November 24th 2000.
Next club meeting Monday 4th December 2000.
Meetings are held at the Abbey Baptist Church, Abbey Square, commencing at 7.00 p.m.
November meeting.
Unfortunately this proved a non-starter as far as our speaker was concerned as he fell victim to the atrocious weather that we were getting at that time, however despite the adverse conditions we still had a creditable turnout. I understand that Mr. Wren has said he will fulfil his engagement sometime in the next season.
Having found ourselves without a speaker, we found a willing volunteer in the shape of Frank. Frank gave us a very entertaining 90 minutes, showing colour slides of ancient coins from the earliest Greek issues up to the late Roman period with a résumé on events. As all this was done at very short notice this was a very laudable effort and our sincere thanks go to Frank for stepping in and entertaining us for the evening.
There were five dealer tables open and eighteen members attended.
Annual Club Auction
This is the last call for auction lots for the January auction, please try and make this a good evening. I expect everybody to put a few lots in, I am sure you must have a few duplicates that you don't need.
Raffle
John ran the raffle, which was won by Maurice who received £10.
British Museum Open Day
The Reading coin club display at the British Museum went very well. Hundreds of visitors went through the gallery and our volunteers were kept busy, explaining the display items, identifying coins from out star 'hands-on' attraction - a shoebox with a few kilos of assorted coins, as well as answering any other coin related questions that came our way.
Many thanks to all the committee for making the display possible and to Dave and Kay for assisting with the running and a guest appearance by Muriel, who had provided some of the late Michael's material for the display.
Apart from the free lunch (?!) the club was also given two books for the library (Coin Yearbook 2000 and Banknote Yearbook 2001) and some notelets giving advice on how to store coins from the British Museum's own department. We hope that this event has generated some good publicity for the club, possibly on television. One membership enquiry was received while the display was on.
BANS.
The BANS meeting revealed that there had been some difficulties in the administration of the Societies financial affairs. This is now believed to be under control. Financially BANS is on a firm footing, with some £13,000 pounds in assets, although some £6,000 is being held in reserve for disasters.
The current scheme of charging a fixed amount per member is to be abandoned and replaced by a flat fee of £5 per association.
Last year each association was to have been sent a free copy of all the BANS publications (BANS have a lot of spares) but this didn't happen. It should happen this year. A new publication, by Peter Preston-Morley, is an index of all the known resources of numismatic information (museums, mints etc.) in the UK and we should also receive a copy of it.
Reports from around the country indicated that there are still a lot of active associations, though the problem of attracting younger members remains.
Many clubs now have web sites and these are starting to generate queries/membership requests for the clubs involved.
Glasgow's congress went very well and next year's is in Manchester on 7-8 April.
Future Events.
Coin Fair. Saturday 16th December. Commonwealth Institute. Kensington. London W8.
Obituaries
John Kent from the British Museum died recently. We have a recording of the talk he gave in 1998, about Roman coins, in the library.
We have also heard that Patrick Finn, a specialist in Irish and hammered coinage, has died.
20 Years ago.
This meeting was the Annual Auction, when the club benefited to the tune of £24.32 by way of commission, which, as the secretary of the day noted, "Was an improvement over the previous few years"