The Three Pound Coin ( VILLAGE TALES Ep. 6 )
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| Where did Milton find his ‘three pound coin’? |
Milton Peacock, the retired solicitor who lives opposite the Old Mill in our village and found the body of Mark Musgrave, passed by one Tuesday morning while I was dead-heading some roses in my front garden. He said he had heard that I had been in the antiques business and asked if I knew anything about coins. I replied that I was no numismatist but the house clearances I handled usually resulted in some coinage, and I could give him a name and number of a specialist.
Two days later he called in to say that the person I had put him on to had been quite short with him to the point of rudeness. I apologised on his behalf and asked Milton what had evoked such a hostile response. He produced from his pocket a small felt bag, within that some cotton wadding out of which he revealed a coin.
‘What do you think of that?’ He asked me.
To my uneducated eye at first it looked like an old bun penny, but one that had been minted a decade or so ago. The head looked like our present queen, so a bun penny it wasn’t.
‘Well, it looks like it could be a token or a medal, I’ve handled a few of those,’ I told him but then took a closer look. ‘except it had the latin inscription running round the milled edge, like our present coinage. What is it?’ I asked.
‘Now look,’ he said and turned the coin over to reveal the other side. It was splendidly illuminated with scrolls, swags and other decoration, then I noticed the pound sign and with some incredulity, the figure ‘3’, and beneath it what I presumed to be a date,1969.
‘Impossible,’ was my immediate reaction, then, ‘Mmm, can I have a closer look?’ To which he nodded.
I always carry a small magnifying glass which I used to examine hall marks on gold and silver, I don’t need it now but old habits die hard.
‘Where did you find it?’ I asked him while I scrutinised the coin to see if it had any tell-tale signs. I can’t say of ‘forgery’ because as far as I know a £3 coin doesn’t exist. The minting as far as I could tell was as good, if not better, than any coin I’d seen.
‘Where did you get it?’ I asked again, but he refused to tell me, so that made me suspicious and he noticed.
‘I acquired it perfectly legally,’ he assured me.
‘Well that’s a real find,’ I said handing the, whatever it was, back to him.
Then as he left I suggested it could be quite valuable to a collector, more as compensation than any real judgement.
I considered the, water it was, most likely to be a joke but I had to admit the workmanship was superb so it then made me wonder if a counterfeiter had produced it as an exercise. Then it hit me, a gambling chip, but with the queen’s head? Maybe not.
A week or so passed then one Sunday I picked up my papers and on the bottom of the front-page, was a small photo of Mr. Milton Peacock with his extraordinary find. Apparently the papers expert numismatist was impressed and puzzled in equal measure. When asked, the government dismissed it as a hoax and would say no more. Various experts had their say but the, water it was, remained pretty much a mystery.
I passed Milton’s cottage one morning and noticed a sign hung on his front gate which informed callers interested in the coin that only those with appointments may be seen. Obviously the newspaper article had created a lot of interest but that was all to stop suddenly after the paper printed another article about the coin. Under the headline, ‘Three Pound Coin Mystery Solved,’ Apparently a delegation from the home office had visited Milton and given him and several representatives of the press a full and frank explanation, which went roughly as follows,
‘The Royal Mint regularly upgrades their machinery and this had happened just prior 1969, remember that was the date on the coin. Any new machinery had to be put through a rigorous testing procedure to see if they could meet the exacting British standards. A Swiss firm had been selected from a short list of companies with a proven record in minting. It is a long established principal that no coinage intended for use in Britain should be minted abroad. The problem was solved by a young designer at the mint itself. She suggested a coin be designed to include sufficient detailing to test the stamping accuracy, speed, etc. but was not legal tender. After various committees had thrown the idea backwards and forwards it was approved and the design was given the go ahead. Several civil servants and an inspector travelled to Switzerland to oversee the production and examine closely the results. A run of several thousand coins was minted, five of which were brought back for examination by the Royal Household, Downing Street, etc. All were accounted for, returned and destroyed before the contract was awarded. Mystery solved, or so we thought.
The article avoided go into how the coin had arrived in Milton’s pocket, which rather interested me more.
