 Just to introduce myself, my name is Matthew Hill, I'm the editor of Coin Collector magazine and also of the All About Coins.co.uk website. We're really lucky today to be joined by Chris Barker who's the Information Research Manager at the Royal Mint Museum. So Chris is going to tell us about some of the treasures held at the Royal Mint Museum in Cardiff. We also have the opportunity to ask Chris questions, so if you've got any questions at all, do just put them in the Q&A box. There's also a chat box, I mean you can use that if you like, but the Q&A is probably easier for me to just manage those questions and then we'll put them to Chris at the end, so feel free to just type those in and the digital stage is yours Chris, so I'll hand over to you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'll actually move this out of the way down there. Good evening everyone and so welcome to this talk I'm giving tonight about sort of the highlights of the Royal Mint Museum's collection. Like Matt said I would encourage any of you to come with any questions at all you might have at the end of this talk and the way I've structured it is quite probably idiosyncratic, it's highlights that are highlights to me as well as much as anything else. So the aim of tonight is to try and give you an idea of the diversity of what we've got in the collection as well. So we'll cover quite a lot of ground hopefully and some of this may be familiar to some of you but hopefully there'll be new content for everybody here, so forgive me if I go over stories that some of you may already be familiar with, but I can't really start tonight without mentioning this particular coin because this is where it all begins for us as a mint rather, so we date our founding back to the reign of Alfred the Great and we have no documentary evidence with which to get that date, so instead we have to use the coins evidence itself and this is what we use here at this is this Londonia monogram penny of Alfred and you can clearly see on the far side on the on the head side you've got a depiction there of Alfred in sort of a Roman emperor-esque style almost the split inscription Alfred running across the top and then from the history of the Mint's point of view the more interesting thing is this Londonia monogram that's on the reverse so we can see the L, we can see the O in the middle then the N goes across the coin itself the D on the far side the I inside the D and there's a connection at the downstrokes of the L and the N which gives you the A, so spells out Londonia and demonstrates that this particular coin was struck in London and the reason why I've included this in the highlights page is because of it being our sort of symbolic start date so with all the work that goes on in the 880s in London tied in with Alfred that is when the Roman really sort of kicks off and begins to be honest we can't say hand and heart exactly when some of you may well be familiar with the concept of the 886 date that Softon bandied around quite a bit but that sort of does tie back to slightly older evidence whereas today the more contemporary thinking is that these coins came in roughly around 880 itself although we can't say hand and heart exactly for sure but from the late 9th century onwards you definitely have a continuous organization that we today know as the raw mint and so from the start of our highlights reel I think this is where we really have to begin but in terms of other things that we've got in the collection we've got some great and spectacular rarities and that's mostly what I'll be focusing on a lot tonight really and trying to bring out some of the stories behind some of these rarities and some of the stories that these rarities help to tell one of those has to be the Hemi the 7th sovereign so we're very lucky in the museum that we actually have a very good example albeit one with a rather nasty crack as you can see running a rather unfortunate position on the obverse that said it's very well struck generally speaking particularly for the period for its time and with the Hemi the 7th sovereign which is what we have on screen here what you're seeing is the first pound piece so the first 20 shilling piece and from a museum highlight point of view it's a great thing to show to people to demonstrate how coinage and how gold coinage in particular can be read and can be used as a political message excellent for that because what you see on the obverse is you see this very very powerful depiction of Henry the 7th we see him here on his very grand ornate throne he's got all the paraphernalia there of royalty he's wearing the coronation he's wearing the coronation robes he's got the orb he's got the scepter and he's got this big gold crown on and it's designed to convey this real sense of monarchy of royalty and of power and that is because of Henry's situation when these are first issues in 1489 he's only relatively recently seized the throne from Richard at the Battle of Bosworth and therefore he's quite shaky on that throne and there are many people nationally and internationally that question his legitimate right to rule so one of the means of propping up that power base is the coinage itself and he issues the first ever pound coin the first 20 shilling piece that we see in this gold sovereign the largest coin ever struck in England up to that point and that is why you have this really powerful depiction of his ruler and the name sovereign is that sort of final blunt instrument hammering home this message that he Henry the 7th is the rightful ruler the rightful monarch the rightful sovereign of England and we know that Henry's using these things very cleverly so he's not really issuing these for circulation as we would understand it