OLD COINS STOLEN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 178, 31 July 1933, Page 6

OLD COINS STOLEN

REMOVED FROM MUSEUM POLICE ACT QUICKLY. Coins valued at approximately £5O were removed from the Alexander Aluseum, Wanganui, between closing time on Friday night last and eleven o’clock on Saturday morning. Within an hour of the matter being reported to the police, Detectives J. Walsh and J. Afurray arrested a young man and he will be charged with theft. The coins were all recovered. On Saturday morning Air. J. H. Burnet, director of the museum, noticed that certain coins were missing, and that the cases they had been kept in had been tampered with. He immediately reported the matter to the proper quarter. By mid-day the police had made an arrest. AVanganui people still have vivid recollections of the recent hunt for silver on the Great North Road, in which the two city detectives were engaged. AVhen the museum matter was reported there was every prospect of another search developing, this time for gold and silver both. Among the coins recovered by the police are several gold ones—golden sovereigns, golden guineas. Some of these would not pass a« legal tender today, and even if a person presented a sovereign over the counter in the same way as he transferred a pound note, he would be looked at twice. Presumably, therefore, the easiest method for disposing of such property would lie through the hands of dealers in gold, and a person adopting such a course would have to give fiomo satisfactory account of how he became possessed or the property. Sonic of the coins in this ease date back oxer 100 years.