April 2nd 2021.
Upcoming club
meetings:
Monday 5th April – 8pm.
·
Subject - This
will be another ‘Zoom’ meeting, open to all members. We will be having a talk
from Neil as well as bringing members up to date with any developments.
February Meeting
John opened the meeting with fourteen people in
attendance. John was able to announce that he had contacted all the members and all are fine, though we now have two people in the club who have
had Covid and recovered. Also almost all the members
have had their first jab, which tells you something about the average age of
club members! The next thing to say is that following the ‘Roadmap’ there is a
possibility of a physical meeting in July – Peter is investigating with the
Church. The next two meetings fall on Bank Holidays but in the current
situation the members present decided we didn’t need
to move them. Graham had had an e-mail advising him that the Birmingham Coin
Fair was planning to go ahead on July 11 and the Medallion conference may take
place the next day.
Peter Hall advised that this
year we will only have a statement of accounts and pick up on the audit trail
next year because there have been so few transactions. We are also once again
considering not having a membership fee during the 21-22 season for existing
members.
Following this we proceeded
with Chris’s talk on ‘The Revolutionary Politics of the Late 18th
Century’, illustrated with ‘Condor’ Tokens. Chris began by outlining the
political situation in the US.
At this time European settlers were expanding their territory and were looking to the
home country to help them. In England’s case it was the thirteen states and for
France it was French Louisiana. This led to the French/Indian war of 1754 to
1763 and the ‘Seven Years’ war of 1754 to 1763, which also affected Europe.
England sought to raise taxes from the settlers to pay for the settler’s
protection, the American’s refused and this led to the American Revolution.
American rebels set up ‘Committees
of Correspondence’, with a rigid membership, excluding anyone loyal to Britain,
to coordinate opposition against Americans who supported Britain. They replaced
all loyal Americans in positions of power or influence and arranged boycotts of
British goods and were able to influence local Government in a way similar to the present day Chinese Communist Party to the
extent that they were operating as a ‘shadow’ Government by 1764. This did not
go down well with the ‘Powers that Be’ back home.
Chris then went on to
explain what ‘Condor’ tokens were. They are call Condor tokens after James Conder,
a noted British Numismatist who not only studied the series but even issued his
own tokens. They were produced at a time when there was a shortage of copper currency
in the 18th Century, partly caused by the Industrial Revolution. As
people moved to the cities there was less opportunity for bartering and a
greater need for coinage. Paradoxically, the Industrial Revolution meant that low cost minting was now a possibility and people began to
produce their own token coinages. There are five categories of Condor Tokens,
trade tokens to be used by one company, generic trade tokens for use as change,
tokens for advertising, satire or political commentary, tokens for collectors
often showing attractive or important places and finally, private tokens
produced as vanity pieces.
Circumstances that gave rise
to the production of Condors also included the discovery of huge amounts of copper
at the Parys mine in Wales and the problem of large numbers of counterfeits in circulation.
Thomas Williams, a representative of the Parys offered the technology for
producing edge lettering on coins to help with the counterfeiting to the Royal Mint but the Mint refused and by 1786 2/3 of all copper
coins in circulation were counterfeit. The Mint’s response was to shut down production.
Parys then issued its own tokens in order to pay its
workers, shortly copied by other businesses following their lead.
Chris then spoke about political
tokens, which were issued by political radicals in response to fiscal problems all
over Europe at the time. He showed two tokens, one with the message ‘Remember
the debtors in Ilchester (sic) Goal’ and a second one illustrating a man being
shanghaied. Two other tokens had a ‘tree of liberty’ obverse one with a
guillotine reverse and the other with a French cockerel attacking a cowering
British Lion and a third had a Bonfire on the obverse and proclaiming
‘The End of Oppression’. All of these challenged the establishment with many of
them were produced by Thomas Spence, a radical who conceived a plan for property redistribution
and political reform. But there were tokens from
the Loyalists too which Chris illustrated with a piece which had the King’s
portrait and another, with ‘The Wrongs of Man’ parodying Tom Paine, a third had
cojoined portraits of the King and Queen with the message ‘Peace and Harmony’
and a fourth with a highly symbolised attack on the unstable situation in
France compared with Great Britain. After Spence went bankrupt his tokens were
bought by Skidmore who produced them for gain, rather than any political motive
and some of these are mules with obverse and reverse giving opposing messages,
although they can be looked at as equivocal statements.
Some tokens were purely
satirical such as one that was ‘payable at Newgate prison’ mentioning several well known radicals, many were used
for advertising including by lawyers and finally we had examples of tokens made
purely for collectors.
