May 19th. 2015.
Next
club meeting Monday 1st June
2015.
This is the club's
AGM and Annual display Competition for the Michael Broome Cup. The AGM is the
meeting where the officer's report the status of the club and the membership
voice their concerns/ideas. It is also the time where the club committee is
elected for the forthcoming year.
With this
newsletter are the Committee and Financial Reports for the AGM, plus the 2014
AGM minutes. Please take time to read the reports prior to the meeting as it is
not the intention to repeat the content verbatim at the meeting. Rather the key
points will be briefly covered so that the AGM can focus on membership comments
and discussions.
The second part of
the evening will be devoted to the annual display competition, with the winner
being awarded the Michael Broome Memorial Trophy for 1 year. The competition is
open to all members and can cover any topic connected to numismatics. So to all
members please have a go and enter a display.
There may be some
limited time available at the end of the meeting for dealing but please note
that the time before the start of the meeting is for members to look at the
Displays and perhaps renew their memberships.
Meetings are held
at the
May Meeting
We were pleased to
have a visit from several members of the Worthing
club for the talk this month, which was a talk by Derek Aldred,
entitled ‘Propaganda & Inflation from the old Curiosity Shop’.
Derek started with
a picture of a Nazi Party rally where all the members were saluting Hitler. By
means of adding the slogan ‘Who wants a pizza?’ at the bottom of the picture,
Derek was able to show how easy it was to puncture the bubble of propaganda.
Derek then gave us
a potted history of the life of Charles Dickens, together with numismatic
references to Dickens, such as Centenary medals and the Royal Mint Bicentenary
commemorative £2 coin. Finally he settled on Dickens’ masterpiece ‘The Old
Curiosity Shop’. First published in 1841 it quickly became a best seller and
its story of Little Nell and her Grandfather went on to enthrall people ever
since. It is believed the original model for the shop was a Bric-a-Brac shop in Fetter lane, owned by a Mrs. Haines and it is
known that Dickens used to visit the shop. The building now known as ‘The Old
Curiosity Shop’ is not far away in Portsmouth St. This site became famous and
is visited by Dickens’ fans from all over the World and features on postcards
etc. It is now a handmade shoe shop.
Another ‘Old
Curiosity Shop’ had been established in Falmouth by John Burton in the late
1860s. John Burton used to acquire anything unusual and the shop soon filled up
with curios from all over the World. John Burton also dealt in old coins and
when in 1865 a hoard of Roman coins was found nearby and he acquired some of
these which he sold. David explained how at least one of these, generously
donated to the Falmouth Museum, almost certainly came from elsewhere, belonging
to a period unlikely to have been represented in the hoard. He also used
countermarked Japanese tokens for advertising. The shop was visited by Prince
Edward (later Edward VII) which prompted a change of name to ‘The Royal Old
Curiosity Shop’. John Burton even offered to buy Smeaton’s
Lighthouse, for a modern day equivalent of £50,000, when it was to be replaced
by the Eddystone Lighthouse in 1882. It was to stand
on the headland by Pendennis Castle but of course was
finally to end up at Plymouth. The centenary of Smeaton’s
Tower in 1859 was celebrated by its use on the reverse of the new bronze
coinage, however David pointed out that the tower on the coins bears a striking
resemblance to the one in Shoreham by Sea in Sussex, close to where Leonard Wyon, the coin designer lived.
Another eccentric
dealer was known as ‘Uncle Fred’ - Fred Jeffery - famous in the 1960s. He used
banknote business cards, based on the ones used in the 1920s overprinted on
inflation notes from Germany. Derek pointed out that some Germans blamed Jews
for the hyperinflation. The highest denomination issued was for 100 Billion
Marks and piles of notes were given to children to play with. He went on to
show other examples of overprinting for advertising purposes.
Large quantities of
the notes crossed the Atlantic and were used similarly in America. In Scotland
the Unionist Party used the notes for Political advertising. In the inter-war
years in Germany the overprinted notes were used to attack Jews. In 1933 when
the Nazis came to power, Baron Von Mildenstein was sent to Palestine to talk to Zionists about
resettling German Jews. A medal was struck to commemorate the event, being very
unusual in having both the Star of David and the abbreviation NAZI on the same
piece. The designer was Ludwig Lauer responsible for the miniature Victorian
and Edwardian toy money, which had an excellent reproduction of Smeaton’s Tower.
Derek warned us that Hitler’s portrait rarely appeared
on official coinage so any offered are likely to be fakes and he gave details
of three known official tokens. Hitler’s portrait was present on stamps in
Germany though. During the war several notes were overprinted by the Resistance
for propaganda purposes, although similar propaganda was put out by the
Germans, using English stamps. One of the occupied territories was the Channel
Islands and Derek warned that some cinema tokens from the war are available on Ebay though in fact no tokens were ever issued, they are
fantasies. Also for propaganda purposes, Ghetto currency used to circulate in
some prison camps. In fact they had no genuine use and were only there to show
off to the visiting Swiss Red Cross.
Rommel arranged air drops of copies of English £1
notes, with an Arabic reverse, designed to undermine the British authority in
the area. British did similar with drops on the Continent and also in the Far
East. Such things continued to happen much nearer modern times in Vietnam,
where the Americans made propaganda drops. Such things are not new and Derek
showed some of the early countermarks from the Suffragette movement. Irish
coins in the 1930s were countermarked by Protestants recalling the Battle of
the Boyne and this carried on right through the Troubles with both sides
involved, using banknotes as well as coins.
The overthrow of the Shah also led to overprinted
notes, where it was necessary to issue notes but new notes could not be done in
time, so overprinted ones were used with additional propaganda. Continuing to
the modern day, propaganda notes were used in the War against Saddam Hussein. The
dictator had set up several archaeological expeditions to search out the
historic sites in Iraq but sadly many of these have been destroyed by Islamic
State recently, as have the Museums and the artefacts in them, along with the
tomb of Saddam Hussein. Such actions were advertised on the Internet, which has
become the new medium of dissemination.
Just over the border from where Saddam was found in
Afghanistan is the Kashmir Art Palace, known locally as “The Old Curiosity
Shop” – one of many around the World.
An exceptionally well presented talk was followed by a
question and answer session and a vote of thanks to Derek.
Future Events.
·
St. James’s Auctions Ltd. – 10 Charles II St., London
20th May
·
London Coin Fair at Holiday Inn, Bloomsbury - 6th June
·
Midland Coin Fair – 14th June
Past Events
·
10 years ago in May 2005 Mr
Graham Dyer, who replaced the advertised speaker, gave a talk entitled `the
withdrawn sixpence of 1887 - a tragedy of errors'
·
20 years ago Marion Archibald
spoke on recently found early medieval treasure troves such as the Woodhouse
find of Sceattes and the Box find of Matilda &
Stephen pennies
·
10 years before Marion
Archibald spoke about a day in her life at the BM covering dealer/ collector
relationships, funding and the security the BM coin treasures
·
40 years ago Mr D Metcalf delivered a talk on the coinage of Henry 7th
Club
Secretary.