10 Pounds White

The "White Fiver" gets the attention, but the larger white notes — printed on one side only, in plain black on unwatermarked rag paper of considerable heft — were the workhorses of wholesale trade and banking settlements for the better part of a century. The £10 denomination in this series circulated almost exclusively between businesses and financial institutions; retail handling was rare enough that high-grade survivors are genuinely common relative to the lower values, which saw harder use.

Production ran uninterrupted through two world wars, but the series ended abruptly in 1943 when the Bank withdrew all white notes above £5 — a direct response to the German Operation Bernhard forgery programme, which had demonstrated how difficult the format was to authenticate under field conditions.