Nature-currency as a bear signal
'A country’s currency is a fundamental component of its national identity’
I was about to head off to Sri Lanka last summer when it was first announced that the Bank of England may drop historical figures from banknotes and replace them with something less controversial. Now it’s happening, and a panel of experts will draw up a shortlist of wildlife to feature on English currency. Instead of Winston Churchill and Jane Austen, we’ll get otters or hedgehogs.
Historical figures only first appeared on our bank notes in 1970, and when I was growing up the ‘Series D’ issue featured Newton on the pound note, Wellington on a fiver, and Florence Nightingale, Shakespeare and Christopher Wren on the higher denominations.
I imagine that most people are nostalgic about the currency they grew up with, and the design provokes a warming chemical reaction not just because we associate them with childhood but because everyone likes having money - but still, this was a stellar cast.
Banknotes need replacing to counter the counterfeiters, typically after about 20 years, and so a new batch of English heroes took their turn after Newton and Wellington, before giving way to our current crop, a still-impressive line-up featuring not just Churchill and Austen but J.M.W. Turner and Alan Turing.
Banknotes are a little window into a country’s soul, and instructive. In Israel, the changing face of the shekel reflects the evolving self-image of a country ‘from the early project of Labour Zionism, confidently secular and progressive, to a more conservative, capitalist and hawkish’ state.
Apartheid-era South African notes honoured Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch explorer who founded the trading station that would one day become Cape Town, a statement about the central importance of the country’s dominant Afrikaner minority. With the arrival of the ‘rainbow nation’ he was replaced with suitably non-racial pictures of animals, but from 2012 these gave way to images of Nelson Mandela. As South African Reserve Bank Governor Gill Marcus explained, ‘a country’s currency is a fundamental component of its national identity’.
Indeed, and that is precisely why states with weak or fractured identities tend to feature animals and natural objects. In Sri Lanka, I noted, the paper currency contains scenes from wildlife and generic figures in traditional dress. It’s a beautiful country, with the kindest people you’ll ever meet, but it’s deeply divided and scarred by inter-ethnic hatred, and the banknotes reflect that sad fact: any historical individual would be too divisive for its population, unacceptable to at least one group.
