Pierre Nortje

In this paper we will take a closer look at banks and businesses that issued their own banknotes during Victorian times in the Boland, Swartland and Overberg regions of the Western Cape.

Although past numismatists like Shaw (1956), Esterhuysen (1980) and Engelbrecht (1987) have written about South African paper money issues, their books touched upon South African numismatics in a broader sense. Very few books have been written exclusively about our early banknotes with publications like Walter Bergman’s “A History of Regular and Emergency Paper Money Issues of South Africa” (1968) and Brian Hern’s “South African Banknotes & Papermoney Pre-Reserve Bank” (2010) exceptions to the rule.

These two numismatists have identified ten banks and one other business that issued their own banknotes. The towns involved will all be found on this old map dating from the late Victorian period.

Map of the Cape from the late Victorian period

The notes were issued by the following businesses:

1. Barry and Nephews
2. Caledon Agricultural Bank 
3. Malmesbury Agricultural and Commercial Bank
4. Montagu Bank
5. Paarl Bank
6. Stellenbosch Bank
7. Stellenbosch District Bank
8. Swellendam Bank
9. Wellington Bank
10. Western Province Bank 
11. Worcester Commercial Bank

1. Barry and Nephews

Entrepreneur Joseph Barry was born in 1796 in England and at the age of 21 years was commissioned...

Beaufort West is the largest town in the arid Karoo region of the Western Cape Province of South Africa. Although it is not the oldest town in South Africa, it was the first town to achieve municipal status. Founded in 1818, the then governor of the Cape, Lord Charles Somerset, named the town and district ‘Beaufort’ in honour of his father, the 5th Duke of Beaufort. To avoid confusion with two other similarly named towns, Fort Beaufort and Port Beaufort, the name ‘Beaufort’ was changed to Beaufort West in the 1860s. 

One of South Africa’s most famous sons, the pioneering heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard, was born in Beaufort West in 1922.

In 1969, a book on the history of Beaufort West was published, written by W.G.H. Vivier entitled Hooy-Vlakte, Die verhaal van Beaufort-Wes. The book gives a short biographical description of the author and mentions that after his retirement he used to spend much of his time on charity work and municipal affairs but also found time for his two hobbies: recording of history and coin collecting.

Book Cover

Quite coincidentally, about 20 years ago, I visited the town of Sutherland in the Karoo with my family and at a local second-hand shop, bought a small collection of coin books. All carried a purple hand stamp of the owner, W.G. Vivier of Beaufort West. 

On the inside of one of the books (Notes...

The word “tickey” was a slang name given to the lowest denomination coin issued in silver for use in South Africa in pre-decimal times during the 1800s and 1900s. It was equal to three pennies and also called a threepence or thruppence. The last of these were struck in 1960 when South Africa’s coinage was decimalized. However, for the next four years, silver 2½ cent pieces, also called tickeys, were struck until 1964 when our second decimal coin series was introduced the next year. Thirty-three years later, in 1997, the tickey (2½ cent) was reintroduced by the South African Mint as a commemorative series struck for collectors.

The word “tickey” gained legendary numismatic status, even internationally, due to South African coins like the gold Sammy Marks tickey struck in the late 1800s and the Union of South Africa’s 1931 issue, both very scarce issues.    

Origin of the name

The Dictionary of South African English (DSAE) gives various possibilities where the word “tickey” came from, but it is clear that there is no consensus on this. Past writers suggested that it came from Portuguese pataca a colonial coin, or French patac ‘small coin’ (via the French Huguenots). Others suggest that the Malay word “tiga” (three) was its origin.

DSAE notes that both Xhosa and Zulu use itiki for the coin, described by lexicographers as being borrowed from South African English, but it is possible that itiki was in fact a rendering in the Nguni languages of a Dutch or...

South Africa has an exceptionally long coastline stretching over 3000 kilometers from the desert border with Namibia on the Atlantic coast southwards around the tip of Africa and then north to the border of subtropical Mozambique on the Indian Ocean. As would be expected, many a ship has foundered in our waters over the more than 500 years since the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeo Diaz first rounded the Cape in 1488. 