today these are struck in small numbers and that being issued as gifts to visiting ambassadors from the courts of Europe so you can imagine an ambassador coming into to Henry the 7th court and as gifts to take back to their respective courts to get given a couple of these things and that's the joy of coinage in many ways they're highly portable but you can actually fit some very sophisticated messaging on there and for that reason that's what and the huge rarity as well which is why this particular coin has made it onto onto my highlights reel really some of the other things to show to you is something that isn't really a highlight but to get where we'll get to a highlight but helps to give you an idea of how we think and how we work within the museum itself so Henry the 7th reign is interesting because you go from typical medieval portraiture of a monarch which is what we see on the far side which is a basically chap with curly hair and a crown standard medieval portrait is symbolic of royalty it's not really designed to convey an individual per se could be anybody it's just giving a royal image whereas Henry the 7th brings across more right more realistic concepts of portraiture which is what we see on the far side there with this this test now the interesting thing about this test is that this was up until a couple of years ago the best example of a portrait test of Henry the 7th that we had in the Royal Mate Museum's collection this test doon that we see on screen at the moment is meant to have come from Sarah Sophia Banks's collection in 1818 and she left a whole host of rarities to us come on to her a little bit later but it's meant to come from her a very picky for steadiest collector and it's meant to be this example of a very good example of Henry's test doon it's not good at all it's actually probably being tooled we suspect somebody's probably worked on this at some point it doesn't look right the whole thing doesn't sit well and to be honest there are some questions as to whether this actually is the test doon which found its way into the Royal Mate Museum's collection in 1818 despite it having that provenance connected attached to it so there are those questions around this this existing piece and that left us with this this situation where we've always wanted a very good portrait test doon of Henry the 7th because this is a key part of the portraiture story because you're going from stylized portraiture to realistic portraiture and it's realistic portraiture which kicks on from this point so we've needed this coin to fill a gap and we were lucky that some years ago in 2017 we finally got to that point by buying this particular piece in that we see here this is a very good portrait test doon of Henry the 7th and it's you know helpful in some ways to compare the two because you can see why we were so suspicious about the one that we had in the collection for so many years the one you see on screen here that we bought in in 2017 bears very little resemblance in many ways to the one that we just I was just showing you this however is an excellent example and it is that gives you an example of how we as a museum have identified a gap or identified a weakness and therefore gone out of our way to try and find something to fill that gap and to fill that weakness in the collection particularly with something that we will use time and time and time and time and time again very these are rare you know in good condition the portrait test doons of Henry the 7th are very very rare things to come across and we were lucky in 2017 that a few people did actually stand aside to allow us to you know bid for this and successfully get it I cannot now for the life of me remember what the actual hammock the total cost of this but it certainly was well into the sort of I think you remember right here 40,000 ish so it's a good example of how we were able to dip into our reserves and as a museum we are lucky that we actually have a healthy reserve budget to be able to buy things such as this and that comes through with our relationship that we have with the raw mint you know working with them in itself and having that link through to the business does enable us to to buy goods such as this when we identify a strong need for it but going from portraiture to talking about some other highlights from the coinage collection itself is talking about ones which there is no portrait and that's what we can see up top here where you actually have no crowned portrait on and what we can see at the top up here is the coinage of the Commonwealth yet again an area which I personally the Commonwealth Civil War and then later on to the restoration and the whole way through Cromwell's era I really find it personally quite fascinating and from the reason why I picked these two pieces of Cromwell and the Commonwealth are because from it again they're rare pieces they're interesting pieces but from a storytelling point of view you get a lot out of them they can show you quite a lot and it really helps to demonstrate how coins can be used as a resource to tell the story of the era in which they're from because at the top you see these Commonwealth coins and there is no crowned head of state so Charles the first has just lost his head we've just executed the king and we now enter the first and only republic that this country ever experiments with in the 1650s and instead of a crowned head of or a ruler of any description the initial Commonwealth coinage is probably the most heraldic coinage that we ever see in this country so you can see the shields on both sides and instead of Latin which was the sort of go-to for all inscriptions at this point you end up with English being used on the coinage for the first time so