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10 Pounds Commercial Bank of New Zealand Ltd.
| Issuer | Commercial Bank of New Zealand Limited |
|---|---|
| Year | 1865-1866 |
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| Shape | Rectangular |
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| Obverse description | The engraved royal arms vignette occupies the upper centre, flanked by ornate guilloche medallions each bearing the denomination TEN at left and right. The bank title THE COMMERCIAL BANK OF NEW ZEALAND LIMITED in copperplate script appears below the heading INCORPORATED, with the issue place DUNEDIN in letterpress above a guilloche underprint panel carrying the promise-to-pay text; a white-on-black TEN POUNDS panel sits at lower left alongside the authorisation line FOR THE DIRECTORS & PROPRIETORS, with the footer BY ACT OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY running across the base. The overall layout is characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century intaglio security printing by Perkins, Bacon & Petch. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | INCORPORATED THE COMMERCIAL BANK OF NEW ZEALAND LIMITED TEN TEN DUNEDIN PROMISE TO PAY THE BEARER ON DEMAND TEN POUNDS VALUE RECEIVED FOR THE DIRECTORS & PROPRIETORS OF THE COMMERCIAL BANK OF NEW ZEALAND LIMITED TEN POUNDS BY ACT OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY ENT'D ACC'T CHIEF MANAGER |
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| Comments |
The Commercial Bank of New Zealand Limited was established in Dunedin in 1861, riding the Otago gold rush, and its early note issues were necessarily contracted out to London security printers — there was no local capacity for engraved banknote production in the colony. Perkins, Bacon & Petch had by this period already supplied plate work to dozens of colonial banks across the British Empire, and the New Zealand commission was one of several concurrent antipodean contracts.
Ten-pound notes in colonial New Zealand circulated in a merchant and pastoral economy where that sum represented serious working capital. The series had a short window — the bank itself was absorbed into the Bank of New Zealand in 1866, which makes the survival of any example from this issue genuinely uncommon.