Coins, Tokens and Historical Medals

George III (1760-1820), Pre-1816 issues, A uniface Trial for an effigy of the King, unsigned, struck on a blank intended for a Parys Mine Co Penny, 1787-8, laureate bust right in semi-high relief, set within three circumferential witness lines, edge on demand in london liverpool or anglesey, 28.14g (BMC –). Two obverse rim nicks at 8 o’clock and 11 o’clock, otherwise very fine and patinated, of the highest rarity; no other specimen believed known £900-£1,200

Provenance: W.W.C. Wilson Collection, Anderson Galleries Auction (New York), 16-18 November 1925.

The cataloguer strongly suspects that the portrait on this piece is by John Gregory Hancock. It is similar, in many respects, to the obverse of a pattern halfpenny, 1788, illustrated in BMC, plate 15, no. 929. The fact that the piece is on an Anglesey blank and Hancock engraved the dies for the early Anglesey pennies of 1787-8 could be seen as supporting this view. David Dykes, in Coinage and Currency in Eighteenth-Century Britain, the provincial coinage (p.160), says that the Peck coin was based on a design by Samuel More and struck by John Westwood in Birmingham. It, along with other 1788-dated halfpence and farthings by Droz and Pingo, were intended for submission to the Privy Council Committee on Coin in the spring of 1788 as samples for a national coinage contract. One is tempted to suggest that this is a trial for an intended penny associated with that endeavour that is otherwise apparently unknown.

William Walter Coulthard Wilson (1870-1924), a second-generation paper manufacturer and freemason from Montreal, joined the ANA in October 1907 and subsequently the British Numismatic Society in March 1909. He formed a collection of Canadian coins, tokens and medals that was unsurpassed at the time, principally through his purchase en bloc of the collection of Louis Casault, librarian of the Canadian Parliament, a deal brokered by Pierre Breton in 1909. The Wilson collection was catalogued for sale by Wayte Raymond in an arrangement probably facilitated by Howland Wood, then curator at the ANS, which led to a furious row between Wood and the dealer Thomas Elder, who believed that he should have been asked to tender for it