NEW ZEALAND COINAGE

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 55, 6 March 1934, Page 7

NEW ZEALAND COINAGE

THE TRANSITION STAGES

WORK OF THE ROYAL MINT

(Fi-om "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, February 2. Already New Zealand half-crowns, florins, and sixpences have reached the Dominion. Shilling pieces and threepenny pieces will be dispatched in a fortnight's, time. They certainly are a very beautiful group of coins. The shillings have, like all the other denominations, the head of the King on one side; on the other is a crouching Maori warrior with the spear .in his hand. It is most remarkable that, the detail of the picture can be so accurately brought out. On the reverse side of the threepeny pieces is the picture of two Maori meres crossed. New Zealanders will receive their ne\v coinage by degrees. For the initial consignment already dispatched the Royal Mint has received an equivalent of English coinage from the Dominion. Armed with this first lot, the authorities will be able to issue it in return for its equivalent in English coinage from the banks 'and the public. English coinage collected in this way will be returned to the Royal Mint and an equivalent of New Zealand coinage will be sent out. It will thus be seen that the transfer of the coinage will take probably not less than a year. In due course, the Government will doubtless issue a proclamation that English coinage will cease to be legal tender on a certain date. In his last report, the Deputy Master and Comptroller of the Eoyal Mint (Sir .Robert Johnson) says that "it is clear that, in the Dominions and Colonies and Dependencies which have adopted special coinages, British tokens are destined sooner or.later] to disappear from circulation. A generation ago the Mint was regularly supplying large quantities of British silver to Australia, New Zealand, West Africa, South Africa, and the West Indies. Of these customers only the West Indian group remains, though British silver is still supplied from time to time to Nyasaland, Gibraltar, Malta, St. Helena" and the Falkland Islands." WOEK IN THE MINT. "Fortunately," Sir Robert Johnson continues, "so far as actual coining operations are concerned, these changes have not always meant a great reduction in work here. The Rhodcsian and the Irish Free State coinages have all been struck here, the West and East African requirements have generally been met here, and now New Zealand has come to the Mint for its new issue. Canada, Australia, and South Africa have for some rime struck their own coinages, but the resulting hiatus has so far been more thaii filled by the large orders for foreign'coinages which have been so marked a feature of our work for the past ten years. ■ On the whole, "the coining plant has been kept well in use. Indeed, as compared with the ten years before the war (1904----1913) when the average number of pieces struck was just under 136,000,000, the average number struck in the decade 1923-32 was over 188,000,000, of which 34,500,000 per annum on average were for foreign countries, which did not figure in the coinages of the prewar period at all."