On the money – Alison Healy on the curious case of the £1,000 note and the sacked servant girl

If you have ever lost money in your home, then you should take note of the curious case of the £1,000 note, the sacked servant girl and an industrious mouse. All might not yet be lost.
I first read this intriguing story in Allen Foster’s book, Historical Irish Oddities, and it seemed so unlikely that I had to find out more. It all began in the early 1830s when a Dubliner called Mrs Pearce made the somewhat unwise decision to keep her savings, in the form of a Bank of Ireland £1,000 note, in her wardrobe.
We don’t know how often she checked on the note’s wellbeing, but we do know that when she went to look at it one day, there it was – gone. As is the case in such sagas, the poor servant girl was immediately suspected. No doubt she protested her innocence, but Mrs Pearce sacked her anyway.
News of the missing fortune reached the ears of Bank of Ireland’s governor, the extravagantly-named William Chaigneau Colvill. With a name like that, he was destined to become a bank governor one day, and indeed his father had been governor, and his own son and grandson would also follow him into the family business.
FG Hall’s 1949 book on the history of Bank of Ireland explains that Governor Chaigneau Colvill was a benevolent type of fellow, and he took it upon himself to visit Mrs Pearce.
I have not seen a photograph of him, but I like to think he was a cross between Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, given what he did next. The governor asked to see where the money had been stored. When Mrs Pearce led him to the wardrobe, he took out the sliding slab on which the note had rested, lifted some boards and solved the mystery. According to FG Hall’s retelling, he had uncovered a mouse’s nest “beautifully lined out with a white fluffy material, which he recognised as Bank of Ireland tissue paper”.
Bank of Ireland historian Mick O’Farrell says the £1,000 note would be worth around €150,000 today.
Given the price of housing in Dublin, that sounds like good value for a mouse-sized home.
The governor carefully removed the nest and brought it to the bank’s printing house department. With the help of a microscope, the head of the printing house was able to pick out the serial number of the note.
In keeping with his benevolent nature, the governor ordered that a new note be issued to Mrs Pearce on one condition. She must re-employ the servant girl or pay her compensation for the false accusation of theft.
FG Hall doesn’t elaborate on the fate of the maligned servant girl, but he does add another twist to the tale. After Mrs Pearce died, her executors called to the governor. Mrs Pearse had never forgotten what he had done for her, and she included him in her will, leaving him a gold watch and a brooch in blue enamel with a spray of diamonds.
The governor moved to Reading after he retired, and died in 1864, but the watch still ticked on. According to FG Hall, it had been passed to the governor’s great grandson, and it was still keeping good time in 1949.
Mick O’Farrell has been studying the history of the bank for the past decade or so and says its extensive archive, which stretches back to its foundation in 1783, might yet yield more information.
So if you are still wondering where your missing tenner went, it might well be providing a cosy bed for one of your uninvited lodgers. Of course, don’t rule out your dog as a prime suspect. Just look at the salutary tale of Cecil the dog. Back in December, Clayton and Carrie Law from Pittsburgh withdrew $4,000 for a home improvement job. However, their goldendoodle had other plans. Cecil quietly removed the envelope of money from the kitchen counter and proceeded to eat most of it within 30 minutes.
After contacting the vet and the bank for advice, the panicked couple pieced together about $1,500 from the torn bills. To avoid being permanently sequestered in the dog house Cecil helpfully vomited up a few hundred dollar notes. To retrieve more notes, the couple needed masks, gloves, and stomachs of steel. Over the following days, Cecil had no privacy when he answered the call of nature. The couple immediately scooped up his droppings, sifted them and carefully cleaned the torn notes with washing-up liquid before piecing them together. At the end of it all, they had rescued all but $450.
It brings a whole new meaning to the term money laundering.