5 Pounds National Bank

National Bank Limited was one of the commercial banks operating in New Zealand under the pre-Reserve Bank framework, when private institutions still issued their own notes alongside government currency. This 5 Pounds note, printed by Perkins Bacon in London, falls in the period immediately following the First World War — a moment when note production and distribution chains were still recovering from wartime disruption, and demand for higher denominations was rising with postwar economic activity.

Perkins Bacon's intaglio work on colonial and dominion banking notes from this period is generally well-executed, and the firm had long-standing relationships with British imperial banking clients. The 1918–1919 window is narrow enough that surviving examples almost certainly reflect low print runs.