This item has being lying around in my office for around 20 years.
My new curatorial colleague, Nicky Reeves, spotted it the other day, and was intrigued. It's a cheque, carved on a broken slab of "Emerald Pearl" larvikite, a Permian alkaline igenous rock from near Oslo, in Norway. Here is its story.
As older readers will know, the Poll Tax, (officially known as the "Community Charge") was introduced by Margaret Thatcher's Tory government in Scotland in 1989-90, where it proved record-breakingly unpopular. The following year, it was introduced in England and Wales, where it soon became equally unpopular.
At this time, I was working in the excellent Leicester University Geology Department, and living in and enjoying the fine and mysteriously-underrated city of Leicester. Leicester had a Labour council, who hated the tax, but were forced to rely on it for income.
This left me in a dilemma. Paying the tax would be taken as support for it. Or at least acquiescence to it. Not paying the tax would deprive the council of money needed for schools, rubbish disposal, roads, museums, etc. What was I to do?
I had discovered that cheques did not need to be written using the official bits of paper from a cheque book. It was "well known" that a cheque had been written on a cow by a disgruntled farmer, and found to be legally valid. (I believed this at the time, but see here ). So I decided to write cheques on tablets of stone. This would be enjoyable, appropriate for a geologist, and would ensure that my money was accompanied by a clear and forceful statement of protest. Also, when it comes to messages, you can't get better than tablets of stone.
I inscribed the stone (using a pneumatic air pen like these) , and then took it to the bank, where it was slid under the security glass at the counter (In one later case, where a larger slab was used, the teller had to come came out to collect it). Staff at the Midland Bank (now closed; this building on London Road in Leicester) took the process entirely in their stride, and the money was taken out of my account, and transferred to the council at record-breaking speed. I subsequently paid several more Poll Tax bills in the same way.
My protest clearly helped* By the time I returned to Scotland in 1992, having got a job at Glasgow University, the Poll Tax was obviously doomed, and it finally expired in 1993/4.
A few years later, I was revisiting Leicester, and wondered what had become of my stone cheques. So I went into the Midland Bank branch on London Road, and enquired. All cheques have to be retained for some statutory period. Rather amazingly, two of my stone slabs were still "on file", I think in the same branch. All I had to do to get my slabs back was to write a couple of paper back-dated replacements to go on file in their place, and I was able to walk out of the bank with the stone cheques. One (on slate) is now in the numismatic collections of the Hunterian Museum, while I have kept this one.
* It would be interesting to know if anybody other than the bank staff in the London Road branch of the Midland Bank ever got to know of the existence of my stone cheque protest. Realistically, probably not. but I like to imagine that they did play some small, and perhaps decisive part in the demise of the Poll Tax.
My new curatorial colleague, Nicky Reeves, spotted it the other day, and was intrigued. It's a cheque, carved on a broken slab of "Emerald Pearl" larvikite, a Permian alkaline igenous rock from near Oslo, in Norway. Here is its story.
As older readers will know, the Poll Tax, (officially known as the "Community Charge") was introduced by Margaret Thatcher's Tory government in Scotland in 1989-90, where it proved record-breakingly unpopular. The following year, it was introduced in England and Wales, where it soon became equally unpopular.
At this time, I was working in the excellent Leicester University Geology Department, and living in and enjoying the fine and mysteriously-underrated city of Leicester. Leicester had a Labour council, who hated the tax, but were forced to rely on it for income.
This left me in a dilemma. Paying the tax would be taken as support for it. Or at least acquiescence to it. Not paying the tax would deprive the council of money needed for schools, rubbish disposal, roads, museums, etc. What was I to do?
I had discovered that cheques did not need to be written using the official bits of paper from a cheque book. It was "well known" that a cheque had been written on a cow by a disgruntled farmer, and found to be legally valid. (I believed this at the time, but see here ). So I decided to write cheques on tablets of stone. This would be enjoyable, appropriate for a geologist, and would ensure that my money was accompanied by a clear and forceful statement of protest. Also, when it comes to messages, you can't get better than tablets of stone.
I inscribed the stone (using a pneumatic air pen like these) , and then took it to the bank, where it was slid under the security glass at the counter (In one later case, where a larger slab was used, the teller had to come came out to collect it). Staff at the Midland Bank (now closed; this building on London Road in Leicester) took the process entirely in their stride, and the money was taken out of my account, and transferred to the council at record-breaking speed. I subsequently paid several more Poll Tax bills in the same way.
My protest clearly helped* By the time I returned to Scotland in 1992, having got a job at Glasgow University, the Poll Tax was obviously doomed, and it finally expired in 1993/4.
A few years later, I was revisiting Leicester, and wondered what had become of my stone cheques. So I went into the Midland Bank branch on London Road, and enquired. All cheques have to be retained for some statutory period. Rather amazingly, two of my stone slabs were still "on file", I think in the same branch. All I had to do to get my slabs back was to write a couple of paper back-dated replacements to go on file in their place, and I was able to walk out of the bank with the stone cheques. One (on slate) is now in the numismatic collections of the Hunterian Museum, while I have kept this one.
* It would be interesting to know if anybody other than the bank staff in the London Road branch of the Midland Bank ever got to know of the existence of my stone cheque protest. Realistically, probably not. but I like to imagine that they did play some small, and perhaps decisive part in the demise of the Poll Tax.