you can see on the obverse you've got the Commonwealth of England on one side and on the reverse you've got God with us on the other side the royalists at the time sort of do make a bit of a joke about this coinage because what they say is that you've got the Commonwealth so the new republic on one side and God is on the other side which is what we would do is they've just lost and they've just had their king beheaded but they also make a joke about the design of these coins as well because these shield this sort of joint shield design that we see here with the harp and the cross of St George they make a joke out of this as well because they say that this shield design looks like a pair of breaches and given that the parliament that is in in use sort of in session at the time when this coinage comes in is referred to as the rump parliament so the last MPs who were left in parliament after it was purged of all those who wanted to keep the king and not execute him is referred to as the rump so the royalists often say that this is a fitting coinage for the rump given that it shows the breaches of you know some trousers really so you get these little in jokes coming across with this Commonwealth coinage as well but yet again reading coins and looking at this sort of era contrast that with this other very rare example of what we've got in the collection for the common the Cromwell patterns themselves so these series of coins that tie in with when Cromwell becomes law protector so basically king in all but name you know he's swept away the parliament which has been dithering away and he's taken over control but he's refused the title of king and instead he is law protector and then you end up with these series of pattern coins that we have of Cromwell where you can see on the obverse it's a wonderful portrait of him and i'll come on to the designer of that in a moment we've got this fantastic portrait of Cromwell sort of reflecting that wall snore style that he's so famous for and on it you can see him very much sort of roman empress with the laureates on very fitting in some ways for the concept of military dictator a la Julius Caesar and then on the reverse yet again sort of reading into this and looking at the coins as a source you have the the arms of the the nation but interestingly in the center you also have Cromwell's own arms put into the center of the English Scottish and Irish flags that we see there and it's a crowned arms as well yet again sort of retrenching back into these established traditions of showing ahead of state albeit not a ruler or not a king rather and also bringing back some of the iconography that people have been familiar with for centuries and it's a return to Latin which is interesting for someone like Cromwell who is very puritan you know wanting to sweep away all the popery including Latin but on these trial pieces that all these pattern pieces that we see here rather you get the return of this Latin and so you've got this rather wonderful that's just well wonderful is probably the wrong word but it's very fitting or welly an inscription which appears which basically if you translate it loosely sort of translates to peace through war more or less yet again very fitting for a military dictator but this is why I included these two here because in terms of using coins as sources and thinking about this as source material this is fantastic it really sort of helps to demonstrate how coinage can bring to life and can help to illustrate and to add to our understanding of history just by looking at the evidence that we have from that era and so we're very lucky that we've got some of these rare pieces in the museum's collection I mentioned that I would come on to design hopefully this moves on I can do there we are so and I can't sort of talk to you tonight without about highlights without showing this because this is probably by far and away one of my favorite designs from the coinage that we have in the museum's collection and what we're seeing here on screen is the petition crown and this is a coin with a quite a bit of sort of fame attached to it because it's by the chap called Thomas Simon chief engraver of the roman and the story behind Simon yet again a very fascinating figure is that he's sympathetic to the parliamentarian cause he works for parliament during the civil war you know he commits high treason by copying the great seal of the realm at the start of the civil war so parliament can still pass laws after Charles has taken his great seal the great seal the only one that's meant to exist off to Oxford and during the Commonwealth period and during the period when Cromwell's in charge he is also chief engraver he becomes Cromwell's personal medallist he's producing the new seals of the Commonwealth so he's very very closely associated with Cromwell and the Commonwealth not an envious position to be in when the restoration of the monarchy comes around and as you can imagine he's not the flavor of the month when Charles has returned to the throne what happens however is that he does retain his position as chief engraver so initially petitions to get it back after he loses it and he's given back to him in 1661 and he does initially produce dyes for the coinage of Charles but what happens is Charles brings in his own favorites so his own people from Holland the Rotier family who he'd quickly come associated with and who had lent him money during his time in exile and it's the Rotier family who sort of become preeminent from a mint perspective and they end up producing the coinage for the new hammered coinage when you get mechanization coming in the 1660s and Simon's a bit miffed at this because he thinks he's a better engraver and what has actually happened