Milton had been travelling for several months and I had virtually forgotten about the coin. By accident one early evening I bumped into him in The Old Drum and Monkey, the village local more often referred to as The Drum. His tipple was whiskey, Bushmills actually, and by the looks of it he had drunk several. I was keen to know what had happened but I was very patient and eventually he was keen to talk. A week or two after the papers had got hold of the story he’d been approached at his front gate by a suited gent with a rolled up umbrella suggesting they go inside for a chat. As Milton opened his front door and asked the gent who he was, two other gents, similarly attired appeared from nowhere and bustled their way in, taking Milton with them. Milton was slurring a bit by then but the gist of his story was that they represented the government department that had given the ‘full and frank’ explanation to the press and now wanted the stolen coin returned. Milton made a fuss and told them he came by it honestly. They said they didn’t care and told him they were not going to leave without it. Milton realised the two accomplices were military enforcers so Milton, being a retired solicitor, warned then against any ‘strong arm tactics’ and told them he knew his rights. The two henchmen backed off and the first gent apologised and said it was all a misunderstanding. All they wanted to do was to come to a mutually agreed solution, and how much did he want?
Milton wouldn’t say what they offered but it was substantial, the only condition was that he was to say nothing about the deal and if anyone asked he had sold it through an intermediary acting on behalf an anonymous collector.
So that was that, or so we thought.
It was getting on for a year later that Milton, who by then I’d got to know quite well, invited me to share a bottle of single malt a friend in Ireland had sent him. After the third glass he admitted the real reason he didn’t want to see me in The Drum, where we usually met, but privately without any ears wagging. He told me of how his daughter worked in London, something to do with government home office select committees and how she’d met a woman who had a connection with the Royal Mint. They’d struck up a conversation when Cilla, Milton’s daughter, had told her about the Three Pound Coin. The woman, who had to remain nameless, shook her head apparently and said that the story in the paper was rubbish, though she didn’t actually use that word. She said the decision to use the Swiss firm had been made long before and had already been installed at the mint. This was in advance of decimalisation taking place in 1971, at the time the government attitude was not to follow Europe down their treacherous monetary path but to retain fiscal independence. British policy is always to act independently, if another country decides to do something eminently sensible, Whitehall will insist we can do it in our own way and better. When failure and chaos ensues, eventually we do it their way, but always begrudgingly.
So when decimalisation loomed and a closer Europe threatened, a committee was set up to decide whether to follow the Europeans and use the decimal system or develop our own ‘improved’ version. The ‘pounds, shillings, and pence’ system was still in place and was traditional and that was another reason why it should not be changed. Tradition is often used to justify making the same mistake year after year. It was decided that some investigation should be seen to be done, even if the result was a forgone conclusion.
The result was a compromise, or if you prefer, a fudge. Rather than adopting a foreign system, a British system would respect and honour its noble history, the empire etc. and adopt the ‘duodecimal system, in other words the twelve or dozenary system, which was already in existence. There was already twelve pence to the pound, twelve inches to the foot, many items, particularly eggs, were sold in dozens, and half dozens so it was thought that the public would be less confused than if 10 was the base. There would still be twelve pence to the shilling, but then there would be twelve shillings to the pound. Rather than paper notes, which are notoriously short lived, the system would convert to mainly coinage. The one pound note would be replaced by the one pound coin, the ten pound note would become the twelve pound coin, the fiver becomes the six pound coin, and for convenience the ‘three pound coin’ would be introduced. Working designs for all the coins were approved, but it was decided that the three pound coin would be used for the trial, it being of sufficient size to take a testing design, and cheaper in materials to produce.
Milton’s informant was not party to the actual production but she believed that all the work was done by the mint and none of it was commissioned abroad.
For the press and their readers the three pound coin rests in the possession of an unknown collector, Milton Peacock was handsomely paid making various charitable donations which remain anonymous, obviously. The government knows nothing other than what they had read in the papers, and I’m still no closer to finding out where Milton acquired his three pound coin. I suppose some things will always have to remain a mystery.
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Written and read by Barkley Johnson.
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