Recollections of a Policeman

by William Russell

It was lucky that he did so; for this little circumstance saved thirteen lives!

Mr. Christmas’s co-inspectors at the Bank of England actually reversed his non-official judgment that the note was a forgery. It was officially pronounced to be a good note; yet upon the evidence of Mr. Christmas as regards other notes, the thirteen human beings at Haverfordwest were trembling at the foot of the gallows. It was promptly and cogently argued that as Mr. Christmas’s judgment had failed him in the deliberate examination of one note, it might also err as to others, and the convicts were respited.

The converse of this sort of mistake often happened. Bad notes were pronounced to be genuine by the Bank. Early in January, 1818, a well-dressed woman entered the shop of Mr. James Hammond, of 40 Bishopsgate Street Without, and having purchased three pounds worth of goods, tendered in payment a ten-pound note. There was something hesitating and odd in her manner; and, although Mr. Hammond could see nothing the matter with the note, yet he was ungallant enough to suspect—from the uncomfortable demeanor of his customer—that all was not right. He hoped she was not in a hurry, for he had no change; he must send to a neighbor for it. He immediately dispatched his shopman to the most affluent of all his neighbors—to her of Threadneedle Street. The delay occasioned the lady to remark, “I suppose he is gone to the Bank!” Mr. Hammond having answered in the affirmative, engaged his customer in conversation, and they freely discussed the current topics of the day; till the young man returned with ten one pound Bank-of-England Notes. Mr. Hammond felt a little remorse at having suspected his patroness, who departed with the purchases with the utmost dispatch. She had not been gone half an hour before two gentlemen rushed into the shop in a state of grievous chagrin; one was the Bank clerk who had changed the note. He begged Mr. Hammond would be good enough to give him another for it. “Why?” asked the puzzled shopkeeper. “Why, sir,” replied the distressed clerk, “it is forged!” Of course his request was not complied with. The clerk declared that his dismissal was highly probable; but Mr. Hammond was inexorable.

The arguments in favor of death-punishments never fail so signally as when brought to the test of the scaffold and its effect on Bank forgeries. When these were most numerous, although from twenty to thirty persons were put to death in one year, the gallows was never deprived of an equal share of prey during the next. As long as simulated notes could be passed with ease, and detected with difficulty, the Old Bailey had no terrors for clever engravers and dexterous imitators of the hieroglyphic autographs of the Bank-of-England signers.

At length public alarm at the prevalence of forgeries, and the difficulty of knowing them as such, arose to the height of demanding some sort of relief. In 1819 a committee was appointed by the Government to inquire into the best means of prevention. One hundred and eighty projects were submitted. They mostly consisted of intricate designs such as rendered great expense necessary to imitate. But none were adopted for the obvious reason that ever so indifferent and easily executed imitation of an elaborate note is quite sufficient to deceive an uneducated eye, as had been abundantly proved in the instance of the Irish “black note.” The Bank had not been indifferent or idle on the subject, for it had spent some hundred thousand pounds in projects for inimitable notes. At last—not long before the Commission was appointed—they were on the eve of adopting an ingenious and costly mechanism for printing a note so precisely alike on both sides as to appear as one impression, when one of the Bank printers imitated it exactly by the simple contrivance of two plates and a hinge. This may serve as a sample of the other one hundred and seventy-nine projects.

Neither the gallows nor expensive and elaborate works of art having been found effectual in preventing forgery, the true expedient for at least lessening the crime was adopted in 1821:—the issue of small notes was wholly discontinued, and sovereigns were brought into circulation. The forger’s trade was nearly annihilated. Criminal returns inform us that during the nine years after the resumption of gold currency the number of convictions for offences having reference to the Bank-of-England notes were less than one hundred, and the executions only eight. This clinches the argument against the efficacy of the gallows. In 1830 death-punishments were repealed for all minor offences, and, although the cases of Bank-Note Forgeries slightly increased for a time, yet there is no reason to suppose that they are greater now than they were between 1821 and 1830.

At present, Bank-paper forgeries are not numerous. One of the latest was that of the twenty-pound note, of which about sixty specimens found their way into the Bank. It was well executed in Belgium by foreigners, and the impressions were passed among the Change-agents in various towns in France and the Netherlands. The speculation did not succeed; for the notes got into, and were detected at the Bank, a little too soon to profit the schemers much.

The most considerable frauds now perpetrated are not forgeries; but are done upon the plan of the highwayman mentioned in our first chapter. In order to give currency to stolen or lost notes which have been stopped at the Bank, (lists of which are supplied to every banker in the country,) the numbers and dates are fraudulently altered. Some years since, a gentleman, who had been receiving a large sum of money at the Bank, was robbed of it in an omnibus. The notes gradually came in, but all were altered. The last was one for five hundred pounds, dated the 12th March, 1846, and numbered 32109. On the Monday (3rd June) after the last “Derby Day,” amid the twenty-five thousand pieces of paper that were examined by the Bank Inspectors, there was one note for five hundred pounds, dated 12th March, 1848, and numbered 32409. At that note an inspector suddenly arrested his rapid examination of the pile of which it was one. He scrutinized it for a minute, and pronounced it “altered.” On the next day, that same note, with a perfect one for five hundred pounds, is shown to us with an intimation of the fact. We look at every letter—we trace every line—follow every flourish; we hold both up to the light—we undulate our visuals with the waves of the water-mark. We confess that we cannot pronounce decisively, but we have an opinion derived from a slight “goutiness” in the fine stroke of the figure 4 that No. 32409 is the forgery! so indeed it was. Yet the Bank Inspector had picked it out from the hundred genuine notes as instantaneously—pounced upon it as rapidly as if it had been printed with green ink upon card-board.

This, then, O gentlemen forgers and sporting-note alterers, is the kind of odds which is against you. A minute investigation of the note assured us of your exceeding skill and ingenuity; but it also convinced us of the superiority of the detective ordeal which you have to blind and to pass. In this instance you had followed the highwayman’s plan, and had put with great cunning, the additional marks to the 1 in 32109 to make it into a 4. To hide the scraping out of the top or serif of the figure 1—to make the angle from which to draw the fine line of the 4—you had artfully inserted with a pen the figures “£16 16,” as if that sum had been received from a person bearing a name that you had written above. You had with extraordinary neatness cut out the “6” from 1846, and filled up the hole with an 8, abstracted from some note of lesser value. You had fitted it with remarkable precision—only you had not got the 8 quite upright enough to pass the shrewd glance of the Bank Inspector.

We have seen a one-pound note made up of refuse pieces of a hundred other Bank notes, and pasted on a piece of paper, (like a note that had been accidentally torn,) so as to present an entire and passable whole.