The use of the word “instrument” makes the phrase more obscure than it needs to be, but it refers to the word “cheque” earlier in the sentence. I suspect most modern British people probably don’t know what it means, but most will have noticed that all the cheques in a chequebook have “A/C Payee only” written vertically across the middle—or at least those old enough to have used cheques will! But people in 1935 would have most likely known what it meant, because 1) in those days cheques were extremely widespread (no credit or debit cards) and 2) unlike today, cheques were frequently written by hand on a standard piece of paper (although chequebooks did exist). The very fact that the phrase was used by a popular author writing for a mass audience (the cases were originally published in Punch and The Evening Standard) should incline you in that direction anyway.
Note incidentally that Herbert’s most famous case is most likely The Negotiable Cow.
The use of the word “instrument” makes the phrase more obscure than it needs to be, but it refers to the word “cheque” earlier in the sentence. I suspect most modern British people probably don’t know what it means, but most will have noticed that all the cheques in a chequebook have “A/C Payee only” written vertically across the middle—or at least those old enough to have used cheques will! But people in 1935 would have most likely known what it meant, because 1) in those days cheques were extremely widespread (no credit or debit cards) and 2) unlike today, cheques were frequently written by hand on a standard piece of paper (although chequebooks did exist). The very fact that the phrase was used by a popular author writing for a mass audience (the cases were originally published in Punch and The Evening Standard) should incline you in that direction anyway.
Note incidentally that Herbert’s most famous case is most likely The Negotiable Cow.
Just fyi, my checks don’t say anything like that, and the closest I can find on Google Images just says, “Account Payee.”