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I had the luck to pick this one up on ebay , unattributed 😊 An F148 high tide

ah! these are some of mine, the better ones.... to heavy to put in a folder so left in pouches 👍

Consider getting a specimen crown rather than the RE proof as it is much cheaper. The specimen is nice, has reflective fields (but no frosting), and comes in the same red box as the proof. My specimen (top) cost me £50 in 2020 and my RE proof (bottom) cost £500 15 years ago.

I hadn't realised GIV Crowns had got so high! This is my best, picked up about 15 years ago as part of an old family collection:

I think people get a bit worked up over the question of cleaning as the topic is somewhat nuanced. Every coin in circulation showing signs of wear has effectively been cleaned because the act of circulation ensures that contact is made with other surfaces which rub against each other. i.e. nothing different to taking a the use of chemical cloth to a coin and rubbing. That just speeds up the process. The only thing that is offensive in the eyes of most collectors is a case of a polished coin, with or without the use of chemical substances. Personally I love toning for the fact it gives added confidence that the surfaces have not been messed about with, but even that has a few caveats because silver dip will leave a residue on the coin which over time will give the piece in question a typically pinkish hue. Any coin in someone's pocket will end up from friction with lots of faint parallel lines, because they were there. Without polishing chemically, I defy anyone to see the difference between pocket rub and a soft cloth, though clearly it would be possible in the case of demonetised coins to use your loaf and conclude that not being in circulation any more, the only option left is deliberate. In the case of the Morgan above, if the surfaces aren't reflective, probably not other than 'cleaning' from circulation, because there is clearly wear to the high points.

These are the best of my bunch, 1864 is probably the best example that I have, these as the rest I have were boot fair finds well over 30 years ago, pre computers internet day and age...... also It turns out 12 months have passed by it was 1 year today that I first joined www.predecimal.com/forum 👍🍻

Many thanks for the suggestion – I could list a dozen Brexity coin matters, but you immediately came up with one that I never thought of! Three points come to my own mind concerning the BM “Money Gallery”. 1) There is a useful account about how it came into existence here – straight from the horse’s mouth https://icomon.mini.icom.museum/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2019/11/The_HSBC_Money_Gallery_at_the_British_Museum__Access_to_excellence.pdf “In 1995 HSBC Holdings PLC, the international financial group, with a deliberate focus on the increasingly globalised nature of monetary transactions, agreed to provide a donation worth £2,000,000 for the project” I am not sure when you visited – but the “deliberate focus on the increasingly globalised nature of monetary transactions” definitely lay behind that 1997 plan - to make sure every country got representation - and this seems surely linked to the advertising strategies of HSBC some years back (Just search Youtube for “HSBC” and “culture”). So my feeling is not that Soho matters were deliberately dropped. More like - it just did not fit the HSBC core narrative and was forgotten. I will add, knowing the sort of money that international brands pump into football, at 2 million, the BM rather sold itself short. Or maybe, scholarly interest is just a niche matter these days? 2) From my own side, it was the reorganisation of the gallery under Citi funding around 2012 that troubled. You point out the change of name, from “Coins and Medals” to “Money”. Under Citi only one long wall was left devoted to “Coins”. The other entire wall was now devoted to “Money”. Predictably the “Money” wall culminated in……... credit cards. Citibank made many billions from Credit cards, and was part of the associated anti-cash/coin advertising push back in the day. It seems curiously difficult to find the Citi BM donation on line – but I seem to recall it was 4 million. Personally that seems to me a cheap price for what rather looks like a shot at re-writing history. 3) More fundamentally, my fear is that these international money men are coming to the institution with the mind set of an advertising agent. Grabbing the attention of the general public is the core aim, scholarly accuracy sometimes lagging a long long way behind. Very specifically I can point to a Youtube video of the current curator, appointed post Citi, holding a silver pound coin of Charles I and saying the words: “it is a pound weight in silver” Oh dear. Rob Tye

I was fortunate enough to pick up mine before the prices went completely crazy:

Nice coin, and I wish I had brought one before it got so expensive. £200 was a good deal even then I think.

I picked this up for about £200 over 20 years ago: I wouldn't rate it as a thousand pound coin but should be well over what I paid!

I did message the seller to tell him what it was but he chose not to amend the description and luckily several people recognised it.

Another one of these sold on ebay a couple of days ago for over £260. Perhaps a little better than the one Pete pictured above last year, but not great. Again not attributed, but nevertheless attracted a lot of interest.

One is ON the truncation (Rare), the other is UNDER the truncation (Common)

7 Million for 3rd (Veiled) portrait, 1300 for 2nd (Jubilee head) portrait.

I remember my A level Chemistry teacher telling me that people used to wash their hands with benzene in university labs. Glad that it was banned by my days. But there are of course more "hazardous" substances that are still commonly used in labs because there are no safer alternatives. For example, if I have to choose between dipping my finger into benzene or into concentrated nitric acid, then my choice will of course be benzene.

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.

Try and get some more capsules for them like the one the Jubilee head Victoria is in. Those PVC ones break down over time and leave a sticky green residue on your coins.

This is a close up of my George IV crown I got from a large collection that was a gift. It is a lot worse condition than yours Paddy.

hey, we won didn't we?!