Old £5 bank notes sold at auction

Towns often printed their own bank notes in the 19th Century

Two rare £5 notes issued in the mid-19th Century have been sold at auction for £1,057.

The money from the Weymouth Old Bank lay undiscovered in a trunk for years and only came to light when a garage was cleared out.

The bank, located on St Thomas Street in Weymouth, caused great financial hardship when it folded in 1897.

The notes were bought by a private collector on Thursday afternoon at Duke's Auctioneers in Dorchester.

Bank collapsed

Deborah Doyle, valuer at the auctioneers, said: "A gentleman brought them into the sale room.

"He was clearing out a relative's garage and there was a trunk in the garage and these lay in the bottom of the trunk.

"They'd been there for several years - hence why they were in such good condition."

The Weymouth Old Bank founded in Weymouth in 1792.

At its peak it had branches in Portland, Dorchester and Bournemouth, but early in 1885 and within weeks of each other, the partners running the bank - William Eliot and Edward Pearce - both died.

It soon went bankrupt and creditors queued outside the bank's doors on Wednesday 31 March, 1897, - known locally as Black Wednesday - in a fruitless search for their lost money.

Local banks issued their own notes at the time because it was difficult to get hold of Bank of England notes.