Printing plate used in the early 19th Century by William Booth to print forged £5 Notes of the Dudley Old Bank. Bought in 1979 from Mrs C. L. Clarke.
Height 126, Length 202 mm. Accession number 1979 N 39.
The Prolific Forger
The copper plate pictured on the right, was used by William Booth, one of Birmingham’s most notorious criminals of the nineteenth century. Booth, who lived at Booths Farm in Perry Barr, was a prolific forger.
To provide some cover for his activities, Booth set himself up as a maker of copper tokens. However, at the same time, he was producing forgeries of the notes issued by some of the many small local banks that flourished in his time and he was also striking base-metal copies of the silver Bank of England tokens that began to be issued in 1811.
Ironically Booths forgeries of these tokens became so popular with collectors that they themselves were forged in the later nineteenth century!
The Dudley Old Bank, the victim of this particular example of Booths dishonest ingenuity, was founded in 1807. After going through a couple of changes of ownership it was absorbed into Lloyds Bank in 1866.
