Next club meeting Monday 1st February 2016.

·         Subject - Convict Love Tokens By Tim Millet.

Meetings are held at the Abbey Baptist Church, Abbey Square, commencing at 7.00 p.m.

 

Notices

·         Please bring your Auction lots for March along to the next meeting and give them to Ian, together with a list of the items, any reserves and – most importantly – some form of identification and an e-mail address if you’ve got one, so Ian knows who the lots belong to.

·         Please note that the ring formed from a 1914 penny on show at the December meeting belonged to Brian Kendrick, not Brian Roberts. Apologies for the mix up.

 

January Meeting

January’s meeting was given over to Short Talks from Members. There were five talks.

 

Tony talked on his first love, which are hammered coins and particularly hammered crowns. He has about thirty and it has taken him some forty years to collect them. The first crowns were made by Henry VIII in the Tower mint but they were made of gold, silver ones were made by Edward VI starting in 1551 the first time a date had been put on an English coin using Arabic numerals. Crowns were issued in succeeding years also but some of the ones for 1553 were made by altering the dies for 1552 and there is a variety of 1553 without the inner circle.

 

The Scottish equivalent of the Crown was the Ryal, initially valued at 30/- and issued earlier than their English equivalents. It was nicknamed the ‘Sword’ Dollar, from its design.

 

Almost fifty years elapsed before the next issue of crowns by Elizabeth I in 1601. After her came James I/James VI of Scotland for whom there are three types of Crown, all very similar. During this reign we had the first occurrence of provenance marks, to show where the silver had come from. Charles I issued similar crowns throughout his reign up until the start of the Civil War in 1642. Crowns continued to be made during the Civil War at various mints as the King moved his headquarters. Nicholas Briot struck some milled crowns during this period. The Tower Mint continued to mint coins as usual, adding a P for Parliament and the ‘all seeing eye’ as mintmarks.

 

A new type of Crown, known as ‘Breeches’ coins were struck by Parliament after the King’s death and other coins were struck in Dublin for the continuing war in Ireland, known as Ormond crowns. This brought us to the end of the production of hammered crowns. Tony had brought an example from each type.

 

Neil talked on the place of Uffcombe in the history of coinage.

 

After Charles I was executed the Royal Mint had very little work to do, so they busied themselves making farthing tokens which they then sold around the country. This work carried on from 1649 to 1672, after Charles II had come to the throne. By this time there were complaints about the tokens no longer being redeemable and eventually they were knocked on the head and Regal issues sent out. Neil’s interest stems from a token he bought off Ebay, his second Uffcombe token but this one was unrecorded, issued by Thomas Baberstocke. It has a Merchant’s mark on the obverse. Neil took the token to Robert Thompson who told him it was genuine and referred him to a reference book called ‘Uffcombe Wills and Inventory 16th to 18th Century’. The significance of Uffcombe arises from 1543. Henry VIII was looking for a new wife and married Jane Seymour. The Seymours had their ‘headquarters’ in Wiltshre in the Parish of Great Bedwyn. The head of the family did a deal with the Diocese of Salisbury so he got the Parish of Great Bedwyn and the Diocese got the Parish of Uffcombe. Geographically Uffcombe was in Devon but for Church purposes it was in Wiltshire. In those times wills were administered by the Church so Uffcombe’s records were kept in Salisbury. Documents for the rest of Devon were stored in Exeter and were destroyed in the Second World War. Local historians have collated the Uffcombe records in two books and Neil found Mr. Baberstocke in there. He was a rich mercer and a widower when he issued the token, which has the initials of his children on it. Uffcombe has a surviving Woolen mill, now a museum. A second token was issued by Humphrey Burden who was a cloth worker and he had two ‘tenterhooks’ on his token. These were the devices used to hold the cloth while it was drying and the origin of the term ‘on tenterhooks’.

 

Alistair talked on a new collecting area, namely Building Society Ephemera. Building Societies started in the 18th Century for people who were not rich to raise the finance to purchase housing but did not come in to their own till the 19th Century. Banks at this time were only for rich people. There were two sorts, ‘Terminating’ and ‘Permanent’. Terminating Building Societies terminated once all the members had purchased a property, the last one ‘First Salisbury’ dissolved in 1980. Building Societies were seen as safe but boring, something that changed dramatically in the 1980/90s.

 

The top ten Building Societies in 1995 each had funds worth 10s of billions of pounds but by 2015 only a handful had more than 10 Billion apart from the Nationwide which sits on assets of 191 Billion pounds! This came about because of a liberalisation of financial services, leading to Building societies de-mutualising and becoming banks. This was followed by a large number of takeovers and mergers coupled with a number of catastrophic failures (eg. Northern Rock). From over 2000 societies in the 19th Century, mainly very local, we are down to just 48 and the number is still shrinking. Today, Building Societies do not have the regional coverage they used to have and tend to rely on internet accounts.

 

So, Alistair asked, what to collect? His answer was anything and everything! He pointed out that there is no established market, so prices are low but equally it’s difficult to find things to collect. Items that are available include Passbooks, mortgage repayment books and some of the bond/share issues which are quite elaborate. There are also ephemera from the actual offices, including nameplates and advertising items such as money boxes, the latter being the most popular on E-Bay.