is that Rotier and Simon had been asked to produce designs for the new milled coinages they refer to it as and Simon because of pressure at work pressure of work at the time working on the great seal and the other coinage of Charles hadn't submitted anything so he'd missed his opportunity whereas the Rotiers had and they got the gig a year later Simon trying to get back into influence and trying to get back into things produces this one of the most beautiful coins out there you can see on here this portrait of Charles II which does everything a good coinage portrait should do it's a likeness yes but I also feel he get a sense of the monarch himself that sort of playboy monarch the merry monarch the the sort of um you know the arrogance almost seeps through from this portrait as well and technically it's hugely gifted because the difficult thing that you get with this this coin is this double raised edge inscription that appears on here which Simon is while showcasing his skill in terms of portraiture and design it also showcases technical ability by putting this double raised edge band around the actual coin itself an absolute nightmare to do that you know we would struggle to do that today with the 21st century Roman so for him to be able to do it in the 17th century speaks volumes about his technical ability with the coinage and that the clever bit of this is that is where he has put his petition to the monarch to say look here is an example of my work look how good I am look how gifted I am please give me the job back of producing the coinage and get rid of those Dutch people you've brought in and give it back to me doesn't work sadly for Simon he's too badly tainted by association and he does die during the great plague of 1665 so he doesn't have long to brood on his loss but interestingly as well he's probably one of the first people to to play with the concept of frosting or on a coin because this stippling that you can see on the cloak of Charles that we have here the folds of this here is an attempt to sort of bring in a little bit of frosting in many ways so quite a pioneer across the board and well worth people looking into in more detail absolutely fascinating man continue with the great rarities just trying to keep the flow of things going so don't get too bogged down I can't leave you without talking about this yet again another huge rarity that we have in the collection which is the Vigo five guinea piece Vigo a point in time where you've got very very few gold coins with Vigo on them and it's called Vigo because of this inscription you can see below the bust of Anne down there which is clearly says Vigo and ties in with Vigo Bay and the story behind that is that it's a province mark denotes to source the bullion that went into making up this particular coin so Vigo Bay is down sort of Spain Portugal that neck of the woods and at the start of Anne's reign Britain and Holland go to war with France and Spain and what happens during that period when they're going to war is that a Spanish treasure fleet is coming back from the new world and it docks in Vigo Bay now uh George Rourke uh George Rourke sorry is the admiral of an English fleet that goes in and raids the Spanish treasure fleet so he sends a landing party ashore they cut the boon that's protecting Vigo Bay he sails in and then he goes in and raids these ships and sinks some of them in Vigo Bay itself you know hooray we've had this great victory we've captured this Spanish gold and silver we take some back to England and it then goes to raw mint to be turned into coins to realm which have Vigo on them as a bit of a propaganda message to show look how amazing our fleet is and look how great we've just had this victory over the Spanish it is however just a propaganda message because in actuality they don't really capture much gold and silver at Vigo Bay the treasure fleet have been docked for a month by the time that George Rourke got there in October and there was basically not a huge amount of gold and there was not a huge amount more silver on there there was a bit of silver coin a bit of silver bullion down in the halls but mostly what you're dealing with is the captain's cabin you know the sweepings of the captain's cabins it's tableware it's statutory it's jewelry so that is what they mainly capture at Vigo Bay but the sweep where all of that sort of is or most of that anyways then shipped back to the raw mint to be turned into coins to the realm and there is a wonderful list of all the things that they capture from the captain's cabins you know held a queue the national archives where it's where the raw mint museum's records are these days and I do think that the weirdest thing that they do take and that goes into the melting pot for these coins for these gold guinea pieces with Vigo on is some Spanish captain's gold earwax remover so the idea of some Spanish captain's gold earwax remover going into what generally becomes a huge great rarity I always sort of tickles me a little bit to be honest but the reason why the Vigo five guineas in particular are hugely rare is because there's not much gold captured therefore not many guineas full stop half guineas guineas are made and there are even less five guineas pieces made you know the largest denomination at the time inactive well that was being made by the raw mints anyway and probably somewhere around the 20 to 30 mark of these are ever made it's very difficult to say how many exactly how many but it's a very limited number and we're lucky that we have one in the museum's collection and yet again I've mentioned the lady already these great rarities the petition crown the Vigo five guineas uh well the the supposed Henry the Seventh Testoon these come from Cerys