FROM THE ARCHIVES:Monica Sheridan was best known as a cookery expert but her Good Living column had a wider brief, including this one headlined "How To Make Money" – JOE JOYCE
I CAN see no reason why, given a little intelligence, we couldn’t all have as much money as we want. I was looking at a bundle of freshly-minted pound notes the other day. It was as neat a packet as ever you saw.
There were a thousand of them and they were no more obtrusive than five “twenty” packets of cigarettes stacked one on top of the other. (I have often smuggled that size of parcel through the Customs without batting an eye).
Seven years’ apprenticeship to a good engraver and you could make your own plates, and from the plates you print your own money. The fact that you will end up with seven years in Portlaoise is the only fly in the ointment that I can see.
All the money used in Ireland is made in England. The folding money, which consists of 10s., £1, £5, £10, £20, £50 and £100, looks very pretty, but the larger denominations are seen only with cattle dealers and bookmakers, who peel them off fat, tatty bundles as if they were crumpled toilet paper.
In England there is no note of higher denomination than a fiver – that handkerchief-size Bank of England note that is looked upon with such suspicion by the British shopkeeper.
But it wasn’t always so. Up to the time of the last war the British made notes as high as £1,000, but when the Germans started printing English money and distributing specious largesse it caused no end of confusion.
The British authorities called in all the high-priced notes and put a thin metal strip down the 10s. notes, the £1 notes and the fiver to make them almost impossible to counterfeit.
In the early war years, too, people were hoarding ill-gotten money (black market dealings and the like) and not disclosing it on their bank account or in their income tax returns. When the British Treasury called in all the high-denomination notes the owners had to disclose how they got them – Which made things very awkward for a lot of people who had no visible means of support, except, perhaps, a small job in the Ministry of Supplies.
I knew of one crowd in the North of England who actually burned over £4,000 in a domestic boiler. It was either that or five years in the clink.
Banks have robbed money of all its magic by introducing the cheque book. I’d far rather have twenty clean pound notes in my fist than a £20 cheque any day of the week.
But what a let-down even paper money must seem to people who have been reared on sovereigns! I am in correspondence with a charming man in West Cork, who mentioned in one of his letters that he remembers his first trip to Paris when he was 23. Suspended from a string round his neck, for safety, was a calico bag containing fifty gold sovereigns. Think, just think, what you could have done with one sovereign in Paris at the turn of the century.