadem and a necklace of three matched strings of pearls, her preferred choice of necklace for informal and semi-formal occasions. Also she wears the earrings from Queen Alexandra's Wedding Parure.
The Queen is wearing the George IV State Diadem. Made by Rundell, Bridge & Rundell (and likely designed by their designer, Philip Liebart) in 1820, the diadem features a set of 4 crosses pattée alternating with 4 bouquets of roses, thistles, and shamrocks. The motifs are set on a band of diamond scrollwork between two bands of pearls. Queen Alexandra had the diadem made smaller in 1902, reducing the top band of pearls from 86 to 81, and the bottom band from 94 to 88. The front cross is set with a 4 carat yellow diamond, and the piece features 1,333 diamonds in all. (Sartorial Splendor)
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. "From her Majesty's Jewel vault".
The Three Strand Pearl Necklaces.
Queen Elizabeth's standard daytime wardrobe includes pearls, of course; usually a triple strand necklace. She has at least three of these, according to Leslie Field in The Queen's Jewels:
1) A gift from her grandfather, King George V, to commemorate his Silver Jubilee in 1935.
2) One made from graduated family pearls which the Queen had created with a diamond clasp soon after she acceded the throne in 1952.
3) A gift for her coronation in 1953 from the Emir of Qatar, also with a diamond clasp.
And there are more as well. The differences between pearl necklaces are hard to track, especially when you can't see the clasp (and you normally can't when the Queen wears them). "From her Majesty's Jewel vault" (англ.).
Denominations in numerals are in bottom left and top right corners. In words centered.
Revers:
In 1963 Britannia was reimagined for the new £5 note.
The Daily Telegraph commented that she was ‘a likeable young lady … though not very regal’. In fact, this younger version of Britannia was modelled on the designer’s daughter, illustrator Phillida Gili.
Britannia is an ancient term for Roman Britain and also a female personification of the island. The name is Latin, and derives from the Greek form Prettanike or Brettaniai, which originally designated a collection of islands with individual names, including Albion or Great Britain; however, by the 1st century BC Britannia came to be used for Great Britain specifically. In AD 43 the Roman Empire began its conquest of the island, establishing a province they called Britannia, which came to encompass the parts of the island south of Caledonia (roughly Scotland). The native Celtic inhabitants of the province are known as the Britons. In the II century, Roman Britannia came to be personified as a goddess, armed with a trident and shield and wearing a Corinthian helmet.
The Latin name Britannia long survived the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, and yielded the name for the island in most European and various other languages, including the English Britain and the modern Welsh Prydain. After centuries of declining use, the Latin form was revived during the English Renaissance as a rhetorical evocation of a British national identity. Especially following the Acts of Union in 1707, which joined the Kingdoms of England and Scotland, the personification of the martial Britannia was used as an emblem of British imperial power and unity.
Denominations in numerals are in bottom left and top right corners. In words centered.
Comments:
Sir Jasper Hollom (December 16, 1917 - August 29, 2014).
Sir Jasper Hollom, who has died aged 96, was the deputy governor of the Bank of England and chairman of its “Lifeboat” committee, which successfully steered the City through the secondary banking crisis of 1973 to 1975.
Like his mentor Leslie O’Brien (later Lord O’Brien of Lothbury), Jasper Hollom was unusual in his generation for having risen from the lowest to the highest ranks of the Bank, which he joined as a teenage clerk in 1936. Having served four years as chief cashier, he was appointed an executive director in 1966 and deputy governor to O’Brien in 1970.
The greatest test of the Bank’s authority and effectiveness since the Second World War was to come in November 1973, not long after the accession as Governor of Gordon Richardson (later Lord Richardson of Duntisbourne), the former chairman of the merchant bank Schroder Wagg, as O’Brien’s successor. A run on London and County Securities was the first in a series of threatened failures of smaller banks and finance houses that had lent heavily against property, the value of which was collapsing, and were no longer able to fund themselves.
Matters came to a head on December 19 with the case of Cedar Holdings, a specialist in second mortgages, which the Bank felt had to be bailed out in order to prevent a domino collapse across the entire banking system. Richardson, though a figure of formidable personal authority, was still playing himself into the governorship (wags referred to the Bank in his early months as “the Tomb of the Unknown Governor”) and relied very much on his deputy’s advice. It fell largely to Hollom to conduct secret, and at times fiercely fought, negotiations with Cedar’s directors, bankers and institutional shareholders, into the early hours of the following day.
One of the investor group recalled of Richardson and Hollom that “their sangfroid was remarkable”. Another account described Hollom as having “the prim archdeaconish expression of a Harley Street specialist, one whose second opinion would be no different from his first, whose pointedly good manners and precisely cadenced diagnoses were all the more telling for the firm concealment of a tough interior”.
