The Bank Note Club January 7, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Imagine a watering hole where Hans Christian Andersen has cocktails with Genghis Khan and where Sigmund Freud takes to the dance-floor with Greta Garbo and makes innuendos. A world in which Nelson Mandela plays darts with Benjamin Franklin and St Martin gets into a fight with Pharaoh Khafra. Have we strayed into a parallel dimension of the rich and the famous, a club where only deceased A-listers go? Well not exactly. Indeed, some of the men and women gathered here are not particularly rich or famous: take, for example, Policarpa Salavarrieta sitting over in the corner, a Columbian spy (whose real name we don’t know) or Ingibjörg Benediktsdóttir, the second wife of Gísli Þorláksson (neither of whom you or I have heard of). But what do they, and the three or four hundred other people here, all have in common? Quite simply everyone drinking in this fantasy water hole has appeared on the coins or banknotes of countries somewhere in the world in the last century. A club that includes Sufi mystics, medieval despots, explorers, poets, golfers, suffragettes and state approved serial killers (Che Guevara, Hitler, Mao etc).
So how do you make it onto a banknote or a coin? Probably the most important qualification is to live in a small country. If you do something great in Iceland or Luxembourg there is actually an outside chance that you may make it into the club without becoming president. So Sir James Martin appeared on the ten pound note in Northern Ireland (population one and a half million) because he invented the ejector seat. Do that in Germany (population eighty million) and you won’t even get on a pfennig. Another tip is to get into the ‘groove’ of your native country. So Balkan states are particularly big on men and women who died for Serbia/Croatia/Albania now or a thousand years ago (preferably after having killed lots of Serbs/Croats/Albanians). The gentler Scandinavians prefer, meanwhile, artists and film stars: Sweden has Ingmar Bergman for God’s sake! The British seem to enjoy, meanwhile, the obscurity of their choices. As a British historian I was shocked to see that I only knew five of the eight men and women who currently appear on British banknotes. Nor were those who appear on the banknotes necessarily wealthy in their own right: ironically enough since they were ‘stirling’.
And the worst choices? Well… there are so many to choose from. But here are some highlights, other suggestions: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
(i) Avicenna the great ‘Persian’ philosopher appears on a Tajikistani note, even though he seems never to have lived in the country…
Gibraltar made the unusual decision of adopting (ii) Tariq ibn Ziyad, because his name is behind Gibraltar, ‘Jabal Tariq’, the Rock of Tariq. Tariq was also the man who conquered Hispania for Islam and who could have destroyed all Christendom: multiculturalism is all great and proper but…
(iii) Syria used to have (paper currency probably doesn’t go very far there anymore) Marcus Julius Philippus, a third-century Roman Emperor on one of their notes. The Assads were just not either very Roman or every Imperial, though good try. MJP had probably been born in Syria though.
(iv) Aliyu Mai-Bornu appeared on a Nigerian note in 2005 because he was Governor of the Nigerian Central Bank in the 1960s. Aliyu may have been a splendid chap but there seems something a bit incestuous about a national bank celebrating a national banker on money. Britain, btw, foolishly did the same thing with John Houblon, the first governor of the Bank of England, but the Bank of England has a little less hyper inflation?
Then, finally, on the subject of bad taste here is (v) Sadam Hussein and his ‘double’ (ahem) Nebuchadnezzar. Who would have thought it?
