Seán Creedon looks at the history of our banknotes and their many different designs, from their inception in 1928 following the founding
of the Free State up to the introduction of the Euro in 1999.

 

The Irish Free State, subsequently known as Ireland, resolved in the mid-1920s to design its own coins and banknotes.
Over 100 years ago it was poet and Senator William Butler Yeats, a prominent member of the Coinage Committee, who suggested that the currency being planned for the new State should celebrate animals which at that time were the backbone of rural Ireland’s economy.

As there had been no distinct Irish coinage for over a century since the Act of Union fully kicked in, it was a significant step in 1922 when the Free State was formed.
Prior to 1922 British coinage was in use in Ireland and sterling had been legal tender in Ireland since 1826. In 1922, three categories of banknote were in circulation. These consisted of notes issued by the Bank of England, the British Treasury, and the six Irish banks that were chartered to issue notes.

A banking commission was created in 1926 to determine what changes were necessary relating to banking and banknotes issue in the new state.
The commission was chaired by Professor Henry Parker Willis of Columbia University who was Director of Research of the Federal Reserve Board in the United States.
The Currency Act, 1927, was passed as a basis for creating banknotes and the Saorstát pound, later to be known as the Irish pound, as the standard unit of value.

The legal tender notes issued under this act began circulating on September 10, 1928. Following the issuing of the new currency, the Free State government pegged its value to the pound sterling.
A second banking commission was created in November 1934 to inquire into creating a central bank. But it would take three decades before the bank would have all the rights and functions associated with a central bank.

Series A
Series A was known as the Lady Lavery Note and was commissioned by the Currency Commission. The notes were printed by Waterlow and Sons, London, a company that was later acquired by De La Rue in 1961.
Each note has a portrait of Lady Lavery, the wife of the artist Sir John Lavery, who was commissioned to design this feature.
The original oil on canvas painting of Lady Lavery, titled Portrait of Lady Lavery as Kathleen Ní Houlihan (1927), is displayed at the National Gallery of Ireland.
The theme on the reverse of the notes is the rivers of Ireland which are depicted as heads taken from the Custom House in Dublin. The watermark on all notes was the head of Érin.
The first notes in the Lady Lavery series, which issued in 1928 were for ten shillings, one pound, five pound, ten pound, 20 pound, 50 pound and 100 pound.
On May 10, 1938, the name of the currency became the Irish pound.
The Irish people would become very familiar with Lady Lavery as she would stay in their pockets and purses for the next 48 years.
The date on the last ten shilling note issued was June 1968; the date on the last five pound note in Series A was September 1976, while the date on the last one pound note in the original Series A was September 1976. The date on the last 50 pound and 100 pound notes was April 1977.

Who was Lady Lavery?
Hazel Lady Lavery was an American painter and the second wife of portrait artist Sir John Lavery. Born in Chicago on March 14, 1880, Hazel Martyn was the daughter of Edward Jenner Martyn, a wealthy industrialist of Irish descent. A contemporary account refers to young Hazel Martyn as “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Midwest”. In 1903, Hazel Martyn married Edward Livingston Trudeau Jr, a physician who advanced the treatment of tuberculosis.

Trudeau died five months later from an embolism brought on by pneumonia. They had one daughter, Alice, who was born 10 October, 1904. Alice later spent much of her life in Ireland, marrying first John A. McEnery from County Kilkenny, then after being widowed, in 1963 she married historian Denis Rolleston Gywnn.
Hazel Martyn first met John Lavery, a Catholic-born painter from Belfast, whilst engaged to Trudeau.
In 1909, she and Lavery married after the death of her mother, who was opposed to the match. During World War I, John Lavery became an official artist for the British government. In 1918, he received a knighthood and Hazel Lavery became Lady Lavery.

The Lavery’s lent their palatial house at 5 Cromwell Place in South Kensington to the Irish delegation led by Michael Collins during negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. Hazel Lavery died of a heart attack on January 1, 1935 at her home in London, having been suffering ill health for over a year after an operation to remove a wisdom tooth.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own