of Fire Banks a lady who was collecting in the 18th and early 19th century and on her death equate to the collection to the raw mint museum or the newly established raw mint museum and also the British Museum British Museum got first dibs but they were very good and they didn't take anything they didn't already have and so we got the vast majority of it including these great rarities so we owe her and her brother such as if banks who facilitated the actual transition of the collection after her death in 1818 we owe those two a great debt because they lay the foundation stones for the raw mint museum in 1818 and sort of in that early period because the museum was only established in 1816 a couple years earlier and these early bequest give us material that we would never be able to afford today you know for example of ego five guineas auction today you're probably going to need at least 400 thousand pounds to get one of these so we're lucky to have had that uh coming across to us staying with great rarities I can't talk to you without mentioning this particular coin which is the 1933 penny and some of you may well have already heard of the 1933 penny because it's going to be a popular mythology an urban legend attached to it so in 1933 you've got a huge lot of pennies in circulation there's absolutely no need for us at the raw mint to strike any that said there are a handful made and the reason why you get them is because in that year you get requests for year sets to go underneath the foundation stones of buildings very traditional use of coin and the deputy master at the time Chuck called Robert Johnson mischievously agrees to these requests full well knowing that he would have had to strike a special number of 33 data pennies in order to achieve that uh you know these these requests that have come into him and that is where we get the six that we 100 percent definitely know of three that go out there into the big wide world and three that go to national collections so two to ourselves in the raw mint museum and one to the British Museum when it comes to collections and of the three that go out there into the big wide world to go to churches in the Diocese of Rippon and one goes to the University of London all of which find their way underneath foundation stones now the magic of this coin and the reason why a lot of people have heard of it is that there are references in the mince records good references but not concrete to maybe a couple more ever having been made and because this is an ordinary circulating coin you end up with this tantalizing possibility where this could those extra few that may well have been made might have sneaked out into people's change uh as a result of the excess number and that is why you get people actively checking their change in a prior to decimalization looking for these coins and of those that actually went out into the big wide world one is thought to still be underneath foundation a foundation stone and that's the one at the University of London bear in mind nobody's been digging it up to have a look to check whether it is still there but of the two that went to churches one was stolen so a classic sort of heist tale where workmen turn up in Hivas vests on a weekend in the 1970s I think it is remember rightly and they dig it up and then they they're gone by the Monday and the other one of the other church when they find out that one has been stolen they decide to dig it up and put it into into storage safe storage and then ultimately they sell it on uh onto the open market so there is one certain world there's actually a couple floating around the open market but in terms of the attributation those that go you know of some of them of one of them anyway it's uh up there in the air as to to where that actually comes from yet again another huge highlight of the collection is the coinage of Edward VIII because Edward VIII by far and away is the jewel of the museum's collection this really is a highlight for us in the in the museum because we have by far and away the most complete collection of Edward VIII pneumismatic material certainly official pneumismatic material I should say because during the reign of Edward VIII with it being so short no coins bearing his portrait are ever issued for circulation so all you're left with are a series of trials patterns and test pieces and the vast majority of those we have that makes them hugely rare but there's a great story behind the Edward VIII portrait as well and that sort of has come to light a lot more recently what with us having a new monarch coming to the throne for the first time in such a long time because the tradition the way the monarch faces should alternate by reign and that is a tradition that goes way way back to Charles II it's a very British tradition in many ways because there's no rhyme or reason really why it starts and there's no practical reason why we've continued it but it has become tradition and therefore we have stuck to it over the centuries now Edward VIII has been the only monarch to have broken those centuries of tradition because he believed very fervently that this was his best side and he was absolutely determined to have his best side appearing on the coinage portrait and so if we chucks his toys out the prime and insists to be shown facing the same way as his father and he would have had his own way you know he would have broken those centuries of tradition in fact one of the things that we have in the museum's collection up in our store is a plaster model of this portrait with him facing the other way it's the right way from a numismatic tradition point of view and I can see why he didn't want it because he does look incredibly young he looks about 12 and then went to