5 Pounds National Bank

National Bank Limited was one of the main trading banks operating in New Zealand in the early twentieth century, though it was incorporated in London and maintained its head office there — a structural detail that shaped how its notes were produced and regulated. The P#223 series falls in the immediate post-WWI period, when note-issuing rights for private banks in New Zealand were being progressively tightened ahead of the eventual monopoly granted to the Reserve Bank in 1934.

Private trading bank issues from this transitional window are now genuinely uncommon in any grade; many were withdrawn and destroyed as the state consolidated control over currency issuance through the 1920s and early 1930s.