Australian Banknotes - Private Bank Issues

Lot 2829    Session 10 (7.30pm Wednesday 19th November)    Australian Banknotes - Private Bank Issues

Estimate $7,000
Bid at live.noble.com.au
SOLD $6,000

GOVERNMENT HOUSE, Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land Police Fund, Edward Foord Bromley Esq., Treasurer of the Police Fund, Government police fund bill, £5.5.0, April 21 1821 (year 182 printed), No.167, to E.F.Bromley, hand signed by Lt. Governor William Sorell, black on white, watermarked paper with crude Britannia with shield on waves in oval on side, with additional four horizontal lines. Tatty with pieces missing, fair, but extremely rare.

Notes issued by the New South Wales Police Fund are well known (see W.J.Mira, The Note Issues of the Colonial Police Fund of New South Wales 1810-1824, 1979 [1990]), but issues from Van Diemen's Land are only noted by Mira (Coinage and Currency in New South Wales 1788-1829 etc.), on p.58, but these had never previously been described and illustrated.

Edward Foord Bromley (1777-1836) was a naval surgeon who arrived in Australia as surgeon-superintendent in March 1816. In November 1818 the secretary of state appointed him Naval Officer at Hobart Town. He went back to England and returned to Hobart in February 1820 and took up the position of treasurer of the Police Fund at a salary of £60. He also became a magistrate and a foundation shareholder in the Bank of Van Diemen's Land. However he is remembered chiefly for a spectacular misappropriation of colonial funds which was finally discovered in 1824.

Although Lieut-Governor Sorell approved his administration and his many friends supported him after his suspension, the evidence of the inquiry revealed incredible laxness and inefficiency. The degree of his personal guilt was never established and it seems likely that his convict clerk, Bartholomew Broughton, participated in the embezzlement. A varied career followed and he died in the Marine infirmary at Woolwich in England on 29 June 1836.

Only two specimens of the Van Diemen's Land Police Fund notes are known to exist in private hands and these examples probably form part of his misappropriation of treasury funds.

A most interesting note with a spectacular association with early Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land).