Bank of England releases prisoners' letters from its archive

In another letter, by Johanna McCarthy as she awaited to be shipped off to Australia, she wrote that she was "quite destitute of money and friends and have been confined in Newgate Bristol 13 months’. The Committee for Lawsuits records that McCarthy and two other female convicts who were ‘on the point of sailing to Botany Bay be paid £5 each' in response to their pleas for relief.

On many occasions the Bank of England did respond with a level of charity to prisoners, the letters in the archive show, in particular to mothers and their children.

The letters, which now form part of the Freshfields collection, have been split into two groups in the archive - those written from prisoners in London and those written from outside the capital.

A significant majority of the London letters were written from Newgate Gaol, whilst the Provincial letters were written from prisons such as Bath, Horsham, Portsmouth and Warwick.

Counterfeit notes became a major problem after the Napoleonic Wars in the 18th century which had led to the ‘Restriction Period’, a time when the Bank was no longer able to pay out gold in exchange for Bank notes. The result was the issuing of low denomination £1 and £2 notes in 1797, with many soon being forged and circulated across the country.

During the 'Restriction Period', more than 300 people were hanged for counterfeiting of Bank of England notes.

Also included in the archives made public today is a series of records to commemorate Bank of England staff who served in the armed forces during the First World War.

On 10 August 1914, the Court of Directors minutes announced that the Governor “…had granted leave with full pay to as many clerks as could possibly be spared to serve in the Defensive Forces of the Country…”.

^{First World War services record}

Amongst the records made public in the archive, the Bank notes is the entry for Captain Eugene Paul Bennett, an assistant from the accountant's department who was appointed as both a 2nd Lieutenant and Acting-Captain during the war. He was awarded the Military Cross for his efforts in the Battle of Loos and was later awarded the highest military honour of the Victoria Cross, for his "heroic and quick-thinking actions" at the Battle of Le Transloy in 1916.

The efforts of Bank staff after the War to raise money for a permanent memorial to fallen colleagues is recorded in a separate document.

The Bank has also digitally published the diaries of Montagu Norman , the Bank of England’s longest serving Governor (1920-44), who was seen as instrumental in overseeing the Bank’s transition from a private bank to what is now recognised as a modern central bank^.

^{Montagu Norman}

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