February 25th 2021.
Upcoming club
meetings:
Monday 1st March – 8pm.
·
Subject - This
will be another ‘Zoom’ meeting, open to all members. We will be having a talk
from Chris as well as bringing members up to date with any developments.
January Meeting
John opened the meeting which was attended by fifteen
members, with one apology for absence.
We then moved to John’s talk for the evening, ‘How I made my Collection’.
My
collection is based on the coins I used to spend when I was young, and could
collect from change, so UK only. I first formed it between 1966-1971 from the
coins I found in change. This meant it was composed of pennies and halfpennies
going back to 1860, brass threepences going back to 1937 and
sixpences/shillings/florins/halfcrowns going back to
1920. It was virtually unheard of for any pre 1920 silver to turn up by the
time I started the collection. My plan, a common one at the time, was to
collect all the coins for all the years, essentially putting together a ‘year
set’ for each of the years. I have never specialised in any one denomination.
All of this to be done before ‘D-day’ No! not that one. I decided that a sensible start year would be
1902 when Edward VII ascended the throne but then realised I ought to include third
farthings that were really only intended for Malta,
farthings which I could only just remember, silver threepences including some
from Maundy sets, otherwise unobtainable and even crowns. I never considered
gold because at £5 a sovereign that was impossible on ten bob a week pocket
money! I was aided by some of the local shops who looked out for things for me
and nobody could come near our house without little Johnny ‘Checking their Change’!
Part 1
It all started on a wet
Wednesday afternoon when I was round my best mate’s house because it was too
wet to go and play football. Football was the number one thing then because
England had won the World Cup and Coventry were in the First division. However my best mate (now a professor of law in Bristol) had
a cunning scheme. He had heard that old coins could be valuable
and he had lots of them. He produced a shoebox filled with pennies and we
worked out that the head side had kings and queens on them (got to start
somewhere) and the tail side had dates, which we proceeded to put into order. Our
oldest one was from 1860, to be honest a bit of a guess it was so worn and we also realised that quite a few dates were
missing. A suitable ‘Bible’ was purchased and the hunt for coins began in
earnest. I became obsessed, one of those teenage things after all I was just
about the age when the facts of life were being revealed to me, namely
Girls
don’t like football much
Girls
aren’t too keen on collecting coins either.
With
all these distractions, my collection grew slowly. Not helped when ‘big
brother’ would pinch halfcrowns to go out with his
mates on a Saturday night (he says he gave them all back). I discovered there
were coin shops in Coventry and got to know the owners and as ‘D-day’
approached I got the little blue plastic sets, containing the new decimal coins
from the bank and marvelled at the new five and ten ‘new pence’ coins entering
circulation. I recorded the collection on slides and miraculously still have
the slides. A ‘photo archive’ with lots of pictures of worn
out coins.
‘D-day’
was a bit of an anti-climax as it all went so smoothly and then in almost no time
at all the coins I collected had gone forever.
Part 2
Coinwise I became a member of the Royal Mint coin club and faithfully bought
the yearly proof sets, continuing my theme of collecting year sets. New sets used
to come out in the year they were made for but then they have gradually been
coming out earlier and earlier. It wasn’t very
interesting. Collecting from change was especially boring – Oh! Another 1971
twopence!! Meanwhile I had a ‘gap year’ job at Courtaulds,
went to university, did a bit of physics and a bit of computing. While working
at the university, I was reduced to picking up foreign coins from my colleagues
when they went to overseas conferences.
My
other hobby is music and I’ve played in various bands over the years and coming
back from a gig where I’d crashed out on someone’s floor in South London I went through London Bridge train station. It was a
Saturday morning and the place was full of coin
dealers. After something like fifteen years I once again marvelled at the items
on offer and realised that I could now afford to spend more than ten bob on a coin. In fact the prices
for the coins had not gone up by that much in the intervening years and I
resolved to upgrade the old collection. If you do the arithmetic there are just
under 700 coins needed (including proofs) to cover the pre-decimal back to 1902
and I’ve managed to secure almost all of them in EF or above and currently I’m
only missing the ’34 crown. It has taken me from 1988 till now to replace
everything and these days all I do is tinker at the edges gradually replacing
pieces with better grades. A brief stay in California found me putting together
a collection of ‘pennies’, just keeping my hand in, so to speak.
So, what’s changed?
When I started collecting I used PVC pockets like everyone else, then moved
onto Whitman type folders, then individual year sets in cardboard but these
days I use proper coin cabinets, bought from Peter Nichols in St. Leonards. My
first cabinet was a present for my fiftieth birthday, the second was purchased
from the proceeds of selling my guitar amp and so on. The layout for each tray
was a result of some negotiation with the cabinet maker himself. He told me
that bespoke trays like this were a fairly common
request.
