April 2005.
Next club meeting Monday 10th May 2004.
Please mote that in order to meet the speakers travel arrangements the talk will begin I/4 hour earlier at 7.45pm. This is a rearranged talk since the scheduled speaker is unable to attend in May. However, all is not lost and Mr D Symons, curator of the Birmingham Museum, will be giving his talk entitled "Of Celts & Cartwheels" in July.
Meetings are held at the Abbey Baptist Church, Abbey Square, commencing at 7.00 p.m.
April meeting.
At the last months meeting Mr P Preston-Morley gave a talk on the Gold Coins of the USA, well illustrated with slides from the superb collection in the Smithsonian Institute.
An independent monetary system based on the dollar containing 24.75 grains of gold was established with the coinage act of 1792. The first gold coins minted in 1795/96 were in denominations of $10, $5 and $2.5. Known as the Eagle, 1/2 Eagle and 1/4 Eagle mintages were very low, typically being 5000, 8000 and less than 1000 respectively. The first engraver was Robert Scott, who was succeeded by John Riech in 1807.
The discovery of gold in the late 1840's in California and other western states drastically altered the situation and other denominations came into being, namely:
The speaker also gave some details of engravers William Kneass, James Longacre, William Hubbell and Christian Sobrecht, the latter being responsible for the Liberty Head design.
The upsurge in the denominations mentioned above was as a direct result of the discovery of large gold deposits. As a consequence numerous private issues preceded the official denominations. The first were merely slugs of gold of guaranteed weight and fineness issued by Augustus Humbert. However, they were not accepted by the US government, even though Mr Humbert. On the other hand commerce did not share the same reservations and their success resulted in many other California companies to also issue their own pieces, such as Kellos & Co, Morton's, Bechtler's and Moffat Ltd.
Subsequently, as the population and industry grew branch mints were set up in various US cities. These actions put paid to the private issues.
During the talk mention was made of the famous Brasher Doubloon.
Spring social - Skittles Evening 9th April 2005
Eighteen people attended the recent skittles evening at the Red Lion in Theale. As always it was a good fun evening with a buffet and fine ale. To begin with we played the traditional opening where the object is to simply to knock down as many of the nine pins as possible with 3 balls. The fun though really begins with the Last year the boys won by the narrowest of margins. This year all was reversed, for it was the turn of the second game called `killer' where the object is quite simple - hit a skittle or loose a life. Sounds easy. Don't you believe it. The sting in the tail is that the skittles are only reset once all the pins are down. Hence as the game progresses there is less to aim at.
Our thanks go to the scorers and pin setters who made the evening flow. To end the evening, the chairman said a few words of thanks to all the members and guests for their participation and presented the winners with their prizes of bottles of wine.
Overall a highly enjoyable and fun evening with good drinks and a substantial buffet.
Future Events.
Past Events
The guest speaker 30 years was Dr. C Kraay who spoke on the Greek Coinage of Sicily..
20 years ago the well known expert on token coinage Mr. G. Berry gave a talk entitled Computing Through the Ages - Reckoning Counters/Boards and How to Use Them. This I remember was a very interesting talk, if somewhat mind blowing, in trying to follow how accounts were summed, subtracted and totalled. For those interested there is a good book in the library on this very subject.
April 1994 was a member's evening.