Collectable new £5 notes auctioned for charities
Howard Lake | 11 October 2016 | News
The new £5 polymer notes have been benefiting charities through the #fivergiver social media campaign, but an auction of some of the more collectable notes has just raised over £200,000 for three charities.
Auctioneer Spink & Son sold 232 of the notes on behalf of the Bank of England. They are valuable to collectors because they have very low serial numbers, meaning that they were some of the very first to be printed.
The first note, number AA01 000001, was donated to HM The Queen. There are 999,999 fivers with the AA01 prefix.
The next lowest serial number note that is publicly available was AA01 000017, which sold for £4,150. The next note, AA01 000018, sold for £2,400.
The 232 notes up for auction sold for a total of £203,820.
Charity beneficiaries
The three charities that benefited were Bliss, The Lily Foundation, and the Myotubular Trust. They were selected by Bank of England staff.
At least one other charity has benefited. The note with the serial number AA01 001945 has been donated to The Churchill War Rooms, an appropriate gift given that sir Winston Churchill appears on the reverse of the new note.
Main image: Bank of England
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.