1933 penny

[Peder]

I couldn't get into work yesterday (no trains and no buses in the London area due to heavy snow!) and was watching an episode of The Antiques Roadshow on TV. one of the items that came up was a 1933 penny which as we know is extremely rare. From what was shown it looked genuine but surely this must be unlikely. The suspicious thing was that it looked as if it had been in circulation. I feel sure that many people would have know about its rarity and that it wouldn't last long as an ordinary piece I must have been watching a repeat but do any members know if this was followed up?

Peter

[Red Riley]

I couldn't get into work yesterday (no trains and no buses in the London area due to heavy snow!) and was watching an episode of The Antiques Roadshow on TV. one of the items that came up was a 1933 penny which as we know is extremely rare. From what was shown it looked genuine but surely this must be unlikely. The suspicious thing was that it looked as if it had been in circulation. I feel sure that many people would have know about its rarity and that it wouldn't last long as an ordinary piece I must have been watching a repeat but do any members know if this was followed up?

Peter

I believe that some facsimiles have been produced in the last few years but more convincingly, some 1935 pennies were carefully modified to produce extremely good copies. If I remember correctly, the only way to tell is that the final 3 is a fraction of a degree off the vertical, but it would take a microscope to spot it.

If this was the genuine article though, the police would be rather interested as the only one known to be at large was stolen from under a foundation stone in Manchester!

[DaveG38]

I couldn't get into work yesterday (no trains and no buses in the London area due to heavy snow!) and was watching an episode of The Antiques Roadshow on TV. one of the items that came up was a 1933 penny which as we know is extremely rare. From what was shown it looked genuine but surely this must be unlikely. The suspicious thing was that it looked as if it had been in circulation. I feel sure that many people would have know about its rarity and that it wouldn't last long as an ordinary piece I must have been watching a repeat but do any members know if this was followed up?

Peter

I saw a 1933 penny come up on a Roadshow a few years ago - I think it was from a lady from Ramsgate or Margate if I remember right. The 'expert' was, I think, Paul Atterbury who expressed considerable doubt about its authenticity. However, he also commented to the owner that this date was often faked by welding together an English George V obverse with an Australian 1933 reverse! When I saw this I was unable to see how this would work, since the 1933 reverse is nothing like Britannia (unless I missed something here), but either way, in the end I couldn't see how this coin can have been genuine. If it were I think it would have been splashed all over the newspapers.

Its also the case that there are a good many modern restrikes around which are pretty good and which get sold by a gentleman from Essex on ebay for about £14.99 - OK if you want something to fill a gap and have no chance of the real thing. Hers might have been one of these?

DaveG38

[Coppers]

Re: the Antiques Roadshow 33 penny, I came across the following on the Chard website...

"We noticed a coin being shown on the Antiques Road Show on Sunday 25th July 2004, and just caught the tail end of it. The A.R.S. (terrible acronym!) expert wasn't sure whether it was genuine, but thought about £30,000 was about right if genuine, but said that about one fake turned up every year. From the very quick shot we saw of the coin, it looked like a genuine penny, but with the second 3 of the date transplanted from another coin. This was only from noticing that there was a dark area near the date around the top right of the second 3. Obviously we would have needed a closer examination to be able to form a conclusive opinion. It surprises us, though, that the expert had not apparently examined the coin under magnification. We use a number of different magnifications up to x10, but find that a high definition photograph (6 megapixels), can be even better, provided the lighting is optimal.

Thanks to the BBC and Bright Ideas for providing us with an image of the Roadshow coin. We have rotated and cropped it, and show the its date area to the right. It is not easy to see clear and undisputable signs of alteration, but the final "3" of the date does show some peculiarities which we think are sufficient to conclude that it has been manufactured, and almost certainly from two other pennies in the 1930 to 1936 date range."