The
photo archive has moved on too, slides are no longer used now as I can carry
high quality digital photos of the collection and I’ve
written an ‘app’ to allow me to access the photos on my phone. The ‘Bible’ has
been replaced by a bookshelf full of all kinds of numismatic references. I even
have foreign coins, somewhere between five and ten thousand, and some
banknotes, no idea why? I don’t do much with the RM
these days, my last year set was from 2016, a leaving present when I retired
from my job as a dispensing optician, though I have bought a commemorative 50p
for Rosalind Franklin and am currently waiting for the commemorative 50p celebrating
50 years of decimalisation. Coins from the old collection now form a set of
spares from which I make year sets to give to friends when they have a ‘big’
birthday. Rather than collect from the coins in my change I buy coins these days
mainly at coin fairs or the club. Coin shops have all but disappeared and I haven’t developed the trick of buying coins online, though I
do go in to Coincraft from time to time, to gasp at
the prices rather than the coins. My latest acquisition though is from the
local hardware shop, who look out for things for me, the 2020 Diversity 50p.
So
in many ways, the collection is essentially complete. Having just become a grandfather
for the first time has prompted us to rewrite wills and consider what will
happen to the collection after I go. Nobody in the family has shown any
interest in coin collecting and if I haven’t already disposed of it I have decided to leave the collection to my nephews and
niece, so they can sell it and split the proceeds between them.
Photo Graham
A soldier serving with the
British Expeditionary Force (BEF) during the First World War was fortunate to
have with him a number of coins in his pocket.
The occasion was the battle of Cambrai which involved a British attack
followed by the biggest German counter attack upon the
BEF since 1914.
The town of Cambria in the department of Nord, France was an important
supply point for the Hindenburg line and capture of the town, and the nearby Bourlon Ridge, would threaten the rear of the German line
to the north.
The battle took place between November 17th and 7th
December 1917 on the western front. It was the first large-scale effective use
of tanks for a military offensive.
During the hostilities, a Lieutenant Harold Kidd May serving with the 5th
Berkshire Regiment, was shot in the thigh. The full force of the bullet struck
the coins presumably preventing more serious injury.
The illustration clearly shows the extent of the damage, although
individual coin types can still be identified:
An English penny of Edward VII with Britannia visible and dated 1910
A young head Queen Victoria silver florin (2/-) of gothic design from
the period 1851-87.
A French silver 1 franc showing a leafy branch dividing denomination
and the date of 1916.
A well-circulated French silver 1 franc of Napoleon III dated 1866; the
crown and mantled arms are barely visible.
The final item was a metal tag or club pass (possibly the Savile
Club, Piccadilly, London), some of the letters of
which were impressed into the reverse of the 1916 franc when the bullet
impacted.
-------
It was whilst the writer was visiting a friend in Kidlington, the late
Cicely Lee, that upon learning of my interest arrangements were made for me to
view, identify, and photograph the items. Apparently, Lieutenant May returned
home on crutches. It is not recorded how many coins he had with him.
Upon recently re-visiting the story there was more to be told.
Born on 20th March 1898 in Holywood,
Co. Down, Harold was a member of the Belfast University Contingent of the
Officers’ Training Corps and received a commission as Second Lieutenant in the
Royal Berkshire Regiment on 26th August 1915.
He was sent to the front in April 1916 and wounded the following June.
He was reported missing on the 3rd July at
the Battle of the Somme but reappeared unhurt a few days later. In the August
he was promoted to Lieutenant. During
October he was wounded in the shoulder.
Subsequently, in February 1918 he was awarded the Military Cross, the
citation published in Supplement to
the London Gazette of July records:
‘For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty when in command of a
company in an attack. He moved about fearlessly under heavy machine gun fire,
directing the advance. When the advance was held up he
went forward to reconnoitre, and then directed his platoon to their objectives.
He superintended the consolidation with great energy, and
set his men a splendid example throughout.’
He was wounded for the third time on 1st December 1917, but
more seriously, receiving gunshot wounds to both legs. This provides more
detail to add to our first unfolding account of the pocket full of change. A
further local link is that he was transferred to England for treatment at a
hospital in Oxford.
Graham
Past Events
·
20 years ago –
‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ quiz devised by Michael and John.
·
50 years ago - The History of Calculating Machines by Mr. A.F.J. White
Club Secretary.