On 14 January 1801, James Wooldridge stood in the dock at London’s Old Bailey courthouse. The evidence against him was a piece of beef, a pair of grey pantaloons and a pound note. The verdict? Guilty. The sentence: death. What crime had Wooldridge committed? He had bought the beef with a forged pound note. Wooldridge was one of hundreds who fell foul of a century-old law that made forgery a capital offence. But back then banknotes had been for large sums and so the crime was rare. Now, economic crisis had prompted the issue of small and badly printed notes, triggering an epidemic of forgery. As the execution bell tolled with monotonous regularity, public outrage mounted – not against the forgers but against the Bank of England for making the crime so tempting.
LATE one Saturday night in September 1800, James Wooldridge strolled into a butcher’s shop in London’s East End and asked the price of a haunch of beef. At sixpence a pound and weighing eleven-and-three-quarter pounds, the cost was five shillings and tenpence halfpenny. Wooldridge proffered a £2 note. The butcher’s wife refused it: the printing didn’t look quite right. Did he have a pound instead? Wooldridge pulled a bundle of banknotes from the pocket of his grey pantaloons and peeled off a £1 note. He left with the beef and two seven-shilling pieces and a penny-halfpenny change.
Two months later, Wooldridge was arrested and charged with forging and counterfeiting with intent to defraud the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. The bank always prosecuted, no matter how small the note or how petty the criminal. It had to stem the flood of counterfeit money somehow, and if it couldn’t catch the forgers it would settle for the middlemen and their dupes. The sentence was the same whether you were a master forger or had tried to pass a single dud note. The incident in the butcher’s shop weighed heavily against Wooldridge. He was hanged.
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Until 1797 forgery had been a minor problem. Paper money was the preserve of the wealthy. Notes were for large denominations, print runs were small and notes impeccably printed. The chances of fooling anyone with a fake note were low, which discouraged most forgers from trying. The forgers’ luck began to change in 1793, when France’s Revolutionary government declared war on Britain. The cost of war and people’s habit of hoarding gold in uncertain times sent the bank’s gold reserves into free fall. When, on 22 February 1797, 1200 French troops landed in Wales hoping to foment revolution in Britain, they set in train events that led to an outbreak of forgery.
The invasion came to nothing, but the threat from France caused panic. “There was a loss of confidence in paper money. People rushed to the bank to convert their notes into gold and silver coin,” says John Keyworth, curator of the Bank of England Museum in London. The run on gold had to be stopped. A week later, on the orders of the Prime Minister, William Pitt, the bank declared that it would no longer exchange paper money for coins. Gold coins vanished almost overnight as people stashed their guineas and half-guineas away for emergencies. To fill the gap, the bank rushed out new notes for £1 and £2.
Suddenly there were hundreds of thousands of small denomination notes in circulation. Shopkeepers, innkeepers and market traders – people who had no difficulty telling good coins from bad from their feel and weight – now had to deal in banknotes. Many couldn’t read, making them easy prey for forgers. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the print quality was so poor and so variable that even the bank’s staff sometimes had trouble recognising the real thing.
To meet demand, the bank printed the first of the new notes using the same copper plates it had used for larger notes, simply re-engraving the numbers. Even brand new plates didn’t print good notes for long: the pressure of printing squeezed the plates ever flatter and the design soon lost its definition. On top of that, there was another problem: no two plates were identical. They were engraved by hand, and the sudden demand meant at least 50 were in action at any time. “Each plate had its own personality, and it was perfectly possible to have two genuine notes that looked very different,” says Keyworth. Forgers saw their opportunity.
By the end of the year the bank knew it had a problem, and invited suggestions for ways to make its notes “inimitable”. Ideas poured in. Over the next 20 years, the bank considered some 400. They ranged from the ingenious to the ridiculous. One man suggested each note should have a unique number – in the watermark. Another proposed that inspectors from the bank should be “stationed during the hours of business in all the principal streets of the Metropolis, to examine all suspicious notes presented to them by Trades-people, to detain all forged notes and question the parties”.
There were more practical suggestions. Maybe the bank could add silk or woollen fibres or even gold dust to its paper? How about coloured paper and inks? A combination of printing techniques would surely foil the back-room forger lacking the bank’s resources. Couldn’t the bank design a note so exquisite and complicated it was impossible to copy? Top engravers sent in their finest efforts, but nothing passed the bank’s key test: could its engraver copy them? The answer was always yes, if not perfectly then well enough to fool the public. After years of scrutinising every sort of idea, the bank concluded that it was better to stick to paper “as near the present as possible to that now in use and to keep the Engraving as nearly resembling the present as can be”.
“It was possible to have two genuine notes that looked quite different”
As the bank hemmed and hawed over the public’s suggestions, the number of forged notes proliferated. In 1800 there were 4000 intercepted. The next year the number doubled. The introduction of a wavy watermark – the one idea the bank did adopt – caused a slight lull in the forgers’ activities, but it didn’t last. In 1811, there were 9000 bad notes; in 1812 double that, and in 1816 a stupendous 25,000. The next year it rose to 31,000 and stayed there. The number of prosecutions multiplied. Between 1783 and 1796 there had been just four prosecutions and no convictions. Between 1797 and 1818 the bank brought 998 prosecutions; 834 people were convicted and 313 executed. The death toll would have been higher, but in 1801 the bank relented a little: those charged with possession could escape death by pleading guilty. They were transported to Britain’s penal colony in Australia instead.
The public was growing increasingly angry, convinced the bank was doing nothing. Why couldn’t it produce better quality notes? The government set up commissions to look for answers. The Society of Arts mobilised its members to come up with better designs. And the press piled on the pressure. The bank’s notes, wrote one commentator, were of “inferior workmanship to common engraved shop-bills”. The Black Dwarf, a satirical paper of the day, weighed in, accusing the bank’s directors of being “Grand Purveyors to the Gibbet”, able but unwilling to stop the slaughter. Cartoonist George Cruikshank added his voice by publishing his version of a Bank of England note, featuring skulls, gibbets and a pound sign in the shape of a noose.
The bank’s directors felt much maligned, but there was some truth in the accusations. Among the multitude of suggestions were many good ones that if combined might have solved the forgery problem for good. One of these was machine engraving, a new technology that could generate the most fantastic and intricate designs. A second was to switch from copper plates to hardened steel. A machine-engraved, hardened-steel plate could be used as a master to create many more, so that all notes would at last be identical.
But by the time this idea landed on the directors’ desks, the bank had become enamoured with another scheme. Augustus Applegath and Edward Cowper – inventor of an ingenious machine for printing wallpaper – devised a method of printing both back and front of a banknote, with the reverse a mirror image of the front, in perfect register and with several coloured inks. By 1821, the bank had ploughed £40,000 into experiments and trials, but then its own engraver dealt the note a fatal blow: he copied it.
The bank abandoned the scheme and had to pulp 4 million useless notes. But no matter, it had at last found a sure-fire way to prevent forgery of its ÂŁ1 and ÂŁ2 notes: it stopped printing them. After 24 years, the government had lifted the restriction on converting notes to gold. Problem solved.
