A new banknote is set to come into circulation next month in Scotland - and features famous Scots of both sides of it.
The new £100 polymer note replaces the current cotton version – which is part of the ‘bridge series’– and will feature Dr Flora Murray, CBE (1869-1923), the Scottish medical pioneer and suffragette.
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The note has important security features which include an anti-counterfeit ‘window effect’ – transparent windows within The Mound frontage and a transparent vertical stripe – on the front of the note.
Inside the vertical stripe is a multicoloured holographic foil strip which displays the image of Dr Murray, the bank’s logo, and ’£100.’ The foil also displays a ‘Northern Lights’ effect, with stars and colours resembling the phenomena appearing when the note is tilted.
In addition, as with the £5, £10, £20, and £50 polymer notes, the £100 note will have a tactile embossed feature, to aid the visually impaired.
In addition to the colourful foil image of Dr Murray, the front of the new note portrays the Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott, alongside an image of The Mound in Edinburgh as the current £100 cotton note does today.
Dr Murray was a Scottish physician and a committed member of the Women’s Social and Political Union suffragettes - in 1912, she founded the Women’s Hospital for Children with her lifelong partner, Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson, which provided healthcare for children of poor factory and shop workers.
With the onset of World War I in 1914, Dr Murray and Dr Garrett Anderson founded the feminist organisation ‘Women’s Hospital Corps’ and opened two military hospitals in France, staffed entirely by female suffragettes.
The hospitals were such a success that in 1915, the British war office provided them with premises in London, which they together transformed into the Endell Street Military Hospital, the first in the UK established for men by female medical professionals.
The hospitals treated more than 50,000 seriously injured soldiers.
Philip Grant, chairman of the Scottish Executive Committee at the Bank of Scotland, said: “We are so proud that our new £100 polymer note commemorates the remarkable work of Dr Flora Murray who, alongside being a medical pioneer, spent her adult life fighting for women’s rights as a suffragette.”
