Certainly I have 'small-c' collections, in the ordinary meaning anyone might use.
I have a whole room turned into a study/library, crowded with books and maps, which, despite a purge or two when moving house in the past, is still an impressive array of volumes strong on travel, history and photography, although there are many other topics covered, such as maritime matters, languages, clocks and watches, costume, railways and calligraphy. And it spills over into my lounge, where books on architecture, art and cookery are put. And quite a lot of fiction, mainly in the adventure and detective genres. There are major gaps, of course: nothing on sport, for instance; and biography, romantic fiction and comedy are hardly represented. But, taken as a whole, I think my large number of books and other paper material does justify the description of a 'library', particularly as there are a few genuinely old hardback volumes, some of them so large and heavy you could well call them 'tomes'.
I really have a lot of books and maps! And since I keep on adding to it, I must get around to installing some extra shelf space soon.
But it's not an Enthusiast's Collection. I haven't deliberately set out to get a copy of every book or map there is within my particular areas of interest. I don't think there are any 'first editions'. Or if there are, they are there accidentally.
And that's true of my photography too. My current digital archive contains an awful lot of pictures taken by me from 1965 onwards, plus many earlier photos given to me. Ballpark, say 150,000 digital images. I also have a lot of pictures that languish as prints and transparencies. Let's say 15,000 unscanned shots. It used to be more like 28,000 unscanned shots, but I've been chipping away at the digitisation, and have discarded many shots of places that were shot 'just for the record', and have since been re-photographed with a digital camera. They can be junked. But all my 'people shots' are still intact, and I have years of work ahead of me to get those scanned, captioned, and filed away in my archive, where they can be finally searched for in various ways, found, and enjoyed. You want to see all my shots of 'Fat Betty' in Yorkshire? I can present them to you in ten seconds.
But again my photos are not a deliberate Enthusiast's Collection. They have been built up at random, incrementally. I can show you - say - pictures of a great many Sussex country churches; many of the remotest railway stations in Scotland; every pretty fishing cove in the West Country; all the best standing stones on Dartmoor or Salisbury Plain; and most of the meals that I've cooked for myself in the last ten years; but none of it has been methodically put together to an all-prevailing plan, with 'rarity' and 'value' in mind. It has only been filed methodically.
I want you to bear all this in mind, as I turn to what I call my 'coin and banknote collection'. It wasn't created to satisfy a special lifelong interest. The interest was strictly temporary. It tried to be comprehensive, but it wasn't, and I have no regrets about that. When it came to a natural stop, on 15th February 1971, I was pleased at what I'd put together, but undismayed at the gaps.
I intended to gather in examples of coins and banknotes that had seemed a permanent part of my childhood - of British Life, even - but were suddenly going to disappear in the short space of five years. So, like many a youngster, I took to coin-collecting while I could, while the old coinage was still in circulation.
All I did was to examine my change daily and then pop anything old or interesting into a tin or jar.
It had to be put by out of pocket-money, so each coin 'collected' was a sacrifice. That's why during my five years of coin-collecting I had to ignore banknotes. I never possessed any! Well, that's not quite true. After I started work in 1970, I did - at last - have paper money to play with. But it had to go on things like clothes and shoes, and drinking way too much in the way of vodka-and-limes at the pub with my new friends. However, I managed to preserve a pristine ten-bob note before those were withdrawn.
I'm not going to discuss or illustrate every single old coin or banknote I have. I'm just going to discuss my favourite or most interesting old coins and banknotes, and not attempt to be either comprehensive or expert.
Although I wasn't a Collector Type, I nevertheless set about the task of gathering-in examples of the old coinage with method and organisation. Perhaps I had a notion of keeping my collection for ages afterwards, and possibly handing it down to my children, if I were ever forced to have any. Now at nearly sixty-eight, that fate (having children) has thankfully receded. But I still have the coins and banknotes. Sadly, I made no contemporary notes, wrote no contemporary essays, and put away very little supplementary material. (Sigh...what could I have done with a digital camera and a laptop to hand!) But I did acquire proper albums (these must have been birthday presents - surely I couldn't have bought them myself?) and a few booklets on what to collect:
Let's make a start on the coins.
First up, the dear little farthing - one quarter of a penny - which was still around when I was in junior school, though not seen very often. It disappeared at the start of 1961, when I was only eight. It was written as as '¼d'. Two of them would be a halfpenny (next up). Three of them were written as '¾d' - but this seemed to occur only in schoolroom arithmetic lessons! I usually made a hash of working with fractions like this.
I have two examples of a farthing:
I'd like to say that the eight-year-old Lucy Melford (or Dommett, as my surname was back then) handled these very coins when little, and has preserved them or nearly sixty years. But I can't. I wasn't interested in coins at the time. But once decimalisation was in the air from 1966, I did want a farthing for my Old Coinage Collection. So I went to a coin-collectors' shop and bought one. I think it cost me a pound, which is remarkable when you consider that a farthing was 1/960th of a pound. I suppose the shop-owner had to live. I rather think I bought the 1949 farthing, and that the other one (the 1942 farthing) came my way some years later, perhaps from Auntie Peg.
