
This card stands for the Pound. Now you may know that as the standard British coinage, but maybe not that the name was first used in 1489. However the British Pound was not replaced by the euro.
There were other Pounds though - the Irish Pound, dating from the tenth century - and the Cypriot Pound, first used in 1879.
The removal of the Cypriot Pound did not affect the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, who did not choose to use the euro, nor the Pound; instead, they use the Turkish Lira.
Here we have Admiral of the Fleet Sir Alfred Dudley Pickman Rogers Pound, GCB, OM, GCVO, born in 1877, and who came to prominence in the First World War, as a result of his actions at the Battle of Jutland. By the time of the Second World War he was sixty years old, and serving as First Sea Lord, the figurehead of the Royal Navy, a job he did for four years. However, though he showed moments of brilliance, especially in the Battle of the Atlantic, there were also failures, the Norwegian Campaign, and the disaster that resulted from his decision not just to spread out Convoy PQ17 after they left their base in Iceland, but to not have covering forces in place - a decision which resulted in the loss of a hundred and fifty three merchant seamen, and twenty three ships, along with their valuable cargos, almost three thousand five hundred vehicles, and over two hundred aircraft. Within a year he had resigned, citing health reasons, and he died shortly after in 1943.
This proved to be a really fascinating set, with several twists. That code is from our original Australian and New Zealand Index, RB.30, issued in 1983, and in there the set is listed as :
Notable Persons. 60 x 41. Nd. (77). Number in series revised to exclude enemy personalities. Backs inscribed "77 Cards in the Series", later revised to "71 Cards", "70 Cards" and "68 Cards". First issued 1940. ... AU2-20.
By the time of the updated volume, part II, published in 1993, there had been quite a lot of research done, In the main Index the set is recorded as :
AU2-20. (Notable Persons). Subjects known in the four printings are listed under A.30, Handbook Section
The Handbook is at the reverse of the book, and there is indeed a list of all the cards. This will be scanned and uploaded into here tomorrow, but there is something intriguing that I will discuss now and that is the reference, in the original Australian and New Zealand Index, to the excluded cards being "enemy personalities". In fact, though the identities of two of those six cards were not known when our book went to print, these being cards 72 and 77, there is only one card that this applies to, and that is card 25, Herr Von Ribbentrop (Germany`s Foreign Minister). The other cards removed were :
card 73 - The Late Mr. J. V. Fairbairn (James Valentine Fairbairn, a fighter pilot in WW1, later the Australian Minister for Air and Civil Aviation, who died in an air crash in August 1940)
card 74 - Sir Thomas Blamey (Thomas Albert Blamey, the Commander of the Volunteer Expeditionary Force of the Australian Army in the Second World War).
card 75 - Admiral Colvin (Ragnar Musgrave Colvin, Commander of the Royal Australian Navy at the start of the Second World War)
card 76 - Flying Officer E "Cobber" Kain (Edgar James Kain, New Zealand fighter pilot, serving with the Royal Air Force. He also died in 1940, in an air crash, a farewell flight just before leaving his squadron)