Catalog
20 Florins / 2 Pounds - George V
| Issuer | East African Currency Board |
|---|---|
| Year | 1920 |
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| In circulation to | 1921 |
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| Obverse description | Portrait of King George V in an oval vignette at upper centre, flanked by elaborate guilloche scrollwork and ornate floral underprint in blue and red. The denomination '20' appears in large numerals at lower left and right, with the date 'Mombasa, 1st May 1920' inscribed at bottom centre below a panel of multilingual text rendered in Arabic and Swahili scripts. Two authorising signatories appear at lower right above the printed designation 'Members of the East African Currency Board'. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | THE EAST AFRICAN CURRENCY BOARD TWENTY FLORINS OR TWO POUNDS THESE NOTES ARE LEGAL TENDER FOR THE PAYMENT OF ANY AMOUNT MEMBERS OF THE EAST AFRICAN CURRENCY BOARD |
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| Comments |
The East African Currency Board was established in 1919 specifically to replace the rupee-based system that had governed British East Africa since the 1890s. This note belongs to the transitional series that introduced the florin as the new unit — a short-lived experiment, since the florin-based system itself was abandoned within a few years in favor of the East African shilling.
The dual denomination — florins on one face, pounds on the other — reflects the awkward arithmetic of the conversion: 10 florins to the pound, a ratio that never sat comfortably with a public accustomed to rupees. Bradbury Wilkinson produced the series in London; their intaglio work on colonial currency of this period is consistently fine.
Pick 11 is among the scarcer pieces in the EACB sequence, with surviving examples almost exclusively in collector hands rather than having passed through normal trade circulation.