3 Pounds National Bank

The National Bank Limited was a New Zealand institution, and this £3 denomination sits in an unusual gap — three-pound notes were never common in New Zealand or anywhere in the sterling world, where £1, £5, and £10 were the functional backbone of private note issue. The denomination was almost certainly driven by practical lending or agricultural settlement needs rather than everyday retail circulation.

Perkins, Bacon & Petch had been engraving security printing in London since the early nineteenth century, with a client list spanning colonial banks across the British Empire. Their intaglio work was considered reliable deterrence against forgery at a time when colonial note security was a genuine operational concern.