Chris then went on to
address the use of tokens in the American Revolution, starting with the Boston
Tea Party. The history of the event is different to the normal story of Great
Britain implementing huge taxes and the plucky Americans rising
up in revolt. In fact taxes on tea had been
around for quite some time (since 1767) before the Tea Party and it was the lowering of the tax on tea to aid the
East India Company to make cheap imports of tea to the American colonies that
caused a problem. These imports undercut the Dutch tea smuggled illegally into
the States. So, in December 1773 the EIC ships are boarded
and the tea thrown into the Bay. This action was carried out by the ‘Sons of
Liberty’ a group composed of the smugglers and the local merchants threatened
by the imports. In a second example, Chris went on to talk about George Washington,
normally seen as a paragon of virtue. In fact he was a
slave owner who used slave labour on his Mount Vernon Estate. Also a land speculator he acquired large amounts of land on
Ohio’s Western Frontier and then removed the indigenous peoples from it. His
view was the natives needed to become Westernised. He was not alone and clearly
would have been unhappy with Great Britain’s attempts to stifle his ambitions,
particularly the move against slavery in London, nicely illustrated by a
classic token with the picture of a kneeling slave and the legend ‘Am I not a
man and a brother’. Another move he would have
objected to was the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which sought to protect the
lands of the indigenous Americans by not allowing the settlers to move into
American Indian lands. The land had been won from the French by the British but the settlers didn’t want to pay the cost of the
war that won it, they only wanted to be able to exploit the land. Neil Beaton
helpfully pointed out that George Washington was also a Mason and that when
America started producing coins, they were all made in Birmingham in the UK.
Many thanks to Chris for a very informative talk, well researched and illustrated.
And last, but not least and
article by Doug
HOW I BECAME
INTERESTED IN COINS
By Douglas
These days the newsletter is one of
the highlights of my month. The report of John's January talk mirrored how I
became interested in coins. As with John, my interest developed in stages.
The first stage started sometime
before I was 14 years old with Liverpool Halfpennies and after seeing a picture
of an ‘H’ penny, I included the collecting of those along with ‘KN’ pennies. I
started collecting Liverpool Halfpennies as a result of
being given a strange coin in my change on a tram journey in my hometown of
Liverpool. My first instinct was to
complain to the conductor that he had given me a foreign coin, but something
made me put it into my left trouser pocket for examination when I got
home. At home, I realised it was a
Liverpool Halfpenny, and at that point I was hooked! From then on, I started to put all my change
in my left pocket (for later examination) and only spent from my right
pocket. I now have a collection of 9
Halfpennies, two of which I bought with real money at the tables in the club,
the rest in change during visits back home prior to decimalisation. I also bought my one and only Liverpool Shilling
at the club. When I borrowed a book from the club's library, I realised that
there were many types of Liverpool Halfpennies, and one day I will get round to
sorting out my collection by type!
Later in life, the next stage of
collecting coins started when I was on holiday with some friends and visited a
Castle. At the gift shop our friend’s son wanted to buy some replica Roman
coins and I said I could get some real Roman coins for far less money. At the next club meeting I bought 2 coins,
one with Romulus and Remus for their daughter and their son a coin depicting a
horseback rider killing another on the ground.
Their son took his coin into his school, but until his mother went to
the school to explain the origin of the coin, the teacher did not believe the
coin was a real Roman one. To see the pleasure on their faces when holding a
real Roman coin in their hands gave me such a thrill. Others of our friends then wanted similar
coins for their children, and so the collecting expanded. Years later, these children have grown up,
married and it is their children that want their own Roman coins. I must give credit to Peter Hall for the
considerable support he has given me over the years in this enterprise.
Soon after the Roman coins
distribution had started, the third stage in my collection began. At a club auction, a silver coin that was cut
in half came up and presumably because of its condition nobody was bidding for
it. I thought it would be of historical interest to my young friends. I
therefore put in a low bid which was successful. I think that coin was a Henry
III silver coin that I now have in my small collection of historic coins. This collection is made up of coins which
nobody seemed to want to bid for and includes a Charles I silver coin with
trimmed edges, 2 Maundy coins one a Victoria 4 pence coin and one with solder
fixed on one side. Pride of place in the
collection is a 38mm James I gold coin, I don't remember
how or when I acquired it, but it gets more “oohs” and “ahhs”
than any other coin in my collection. As
with the Roman coins, to be able to hold such a historical coin in their own
hands together with explaining why the Henry III coin was cut in half, greatly
increases the children’s appreciation of history. Thanks to subsequent auctions I now have a
small collection of historically interesting coins with very
little monetary value!
To finish off, I now give away my ‘H’
and ‘KN’ pennies which illustrate the use of mint marks. I always say that I am
not a coin collector but maybe I should say that I am a collector of coins that
nobody else wants! Finally, as someone
who is not a fully-fledged numismatist, I am extremely honoured to be allowed
in as a member of an organisation with so many exceptional experts, all of whom
treat me as an equal.
Douglas
March 2021
Past Events
10 years ago - Mike Fulford gave a talk on Silchester
and the Roman Empire
20 Years ago – Phil
gave a talk on Coins and Artifacts found in Berks, Bucks and Oxon
50 Years ago – Alan Ashmole visited us and talked about the coinage of the
Sultanate of Oman