A rescue was duly cobbled together before morning, and over the following days Richardson and Hollom conceived and drove forward the “lifeboat” plan, which marshalled the major clearing banks to provide support for weaker and smaller lenders, including some fringe operators outside the Bank’s normal supervisory net - and protected the depositors of those which had been fraudulent.
A committee under Hollom’s chairmanship met for the first time in the Bank’s Octagon Room on December 28, and continued to meet for many months, deciding day by day how much needed to be advanced by participating banks to keep the businesses in its care afloat, or how best to steer them towards the safer haven of ownership by larger groups. At least 25 companies - including such iconic names of the era as Keyser Ullmann, JH Vavasseur and First National Finance - were sustained in this way by the time a line was drawn under the operation in August 1974. The total lending commitment by the lifeboat participants had by then reached £1.2 billion, though their eventual losses were very much smaller.
The exercise was counted a great success for the City as a whole, achieved with very little input from government. Confidence in the Bank stood high, and Hollom’s courteous but purposeful chairmanship - displeasure or irritation never shown by more than a raised eyebrow, or an occasional drumming on the table - was universally admired. The knighthood he received in 1975, though customary for deputy governors, was widely seen as an acknowledgement of his “lifeboat” work.
Denis Healey, as Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, acknowledged Hollom as the unsung hero of the banking crisis, but also found him, on occasions, “forbidding” - and notably robust both in his advice on monetary matters and in his defence of the Bank’s territory. One of Healey’s junior ministers, Denzil Davies, crossed swords with Hollom on a number of occasions, notably over the introduction in 1976 of a two-tier system of banking supervision, in which lesser operators were henceforth to be labelled “licensed deposit takers”. “To whom might a firm appeal if it did not accept that it belonged in the lower category?” Davies asked the deputy governor. “The Bank,” came the reply. “According to what criteria?” “The Bank’s.” And where would these criteria be published? “In the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin.” But Hollom eventually gave way on the point, and agreed to a tribunal system for appeals.
After retiring from the deputy governorship in 1980, he remained a non-executive member of the Court of the Bank until 1984, and from 1980 to 1987 he chaired the Panel on Takeovers and Mergers, the self-regulatory body which ruled over the increasingly aggressive tactics used by City financiers in hostile bids.
Hollom’s tenure at the Panel saw the publication of a new Code of City practice that sought to keep abreast of market developments - which, as his annual report in 1985 indicated, he viewed with some asperity: “One undesirable by-product … of the ever sharpening competition among practitioners in this field has been a tendency on the part of a small number of financial advisers to push for favourable interpretations of the Code, or on the other hand for condemnation of their opponent’s tactics, some way beyond the limits of the reasonable.” No-holds-barred corporate dogfights such as the Guinness bid for Distillers (which ultimately led to criminal charges) drew criticism from Westminster that the Panel was not sufficiently independent to stamp its authority.
Nevertheless, Hollom retained to the end of his career the reputation of a dedicated and clear-minded public servant whose fixity of purpose was, as one commentator put it, “as hard as the coinage it was his job to protect”.
Jasper Quintus Hollom was born on December 16 1917 and educated at King’s School, Bruton, in rural Somerset. He worked briefly as an insurance clerk before entering the Bank in 1936. During the Second World War he served in the infantry in the Middle East and the Western Desert; he was captured in 1942 and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Italy.
On demobilisation he rejoined the bank and rose to become assistant to Leslie O’Brien in the chief cashier’s office. Hollom became deputy chief cashier in 1956, and succeeded O’Brien as the Bank’s 23rd chief cashier in 1962, provoking one City columnist to remark that his name “has a certain dignified ring to it that seems wholly British and most reassuring - there could never be the slightest doubt that Mr Hollom would pay the bearer on demand the sum of one pound.” His signature duly appeared on all fresh banknotes, including new designs for £5 and £10.
Hollom’s official signature came under scrutiny many years later when a Chinese criminal gang was brought to court in London in 2007 for counterfeiting £1,000 notes, which had not been legal tender since the 1940s, and (more improbably) £500,000 notes, which had never been issued. The gang had forged Hollom’s signature on the notes - but using only his second initial, whereas Hollom himself always used both.
Hollom was also chairman of the Eagle Star insurance group from 1985 to 1987, and a director of BAT Industries and Portal Holdings. He was chairman of the Council for the Securities Industry and the Commonwealth Development Finance Co, and president of the Council of Foreign Bondholders.
Jasper Hollom retired to live quietly in Hampshire. He married, in 1954, Patricia Ellis, who died in 2013. (The Telegraph)
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