T Pope & Co unofficial farthing (W860) - name obliterated on die ?

[JLS]

Recently was pleased to pick up an example of the very rare W860 1/4d issued by the coiner T Pope & Co. of Birmingham. Later noticed that the name of "POPE" appears to have been crudely obliterated from the die - replaced by a random series of raised marks. I don't think this is merely damage to the token because the raised marks left look nothing like POPE. Alternative explanations most welcome !

 

[bagerap]

Pope produced a number of tokens for the Great Exhibition, 8 or 9 I think, many of which were pressed by Heatons. Yours is listed by Leslie Lewis Allen as HP-B320 and in BHM it's 2507.

I've not seen anything like it before, and a heck of a lot of Crystal Palace stuff has gone through my hands. It's certainly too widespread to be a filled die.

[JLS]

8 hours ago, bagerap said:

Pope produced a number of tokens for the Great Exhibition, 8 or 9 I think, many of which were pressed by Heatons. Yours is listed by Leslie Lewis Allen as HP-B320 and in BHM it's 2507.

I've not seen anything like it before, and a heck of a lot of Crystal Palace stuff has gone through my hands. It's certainly too widespread to be a filled die.

Interesting that it's also in BHM - will have a look when I next get a chance. 

Definitely not a filled die, and hard to see it as damage to the die from normal use when the rim and inner circle are unaffected, although it's impossible to completely rule this out,.

My theory is that someone tried to replace the "Pope" on the original die with something (it looks vaguely like "PAID" to me; would make sense if this is really a 1/4d token as presumed by Withers) but damaged the die in the process so that the tokens struck were unsatisfactory.