However, only a very few of these could be said to be true “treasure ships” carrying large amounts of coins struck in precious metals with examples like the Joanna (1682) and Merestein (1702) few and far between. And even these ships seldom carried large amounts of gold coins, unlike legendary ships sunk in foreign waters like the Nuestra Senora De Atocha and the SS Central America that foundered along the American coastline with the last mentioned carrying gold then valued (in 1857) at approximately US$8 000 000. The gold value today in South African currency would be approximately be R14.5 billion with the numismatic value much more.

Gold coins recovered from shipwrecks in South African waters were in most cases personal possessions carried by rich passengers and officers on the ships, although a ship like the Birkenhead (1852) was rumored to have had a military payroll of £240,000 in gold coins weighing about three tons on board. It is thought that the gold coins were intended as payment to soldiers fighting in the Eastern Cape boarder wars.

Two gold coins...

Both MTB South African Tokens (2021) and Hern’s Handbook on Southern African Tokens (2009) list six brothel tokens of which three were issued for use in Durban and the other three in Cape Town. These two port cities were the main entry points into Southern Africa for troops coming to fight in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902).

British troops disembarking at the Durban docks in 1899 (The South African Military History Society)

The tokens are the following: Berthe, Jeannette, Martha (Durban) and Mademoiselle Janne, Lina de Lorme, Mascotte (Cape Town).

Berthe (Hern’s Handbook on Southern African Tokens), Martha and Jeannette (MTB South African Tokens)

Janne (Noble Numismatics), Lina de Lorme (Hern’s Handbook on Southern African Tokens) and Mascotte (Noonan’s Mayfair)

As we shall see, with one exception, the tokens in most cases show clear similarities regarding their sizes, composition, place of manufacture (France) and maker, being Cartaux of Paris. In addition, their date of circulation being during the Anglo Boer war era and running into...

In part one of this two-part paper (click here to read), we mentioned an article written by G.F. Hill of the British Museum in The Classical Review in October 1897. It concerns an astonishing find made approximately four years earlier of ancient bronze Greek and Roman coins at Fort Grosvenor in Pondoland... “The site of what had once been a Bantu hut was being excavated in search of treasure, when, some ten feet below the surface, the diggers came upon a calabash which crumbled away in their hands”. Hill wrote that the coins ended up in the collection of Mr. Thomas Cook, a businessman from East Pondoland who was present during the excavation and could testify that they were all found together.

A researcher, J.F. Schofield of Durban commented in 1927 on the find and was of the opinion that the ancient coins fell into three distinctive groups, unlike Hill, who identifies two groups being Ptolemaic (305 to 204 BC) and Roman (296 -313 AD). Schofield says the third group consists of Byzantine coins, one being of the reign of John I, who ruled from 969 to 976 AD.

Raymond Dart (left) and Joseph L. Shellshear, c. 1921 (The Embryo Project Encyclopedia)

In part 1 we posed the...

Pondoland (Mpondoland) is a geographical area on the mid-east coast of South Africa (Indian Ocean side) and is part of what was previously known as the Transkei. It borders Thembuland, the area from which our former president, Nelson Mandela, hails. His second wife, Winnie Madikizela, was actually born in Pondoland.

Map showing Pondoland

Originally, the hunter-gatherer San and Khoihoi people inhabited the region in scattered nomadic groups for thousands of years. Around 500 AD, Xhosa speaking Ngunis settled in the area as a consequence of the indigenous population’s expansion to the south.

Contact with Europeans occurred when sailing ships from Europe began to circumnavigate Southern Africa. From the 1500s onwards, ships were wrecked on the Pondoland coast, resulting in some of the castaways permanently settling there and later being absorbed into Mpondo communities. For instance, when the Grosvenor, an East Indiaman, ran ashore on 4 August 1782, the survivors met up with a European girl named Bessie. She was the wife of Tshomane, the paramount chief of the Mpondo, who herself had been shipwrecked there 40 years earlier.

Oil painting...