 

Looking towards the earlier history of the Societies, Alistair pointed out that failures are not unheard of in the area and the largest Building Society of the age, the Liberator, collapsed in 1892 due to financial activities of its founder. This event prompted the Building Society Act to prevent the collapse of another Liberator Building Society. The oldest surviving Building Society in the world, formed in 1845, was the ‘Chesham Benefit Building Society’, which was finally taken over in 2010 by the Skipton. Other unusual societies include the Methodist Church, the Temperence Movement and more recently football clubs. Other possibilities include such diverse options as ‘Ones with silly names’ for example, ‘Always Ready Permanent’ the original name of  Northern Rock!

 

Graham  talked on “Chosen by Design”.

 

He told us about a number of items he had come across in the last year, the first being a medal, spotted at Kidlington. Intrigued, Graham eventually bought it for £5, only to discover that it was a Medal of the Order of the British Empire. It was sold later for £105 with the profit shared between Graham and the dealer (a good friend of Graham’s) he bought it off. Secondly was a token with a two storey shop front that took some identifying, eventually turning out to be an unknown variety of an unofficial Irish farthing from Waterford. Third was a silver 1965 Churchill Memorial Medal by Frank Kovacs. The obverse was a bust of Churchill based on a photographic portrait of 1941 by Karsh. In the background is a shelf, with books to the left and brushes to the right, to symbolise Churchill’s distinction as an author and artist. The reverse shows a defiant soldier with raised fist guarding England’s shores, a tempestuous channel around and a flight of enemy planes above, adapted from a 1940 London Evening Standard cartoon.

 

Then we had a series of tokens, starting with a 1d token from the Hull lead works, a very rugged piece of industrial Design issued in 1812, a silver Bristol & Wiltshire Token of 1811, a token issued by ‘A Dealer In Ancient & Modern Coins Medals Antiques Etc’, William Till of 17 Great Russell Street, Covent Garden London in 1834 and finally, in the same theme, a Sir Geoffrey Duncan Token Middlesex ¼d by Denton, a coin dealer in Hospital Gate, Smithfield. A Jefferey Dunstan token (another coin dealer), featuring two men looking at each other with the legend ‘We Three Blockheads Be’, the third blockhead being the person scrutinising the token! And finally a token for the Montrose Lunatic Hospital, showing that you don’t have to be mad to be a coin collector, but it probably helps!

 

John talked about a trip to see West Ham! That’s West Ham in Pevensey Sussex, not the football ground. John had decided to go there after seeing a picture of ‘The Mint House’ on one of the postcards in his collection. He recounted details of the journey, including missing the station and details of Pevensey Castle, which he passed on route. The first change he noted was that the postcard showed a thatched roof, whereas the roof itself was tiled, also the building was for sale. John looked at the building from the outside but there wasn’t much to see, so he went for lunch in the pub opposite. On telling the landlady of his reason for visiting, she brought down a picture of a tray of coins for him to see that had been produced at the mint. John then got talking to the only other customer in the pub at that time who, it turned out, visited the Reading area often having been to school there and on further questioning had in fact been to the same school as John but 15 years after Him. The landlady then returned with a book about the history of the area, which included such facts as the visit of Queen Mary to the Mint House in 1932, where she was presented with a set of coins that are probably still in Buckingham Palace. The Mint House has had varied use since it was built, including as residential property, a museum and an antiques shop. The Mint dates back to the time of William the Conqueror but has been in different hands though its current style dates back to 1542. It was odd to have the mint outside of the castle walls but this was because there were problems building the castle whereas the mint was completed first. The mint only produced silver pennies, for William I, William II, Henry I and Stephen. The mint can be yours for only £2-3 Million including the likelihood of a secret passage joining it to the castle.

 

The member's vote was for Alistair McKay to receive the Marc Myhill memorial shield.

 

 

Answers to Gavin’s Quiz

1.      What does PP stand for on Roman coins?  Pater Patriae

2.      What does RSR in the exergue of Roman coins designate?  Richborough mint (Rutupiae)

3.      When was the first British silver threepence issued? 1551

4.      What was a Bawbee and its English equivalent?  Billon Scottish sixpence, English halfpenny

5.      What is the most common currency denomination in the 17th century token series?  Farthing

6.      Where did the silver for the British SSC coinage of 1723 come from? Peru

7.      What was the highest face value copper token issued in the early19th century?  Birmingham Workhouse 6d

8.      What change takes place on the obverse of the British gothic florin after 1867?  BRITT instead of BRIT

9.      When were heraldic colouring lines added to Britannia’s shield on British bronze pennies? 1881

10.  Were British bronze pennies issued in 1923?  No

11.  Who designed the obverse of the 1887 Jubilee head coinage?  Sir Joachim Boehm

12.  Who was the first British coin issuing monarch of the House of Windsor? George V

13.  When were British bronze farthings demonetized?  31 December 1960

14.  When did a leek first appear on British coins?  1953 (sixpence, two shillings)

15.  What does VDB stand for on the reverse of the 1909 US cent?  Victor D Brenner (designer)

16.  In which country is the Lempira the currency unit?  Honduras

17.  Which country first issued euros in 2015? Lithuania

18.  Which country issued Escalins in the 17th century? Holland

19.  Which mint is denoted by K on French coins? Bordeaux

20.  Which British possession issued obols? Ionian Islands

 

Future Events.

Past Events

·         In January 1976 members heard a talk on Byzantine coins.

·         In January 1986 Mr J Woolly spoke about military medals awarded to the Ox & Bucks light infantry and how he was researching the details of the recipients

·         Since then the January meeting has been given over to short talks from members.

Club Secretary.