1 Pound

The Union Bank of Scotland traced its origins to the Glasgow Union Banking Company, founded in 1830, and spent much of the nineteenth century expanding aggressively through branch acquisition across the west of Scotland. This note falls within a period when Scottish commercial banks still issued their own pounds under the long-standing Scottish free banking tradition — a system that persisted not through legal ambiguity but because Westminster repeatedly declined to extend the Bank Charter Act of 1844 to Scotland.

Scottish pound notes of this period were payable on demand in sterling coin, a guarantee the Union Bank maintained without interruption until its 1955 absorption into the Bank of Scotland. Cotton paper was the universal substrate for Scottish private issues by this point; linen-rag furnishes had largely given way to cotton by mid-century, improving dimensional stability in heavy branch circulation.

The twelve-year date span suggests plate reuse across multiple print runs rather than a single edition.