10:06am Wednesday 20th August 2008
By Geoffrey Virr
My faith in ‘chip and pin’ having been dented, together with the disappearance of ‘cash back’ on card purchases, lead me to handle more ‘coin of the realm’ in the last year or so than I have done for many a year.
That lead to my actually giving the coins more than a passing glance and then on to the Royal Mint website and a mine of information on our coinage.
The illustrated pages on the one pound coin set me off on a search to get a full set of all the £1 coins for each of my grandchildren.
There turned out to be 23 different 'design and date' combinations, with a new £1 coin being issued each year, bar two, since the coin was introduced.
Some designs have been used for more than just a single year. The number of coins issued each year has varied widely adding to the challenge of the search, (details again on the Royal Mint web-site).
Eventually I collected all the sets I needed by finding the last coin of one of the designs of which only very few, relatively speaking, were issued.
The exercise also produced £1 coins of several different designs minted for the Isle of Man, Jersey, and Gibraltar, being used in England. A practice showing how little attention most of us pay to the coins we handle.
In recent years sets of four designs have been commissioned, with one different but related design to represent England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
One of each of these designs has then been issued in sequence over a four year cycle.
A welcome change in my opinion to the variety of heraldic designs, all interesting, but used perhaps too often in earlier years.
A look at the £1 coins in your pocket and at the Royal Mint website might re-awaken the school-boy collector in many a man, as well as giving present school-boys another thing to collect, (much cheaper than football player cards).
My quest for complete sets of the special designs of 50 pence and £2 coins, which have been issued, is only limping along. I suspect that so few of some of the designs have been issued that getting them all is a near to hopeless task.
Every time I consider giving up I get a new coin, so on and on it goes.
Adding a little spice to the coin hunting exercise has been the discovery of an apparent £1 coin forgery where the date of issue and the design did not match.
Further constructive fun was enjoyed by the opportunity of this oldie to point out to the Royal Mint, or rather the youngsters of the over-paid quango that no doubt approves coin designs, that they had made two less than wise decisions in recent times.
The first was to use a design featuring I.K. Brunel still smoking a cigar when it could easily have been removed.
Not a wise move when the Government is spending a fortune trying to stop people smoking.
The second was to use a design featuring the bridge known as the ‘Egyptian bridge’, on a £1 coin representing Northern Ireland. A little research shows that the bridge was the scene of a controversial, but still remembered, encounter albeit many years ago.
Good luck with your coin hunting!
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.croydonguardian.co.uk/trade_directory/