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Thanks for posting, that's an interesting history about the societies. I haven't had much experience of the numismatic academia personally though the BNS journals from start (~1903) are all now freely available on the internet. Peter Mitchell produced an entertaining description of many of the personalities in numismatic life, including museum staff and dealers, which is here: https://www.britnumsoc.org/publications/Digital BNJ/pdfs/2003_BNJ_73_21.pdf I am saddened but not surprised by the Leftward tilt of academia - this has happened over the last several decades and is in general anti-any celebrating or pride in Western history, culture and achievements, though I'm sure there are many honourable exceptions. The social pressure to conform to versions of this mindset will be strong. So parts of academia will exhibit an underlying anti-Western bias and this includes pre-20th century Western achievements (which includes our coinage, both from an artistic point of view and the great technological creation of modern coinage via Soho), as it will be lumped with "elitism, colonialism", etc etc, whatever buzzwords they need to fit the ideology of equivalence i.e. every society's culture/art is the same. An example of this is in the BM's Money and Medals (formerly Coins and Medals) gallery. The display has chronological descriptions around the walls of the history of coins. Now, coming to the late 18th century/early 19th century one would expect a big emphasis on the introduction of the steam press to machine make coinage, which was of a higher and more uniform standard to anything that had gone before. Boulton and Watt essentially created modern coin manufacture, which was then exported/copied around the globe. But instead GB is lumped in with Russia (!) in the title. Reading the small print revealed that we made some coins for them, but at first glance it looks like they were equals in coin manufacture/technology! No other country in the world would so underplay its own glorious heritage. The staff are of course wonderful as I have visited the reading room on several occasions over the years to view their collection, and they couldn't have been more helpful. I made another depressing discovery when I phoned Birmingham Museums a few years ago to ascertain if it was possible to see Peck's Soho collection which he bequeathed to them. Result - I ended up talking to someone who obviously knew nothing about coins (or Peck for that matter). She told me that their last official numismatist lost his job in 2014, and access to the collection was now impossible as it was all locked away and inaccessible. I don't think Peck would have approved somehow.