50 Dollars

The Bank of Montreal's 1931 series was printed during a period of acute financial anxiety in Canada — the Depression had already gutted commodity prices and was beginning to strain public confidence in chartered banks. Jackson Dodds served as General Manager of the Bank of Montreal from 1927 to 1934; C.B. Gordon was Chairman of the Board. Having both a senior executive and a board-level signatory on the note was deliberate, a quiet institutional signal of stability at a moment when stability was not guaranteed.

The Canadian Bank Note Company had been the dominant supplier to the chartered banks since the early twentieth century, and by 1931 their Ottawa plant was handling virtually the entire private note output for the country.

At the $50 denomination, surviving examples from this issue are considerably scarcer than lower values — high-denomination chartered bank notes were rarely broken into circulation and tended to be redeemed quickly once the 1944 Bank Act amendments began squeezing out private currency.