10 Shillings Emergency issue, Series A

Gibraltar's 1914 emergency currency came out of the same administrative scramble that hit British territories worldwide at the outbreak of war — the sudden hoarding and disappearance of coin from circulation forced colonial governments to produce paper substitutes almost overnight. The Gibraltar issue was authorized under emergency powers with minimal preparation time, which shows in the Series A designation: this was a first-run stopgap, not a planned addition to a mature currency system.

Surviving examples are genuinely rare. The wartime conditions under which these notes circulated — a busy naval garrison, constant troop movement, and no particular incentive to preserve low-denomination paper — were not kind to the physical material.