Newsletter: September 2024

Welcome to the latest jam-packed edition of the Royal Mint Museum Newsletter. It has been another busy month for the team as they headed out around the country to give talks on a range of subjects. We also celebrated the completion of our Coins and the Sea project which has been eighteen months in the making. Find out more below.

Museum Annual Review

We were pleased to announce the publication this month of the Museum Annual Review covering all our activities in the last financial year, 2023-24. It includes details of our Coronation celebrations, our work with the launch of the new coins of Charles III and details of all the ways in which we reach out to local and national communities. Did you know, for example, that between April 2023 and March 2024 we answered 1,129 enquiries from members of the public and gave over 136 public talks, both online and in-person. Click here to read the Review and discover more about our work.

Coins and the Sea

In September we held a very special event to say a big thank you to friends, colleagues and partners who contributed to and supported our Coins and the Sea project. Our Museum Director, Dr Kevin Clancy, opened the event and thanked all who had participated and then invited our former colleague, Hannah Spruce, to talk about her exhibition which is currently on display at the Royal Mint Experience. It was wonderful to have Hannah back with us and great to hear that her career continues with a permanent role at the Gosport Museum and Art Gallery.

Our podcast team provided an colourful insight into the experience of recording the first episodes and the Education and Learning Manager spoke about the Coins and the Sea themed short story competition  we ran earlier in the year. We were all looked after handsomely by our colleagues in the Royal Mint Experience and it was wonderful to meet some new people and spend time in the company of those we have already met.

Collection Online

The Museum’s Collections Manager, Sarah Tyley, has added more than 2500 new records to our Collection Online section of the website. Records illustrating a selection of the Royal Mint's earliest work for New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Fiji, the Seychelles and Hong Kong are now available to view. In the coming months further records will be added so please keep checking the site or follow us on social media.

Accreditation

We are pleased to announce that the Museum has been granted full accreditation this month. Museum Accreditation is a United Kingdom partnership scheme run by Arts Council England. The Welsh Government manage the scheme in Wales. It is the United Kingdom industry standard for museums and galleries which makes sure they manage their collections properly, engage with visitors and are governed appropriately.

This process has taken several months with rigorous checks of our collection standards and policies which have kept our team very busy. It has, however, been a good opportunity for us to check our current activities against agreed standards, to see how far we have come in the years since our last review and to focus on our future endeavours. We would like to say a particular thank you to our Collections Manager, Sarah Tyley, for all her hard work in making this happen.

Talks

Chris Barker, our Information and Research Manager, gave a talk to the British Association of Numismatic Societies at their Autumn Weekend which this year was held in Lichfield. Speaking on the subject of King Charles III’s new definitive coins, Chris explained how Britain has adopted a flora and fauna themed coinage for the first time but how this approach actually continues a long tradition that stretches back to ancient Greece.

The Royal Mint Museum has a large and fascinating medal collection and the Orders and Medals Research Society’s Annual Convention, held in Milton Keynes, presented the opportunity for us to share some of the stories behind these medals. Our Information and Research Manager and the Public Engagement and Information Officer spoke about some of these highlights whilst sharing ways in which the Society’s members could access the Museum in order to carry out research.

Virtual Visits

The Royal Mint Museum offers online virtual visits to schools that are too far away to visit our South Wales site. This enables us to expand our education audience outside the Mint’s local area and interact with schools anywhere in the United Kingdom.

This month our Education Manager, Amy Williams, delivered a series of virtual visits to Ysgol Iau Hen Golwyn in Noth Wales. The children were doing a wider project on the Tudors and their teacher wanted them to look at the coinage of the period and to find out about life in the Mint during Tudor times.

The children were very engaged and asked some great questions. We received some lovely feedback from the school, ‘we've all enjoyed our sessions so much. I was blown away how well (the children) listened this afternoon… they were truly enthralled’.

If you would like to find out more about our virtual visits you can make an enquiry HERE