The design of this tiny coin was delightful, featuring a Jenny Wren, that secretive, drab, but lively little bird of the British countryside. I still think this was the most appealing coin ever minted.
Next up, the halfpenny, pronounced 'hay-penny'. It was written as '½d'. A penny and a halfpenny were called a 'penny-halfpenny' and written as '1½d'. Two pennies and a halfpenny were called 'tuppence-halfpenny' and written as '2½d'. I had quite a few halfpennies:
They were all taken from the money that came my way, and Dad (who was very indulgent in this respect) would willingly let me examine his change, which he tipped out onto a bedroom tray each evening. I wasn't so keen on bothering Mum, as she was inclined to pooh-pooh all my childish enthusiasms - but I probably do her an injustice, and she may well have let me go through her purse. My little brother Wayne, incidentally, wasn't in the slightest bit interested in getting an Old Coinage Collection together while it was still possible. He had other fish to fry.
In the early part of the 20th century, the halfpenny looked like a small version of the penny, and featured Britannia, as with these 1917 and 1931 examples:
It was, incidentally, absolutely normal to find very worn coins in one's change, some going back to the reign of Queen Victoria. Each coin might have passed through a million hands in its lifetime. That's a romantic thought in a way, although in our more health-conscious era, the amount of dirt and germs on these coins hardly bears thinking about. I washed my fingers after touching these! Actually, I consider all coins unhygienic, and that's one good reason why I'd like them to be gone.
Britannia is fine, but half-way through the last century a new design was introduced, featuring Sir Francis Drake's ship, the Golden Hind, as in these 1944 and 1967 examples:
Hurrah! Plunder on the Spanish Main! More than just a nod to the British seafaring tradition, this was an incitement to go a-roving and do fun things. No wonder the kid's programme Blue Peter used the same ship on its badge.
Now the penny. It was written as '1d'. This was the main coin of childhood. It was large and weighty, at least as it felt in little hands, and, along with the halfpenny, was the main coin for buying sweets with. It was also an interesting coin. All pennies featured Britannia, but there was a lighthouse too on some of them. And occasionally, on certain pre-1920 coins, extra little letters next to the date - H or KN - which signified that the penny had been minted away from London, out in the country, at Heaton or Kings Norton. Those were rare!
I had a booklet that showed exactly what to look for, and just how 'rare' the Heaton and Kings Norton pennies were.
Not that rare, really! But I managed to include a 1912 Heaton, a 1918 Heaton, and a 1919 Kings Norton in my collection. Here's an ordinary 1912 penny next to a 1912 Heaton penny:
And here's a 1919 Heaton penny:
This is a 1918 Kings Norton penny:
I photographed a page from a modern 2019 guide to coin values the other day, and as you can see, these Heaton and Kings Norton pennies can be worth quite a bit in uncirculated condition (click on the picture to enlarge it).
But mine are way too worn to be worth more than a fiver at most!
Even without these H or KN markings, pennies were fascinating because so many very old ones were in circulation. Here are Victorian pennies from 1863 and 1887, the first of which must have been a 105 years old when I added to my collection. Both are dirty and dusty, and feel greasy to the touch, but it's a rule that you never clean the coins you collect. A sobering thought: Jack The Ripper might have had these very coins in his pocket when he committed the Whitechapel Murders!
And here are two pennies from the very end of Queen Victoria's reign, dated 1898, 1899 and 1900:
I think I am right in saying that 120 of these - ten shillings' worth - was the normal weekly wage of a farm labourer at the time.
Here are twentieth century pennies, from 1902 and 1911, 1949 and 1966:
Next, the threepence, pronounced 'thruppence', more usually called the 'thruppenny bit'. It was written as '3d'. I have most of the later ones they minted:
After the farthing, this was my next-favourite coin. Or at least, the design with flowers was. Early in the last century, the threepence was a funny little silver coin. I have just one of these, from 1932:
It was small, and reminds me of the miniature coins in a set of Maundy Money - presented at one time to selected old folk by the monarch in person. It must have been easy to confuse this coin with the silver sixpence, so they changed the design entirely, the threepence becoming this unusual 'golden' coin, quite thick, with twelve flat edges around its circumference, as in these examples from 1937, 1943 and 1952:
That's the 'flower' design I so much liked. The 1943 coin is almost unblemished: I have a theory that during the war a lot of coins ended up in glass jars, put by for use after victory in the conflict, or just as a little nest-egg for the returning hero. So for several years such coins suffered no wear.
For Queen Elizabeth's new reign, the threepence was redesigned to show a portcullis, rather than those pretty flowers. I didn't care for it. It was too ordinary. Examples from 1953 and 1967:
Gosh, this is turning into a longer post than I thought possible! I'll leave the silver coinage and the banknotes for the next post.
