ALAN KELLY ON ISLE OF MAN PAPER MONEY

Although I had collected stamps and tea cards as a young lad it wasn’t until 1962, aged 11, that I acquired my first Manx coin. My parents had been on holiday in Dublin and they bought me an 1839 Isle of Man penny, which they saw for sale in the window of Kevin O’Kelly’s shop at Wellington Quay, priced at two pounds ten shillings. That coin started me off and I was soon adding to the collection. In 1968 I started work in a local bank, which gave me access to quantities of coin and I regularly took £100 of silver coin to check for rare dates and pre-1947 silver coins during my lunch break. Any proceeds from the sale of coins found were used to finance additions to my Manx collection.

In 1969 I was introduced to Hilary Guard, of The Hydro Hotel, Douglas, and he persuaded me to start collecting Manx banknotes as well as the coinage. Hilary had been collecting for about five years at this stage and had already built up a fairly good collection of banknotes. I was earning little money at this time, but I did have very good contacts throughout the banking sector in the Island, so we planned a campaign to find the rarer Manx notes. Hilary placed an advert in every local newspaper, which he ran for the next ten years – ‘£50 paid for any Manx banknote not in my collection’. If he acquired any duplicates he passed them onto me. In return I used my contacts in the banks, particularly cashiers, to keep any pre-1961 banknotes for me that were paid in over the counter. This happened regularly at that time and we had some amazing ‘finds’, the most remarkable being a pair of provisional issue Martins Bank Limited £1 notes of 1928 paid into one of the banks in Douglas. The Martins banknote registers show that only three notes of each date, 9th October and 3rd November, 1928, can possibly exist and here we had one of each date, both in very fine condition. Three of the five note issuing banks, Barclays, Lloyds and Martins, still carried, as part of the cash, a batch of their pre-1961 note issues, so if I had a tatty example of one of their notes they would allow me to swap it for a better conditioned note! Martins Bank even had a block of uncirculated £1 notes of the last issue, 1st February, 1957, which they would allow me to swap.

There was very little collector interest in banknotes at this time. Hilary and myself were the only collectors on the Island, with one part-time coin and banknote dealer called Frankie Quayle, who had a stall on a Saturday in Douglas Market. In England the only Manx banknote collectors were Leslie Morgan and Godfrey Burr, with the one dealer being David Keable, of Croydon, to whom Hilary and myself supplied our surplus Manx banknotes for many years. Thanks to Kenny Morrison, the Chief Cashier at the Isle of Man Bank Limited, Douglas, Hilary and myself were also able to acquire the first fifty, and last fifty, banknotes for each prefix of new Isle of Man Government issues.

I issued Manx coin and banknote sales lists regularly through the early 1970’s, but in May, 1977 I decided it was time to go full-time dealing, so I left the bank and ran the business by mail-order from my home in Douglas. Hilary retired from the hotel in the late 1970’s and decided to sell his collection in 1979 to finance his retirement. I couldn’t afford to buy it at that time, so Stanley Gibbons bought it and sold it on, as a collection, to an investor. Luckily, he kept the collection intact and when he decided to sell in 2003 I was able to purchase it and bring it back to the Island. In 1985, I formed a limited company, Mannin Collections, and in October, 1989 we purchased the shop in Peel, from where we still operate today. We now deal in all aspects of Manx collectables including coins, banknotes, stamps, postcards, books, maps, prints, watercolours and oil paintings.

Special mention should be made of the major contribution that the late Ernest Quarmby, of Lancaster, gave to Manx banknote collecting. He approached Hilary Guard in 1969 with the idea of researching and publishing a book on the history of Manx banks and their banknotes, which Spink and Son published in 1971 as Banknotes & Banking in the Isle of Man 1788-1970. A second edition of the book was published by Spink in 1994. Few records of the early banks had survived, but Ernest meticulously researched what little information there was available and a fine job he did of it.

Finally, I wish to thank Pam and Pete West for all their hard work in gathering together the information for this publication. A considerable amount of new information has turned up since 1994, including some newly discovered banknotes, and the Isle of Man Government issues have been brought up-to-date.

For more information, or to order, see:
www.britishnotes.co.uk/?page=stock_item&categoryid=18&stockid=28798

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