The official blog of The Royal Mint Museum

For as long as there have been coins there have been counterfeits and here at the Museum we have a particularly fine collection of forged material which goes back as far as the 17th Century. The illegal nature of counterfeiting means that the origins of these objects are almost entirely unknown, but thanks to clues left behind by previous generations and research carried out by Museum staff, a few of their names and stories have been rediscovered. ..

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The need to rebuild The Royal Mint had been recognised in the 1950s. A major programme of renovations at Tower Hill had been announced in 1955, but this had been delayed by economic circumstances and the view had increasingly gained ground that it would be more satisfactory to build an entirely new mint on a less confined site. Matters were brought to a head by the government's decision, announced in 1966, to adopt a decimal currency system, because it required the Mint to strike hundreds of millions of decimal coins in readiness for decimalisation on 15 February 1971. At the same time overseas customers could not be neglected, and the combined burden of export and decimal work made a new Mint essential. In accordance with government policy of moving industry away from the capital, sites were considered in development areas such as the North East and Merseyside, but finally, in April 1967, it was announced that a new Royal Mint would be built in South Wales.  ..

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Recently, whilst reviewing some photographic material, our Museum Assistant brought to light images of women working on the factory floor of the Royal Mint. These black and white photographs capture a time when the employment of women in coining operations was still relatively new. How did these women come to be working in production? What jobs did they do? And how has the role of women in the Mint changed over time? ..

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The Royal Mint has long been home to a strong community of workers and the Museum cares for many items which reflect their shared passions and hobbies. Our archival material in particular records the involvement of Mint employees in a range of sports and social clubs. One of the earliest of these, the Royal Mint Swimming Club, had its first committee meeting 120 years ago on 4 August 1897, when the Mint was still located at Tower Hill in London. ..

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In the Museum we have many objects that tell the story of coin and medal production. Some of the most fascinating are the reducing machines whose intricate mechanisms were once integral to the process of minting. ..

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This month we completed a basic catalogue of nearly 12,000 items in the Museum library, comprising journals, auction, exhibition and museum catalogues, numismatic reference books and literature on events and persons central to the history of the coinage and economy. ..

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Happy New Year and welcome to our 2016 blog. The Museum would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our supporters and to give you a brief summary of our Inventory Project along with a sneak preview of some of the exciting events coming up this year. ..

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During the course of the inventory project we have catalogued 17,500 overseas coins. Many of them are large and impressive but, as we have discovered, it is important not to overlook even small coins in poor condition as they can also tell a fascinating story. Recently we came across an intriguing collection of aluminium one cent coins from East Africa, dated 1908. They are light weight with a perforated centre and some of them are covered in a thick powdery white corrosion layer. These aluminium coins are the first of their kind produced by the Royal Mint and, although they appear to have little value, they represent adaptability, innovative science and a commitment to continuous improvement that had gained pace when Charles Fremantle was Deputy Master of the Royal Mint (1868-1894). ..

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Since completing a catalogue of the coinage, medal and seal material in the main store, we have taken the opportunity to look more closely at some of the remaining objects. Of particular interest was a set of boxes labelled ‘Tower of London’, containing a series of electrotypes featuring various inscriptions and ranging from crudely scratched names and dates, or tags, to lengthy passages of text and detailed artistic impressions.  ..

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Here at the Royal Mint Museum we are fortunate to have a large collection of objects that bring the history of coin production to life. However one particular artefact has caught our eye over the course of the Inventory Project. It is an automatic balance of the type introduced in the 1850s to weigh gold and silver coins. It is in working order and has a smooth and elegant action even after all these years of hard work. The coins make a pleasing sound as they are sorted, although originally they would have been collected in bags under the machine and made very little noise. Automatic balances were employed to weigh bullet cartridges as part of the Royal Mint’s contribution to the war effort, and the machine’s mechanism is fascinating to watch. But the real significance of this machine is that it represents the mass produced accuracy of the coinage produced by the Royal Mint. ..

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