A NOTEWORTHY exhibition has opened at the Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes, showing the history of banking in Devizes, Marlborough, Trowbride and Salisbury.

Coins and banknotes are a particular interest of the museum's curator, Dr Paul Robinson, and he has taken pleasure in researching and mounting the exhibition.

He said: "We have used objects from our own collection and from the County Records Office. We have turned up some very strange and interesting items."

Included in the collection are printing plates for notes printed by banks in Devizes and Marlborough and, more interestingly, counterfeits of them.

The salutary tale of one unfortunate counterfeiter from Bath is told whose partners turned Crown's evidence against him for making forgeries of notes from a Devizes bank.

He was very quickly convicted and executed.

One Devizes bank suffered a robbery in the 1820s when some £25,000 was stolen, an enormous amount of money for those days.

Remarkably, the bank survived the loss.

Dr Robinson said: "Most of these banks went into liquidation in the mid-19th century, either from mismanagement or misfortune. Later on, they were taken over by bigger concerns until we have the few big banks that we have today."

The exhibition's run has been extended until the end of January.