THE ROYAL MINT

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 128, 24 February 1938, Page 14

THE ROYAL MINT

Some Interesting Facts TWO EVENTFUL YEARS There is more in the Royal Mint than money. Ever since Sir Isaac Newton, theologian, scinetist and mathematician, superintended its operations, the interests of the Royal Mint have gone beyond mere coins and their content. The grateful receipt by the departmental library of the Newton Papers, sold at Sotheby’s in 1936 and presented to the Mint by Lord Wakefield, was mo mere gesture of institutional loyalty. The latest report of the deputy master and comptroller of the Royal Mint for the years 1935 and 1936 is in an appropriate vein, traversing artistic and sociological no less than statistical themes. The review of coinage designs occasioned by the advent of two new Kings set the Mint and its advisers by the ears. Argument arose between the sponsors of heraldic and pictorial art, but the advocates of British fauna on British coins were chastened to find only the red grouse peculiar to Britain. A series of royal animals was projected, but only the wren survived, represented on the new farthing, the companion to Drake’s "Golden Hind” now enshrined on the halfpenny.

Heraldry thus survived the movement to bestrew British coinage with cattle or corn or aeroplanes, and the Secretary of the Treasury was left, to ruminate on the mysterious dispensation which has ordained that it should be “only the extreme poles of political thought that can afford to express these through the vehicle of art.” A lively and sympathetic conservatism triumphed in the designing of the new coins, with only the grossly thickened and 12-sided threepence to excite by its novelty. Speculations about ornithology and the origins of myth and legend jostle in this report with astronomical figures of coins struck and in circulation. Here, it is explained why the wren is a royal bird of undoubtedly Nordic origin; and why the Scotsman cleaves with affection to the elusive silver threepence. There, it is stated that 244 million coins were struck in 1935 and a record number of 334 millions ins 1936. Yet even these figures are more than mere statistics. In 1036 they included 150,000 Maria Theresa thalers, dated 1780, inscribed Justitia et Glementia and destined for the .Soudan and Arabia. Even where the writ of the Duce now runs the effigy of Maria Theresa is still sought in trading transactions, aud the Roman (Mint is doing for Abyssinia what London hag done for the Reel Sea region. The coins struck for foreign countries tend to decline in number, as economic nationalism throws up Mints in the new post-war countries. But in 1935 and 1936 the Royal Mint was working overtime. A Silver Jubilee, two Accessions and one Coronation taxed its men and machines to the utmost, and raised acute problems of personnel. ' In all the Mint’s output, however, year after year, Coronation or no Coronation, bronze coins predominate. In January, 1936 j some £9,500,000 of bronze coin was in circulation, representing some four shillings’ w’orth for every man, woman and child - . About 1355 tons of bronze coin were issued in 1936; and the traffic receipts of the London Passenger Transport Board for a single year included 6000 tons of bronze." These bronze coins, as the report admits, are needlessly large and heavy. They were first introduced in 1860 after the style had been set sixty-nine years before in France when the brazen spoils of church .belfries were melted and coined. The British examples are now obsolete, and the heaviest in Europe. But to recoin between two and three thousand million pieces would take ten years, be .prohibitively expensive, and dislocate all the automatic machines in the country. I The thin end of the reform wedge is the new bronze threepence. Over thirty millions of these coins have left the Mint —only to vanish from sight under a new species of Gresham’s Law for hoarding “as novelties in waistcoat pockets and money boxes.”