James Watt and Matthew Boulton will leave the back of the £50 note in a couple of years’ time, and personally I shall be sorry to see them go. They first appeared there in 2011, a few months after George Osborne made the pro-manufacturing budget speech that promised “a Britain carried aloft by the march of the makers”, which is perhaps why Watt looks rather grim and sceptical (in fact, he suffered from depression). Even the more congenial Boulton has the face of a man who’s heard something that needs to be taken with a good pinch of salt.
In life, the inventive Scotsman and the enterprising Englishman became partners in 1775, and at their Birmingham factory over the next 25 years produced the steam engines, then unrivalled in their power and efficiency, that spearheaded the industrial revolution and changed the face of the world. Few individuals can have so fundamentally affected the way we live – or die, (given their still-to-be recognised roles as the fathers of climate change). The £50 note does its best to tell this story.
Each man’s portrait has a quote attached: “I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have – POWER,” says Boulton. “I can think of nothing else but this machine,” says the obsessive Watt. A drawing of a Watt steam engine sits prominently in front. And not any old Watt engine: a little detective work shows it to be an early example of a rotative engine – one that adapted its up-and-down motion to turn shafts and spindles. Samuel Whitbread’s London brewery installed this machine in 1785 and George III went there to see it two years later – a publicity coup for the manufacturer.
You can learn a lot from a banknote, and soon after 2020 we may learn something new again. At that point, so the Bank of England announced this month, paper will give way completely to plastic and the £50 will join the slippery polymer ranks of the fiver (which has Churchill), the tenner (Jane Austen) and the 20, which in its new plastic version will soon abandon the profile of the economist Adam Smith for a full-face portrait of the painter JMW Turner.
Thanks to a change in procedures in 2014, the process of selection works as transparently as such things probably can. The route to Turner, for example, began in 2015 when the Bank decided it wanted a face from the visual arts for its £20 polymer. A new committee, the Bank of England’s banknote character advisory committee, invited the public to submit suggestions and got 590 nominations, a vast range that ran from Beatrix Potter to Lucian Freud, via Carol Reed and Capability Brown. The committee narrowed the names down to a longlist of 67 and then used focus groups “to help us identify which characters on the longlist would resonate strongly with people, and which might cause concern”. Then they produced a shortlist of five – Barbara Hepworth, Charlie Chaplin, Josiah Wedgwood and William Hogarth, as well as Turner. The governor made the final decision, and will do so again for the £50 note.
The type of person – warrior, healer, scientist – the Bank would like to see has yet to be announced, though that hasn’t held back speculation and lobbying; the committee may be in for a torrid time. Margaret Thatcher is a favourite, but the fiver already celebrates a Tory politician – and is a Thatcher worth 10 Churchills? A more likely contender, obliging that part of the Bank’s selection criteria that wants characters who “can reflect the diversity of UK society”, is Noor Inayat Khan, an agent for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who was flown to occupied France in 1943, quickly captured, and shot the next year in Dachau. In what looks like a well-organised campaign, her supporters could be heard and read in the media last week, including the TV historian Dan Snow and several Tory politicians, including the party’s former co-chair, Sayeeda Warsi, Tom Tugendhat MP, the transport minister Nusrat Ghani, and the minister of state at the Foreign Office, Tariq Ahmad.
Khan’s father was a Sufi and distinguished Indian musician, and her mother an American who converted to Islam. She was born in Moscow and grew up in London and Paris. The SOE valued her French and her competence as a wireless operator, though it had misgivings about her fieldcraft. In any case, the spy network she was supposed to help had been so thoroughly penetrated by German intelligence that her presence in France did more harm than good; her bravery had poor rewards.
In 2010 I wrote in support of a campaign to give Khan a memorial bust, which, largely thanks the work of her biographer, the Indian journalist Shrabani Basu, was unveiled two years later close to her childhood home in Bloomsbury, London. A memorial postage stamp followed. But, while the idea that Khan’s story is neglected no longer holds true, does she really meet the Bank’s need to find characters “who are widely admired and who have made an important contribution to our society and culture”?
Certainly, neither she nor many of the faces who have actually appeared on sterling notes would have passed a British equivalent of the US Treasury’s plain ruling that the portraits on dollar bills should be “of deceased persons whose places in history the American people know well”. Its selection of seven former presidents and/or founding fathers of the republic, the latest of them Ulysses S Grant, who died in 1885, is unchanged since 1928 and the design only slightly so.
There speaks a country that takes money solemnly. British paper currency came to human portraiture much later. George Washington has been a fixture on the dollar since 1869, whereas the Queen first appeared on a sterling note in 1960 – but since 1970, when the Bank of England put Shakespeare on its £20 note, there has been no holding back. In 2006, Ulster Bank issued a million £5 notes commemorating the first anniversary of the death of the footballer George Best, while the Royal Bank of Scotland’s new fiver has the writer Nan Shepherd on the front and a mackerel on the back. Shepherd (1893–1981) was only a name to me, but her portrait on the note suggests a Victorian’s idea of an Arthurian princess – the result, apparently, of a whimsical moment in a photographer’s studio when she picked up some old film, tied it round her brow and stuck a brooch in the middle. I now intend to read a Shepherd novel; I may never have done so without this image to prick my interest.
The idea that money needs somehow to represent the diversity of the people who use it is perhaps an absurd ambition. If societies are turbulent and uneasy, the safest choice may be to avoid the human and choose instead pictures of fine engineering and architecture or the natural world, as the euro has done. Still, Khan may not be a bad choice: the faces on paper notes can be educational. As the era of ready cash – the folding stuff – comes to an end, this may be its main function.
• Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist
