20 Pounds Sterling

Bank of Scotland's £20 notes from this period were high-denomination instruments that saw limited hand-to-hand circulation — at a time when average weekly wages in Scotland rarely exceeded a few pounds, a £20 note functioned almost exclusively in commercial and banking transactions. W. & A.K. Johnston & G.W. Bacon Ltd. were primarily cartographers and geographical publishers; their banknote printing work was a secondary but long-running arm of the Edinburgh firm, and their output for Scottish banks is sometimes underappreciated relative to the better-known Bradbury Wilkinson or De La Rue commissions.

The nearly three-decade span of this issue — running from the mid-Depression through postwar austerity and into early 1960s recovery — means significant variation in surviving paper quality is common across the series.