200 Pounds White

The "White Notes" — so called simply because they were printed in black ink on plain white paper with no colored overprints — were the Bank of England's standard high-denomination instruments for over two centuries, their design barely altered from the late 17th century through the 1940s. The 200 Pound denomination sat at the upper end of a range that extended to 1,000 Pounds, used almost entirely for interbank settlements and large commercial transactions rather than retail circulation. Ordinary members of the public would rarely if ever have handled one.

The entire White Note series was withdrawn and demonetized on 30 April 1945, a wartime security measure intended to combat Nazi forgery operations — specifically the Bernhard scheme, in which the SS produced high-quality counterfeit British notes at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.