The Vanishing Threepenny

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 45, 23 February 1938, Page 4

The Vanishing Threepenny

According to the Deputy Master and Comptroller of the Royal Mint, the British public has carried out a large-scale conjuring-trick, and has caused to vanish the majority of the 30,000,000 new twelve-sided threepenny bits. They have vanished, that is to say, out of circulation into waistcoat pockets, and the deeper recesses of feminine handbags. The spell of their novelty has transformed them horn coins to keepsakes and mascots.

It is something of an indignity to have overtaken such useful publie servants; and it is an illuminating reflection upon human foibles. It may be that many threepeunies are kept for their intrinsic charm, although usually in a place ill-adapted for displaying it. Others are doubtless retained, as the cant phrase has it, “for luck.” For in an age when superstition is, on the whole, fast losing its grip, this particular manifestation of it is still widespread; and the mascot, despite the smiles he incurs from the more level-headed, still, in a thousand odd shapes, presses an insidious claim to supernatural powers, and finds many, more or less serious, clients.

The fii-st assumption of the theory of luck is a divorce from reason; but to attribute the control of events arbitrarily to an object, and bow before a lord of misrule with credentials from one’s own caprice, is surely a last pathetic jest at the expense of the intelligence. In the .present case the threepenny mascoteers would do well to ignore chance for a little change.