great lengths to try and get into obey our traditions and we even went to lengths of moving his side partings and his side part that we see here because he knew we knew he had a bit of a thing about it and we moved it onto the other side of his head on the plaster model but he was still having none of it and so he would have broken those centuries of tradition. The reason why you see two coins on here is because these are the shortlisted two designs for his portrait on the left hand side you have the design by William McMillan and you can instantly you can see you've got MCM down there at the bottom beneath the neck of Edward VIII and on the right hand side you have the design by Humphrey Padgett and you can see the little HP below there and the Royal Mint Advisory Committee which decides on these things is completely split 50-50 they don't know which one to go for so they ultimately offer the choice of these two which they're split between to the king and the king unsurprisingly in my view plumps for Humphrey Padgett the one on the far side here that we see and the reason why I say unsurprisingly is that actually William McMillan's design that we see on the far side is actually better sculpturally it's much more of a likeness to the monarch and the one that Padgett produces but Padgett's portrait is more sympathetic it doesn't look quite so aloof or austere it's a bit softer it's a bit more accessible and for a monarch who's having all sorts of trouble at this point in time with the whole Wallace Simpson affair where he's you know wanting to marry this American divorcee who being the head of the Church of England he can't marry because he's a divorcee it's all starting to come out so he what he unsurprisingly wants a slightly softer more accessible portrait that the public can view we forget today just how much of a constitutional crisis is when this the abdication happens in December 1936 but you can see it from this little box which yet again is another favorite of mine in the collection even though it's not a great rarity of any particular description but this is the actual box in which the coins of Edward VIII sat for about 30 years such was the controversy they don't want to be seen the mint didn't want to be seen to be tainted by association with Edward VIII so the coinage is bundled into this sort of shoebox size object that we see on screen you've got the wonderful inscription that you see there not to be opened except in the presence of two senior officers of the Royal Mint it's then wrapped with string the string is waxed off which is what you can see the little blobs there to show if anyone has entered into the box and the box is pushed right to the back of the Deputy Masters safe and the box by itself really just helps to emphasize just how controversial the whole abdication crisis was a massive thing at the time and it took 30 years before we at the Mint were felt comfortable enough to allow this material to come into the Royal Mint Museum's collection now that's been a focus largely on coins I want to show you some of the other things that we have in the collection that helps to give you a sense the variety of what we have because we have a whole host of tooling and people forget about the tooling that we have but the earliest tooling that we have in the museum's collection is on screen there and that's a half groat of Edward III from the 1350s which is currently on display at the Tower of London we don't have an awful lot of medieval tooling but we do have some that being said there's not a huge amount of medieval tooling out there but we become incredibly strong from the 1660s onwards because from that point onwards it was clear that they were actively setting aside tooling as some form of reference collection for artists to look back on and to draw inspiration from and what we see on the far side is this wonderful portrait punch of Charles II which had been produced by the Rotiers themselves and yet again the reason why I've included this as a highlight is because it really does demonstrate the artistic skill necessary that the engravers need to have at this point in time you know somebody's actually physically engraved that by eye from that point to create that design that we see there and it's required so much effort that even when it's chipped as we see down here they would have still used it it would have been easier to use that punch and then repair the actual missing detail on the tool itself rather than create an entire new punch and on the far side that's just a sort of scene-setting image to give you an idea that we have thousands upon well tens upon tens of thousands of tools in the museum's collection not just for the United Kingdom but stretching around the globe touching on the work that we have done over the years you know some of these tools have got fantastic stories in and of themselves I come back to Cromwell here but this set of dies really does have one hell of a journey you know it's produced by Thomas Simon he makes this Cromwell tooling that we see here it's got Cromwell on it it produces these excessively rare pieces of Cromwell during the 1650s and this is for the crown piece it's got this wonderful crack on it which you can trace on the coins themselves but obviously when Charles II is restored he wants to sweep away all of this and get rid of it and so all of this should have been theoretically destroyed but the tools sneak their way onto the open market and they actually then disappear for a while about about a century well not quite a century but maybe 70 odd years or so later they're actually spotted by the their master or mint who actively wants to bring this tooling this Cromwell tooling back into the mint's care now the master the mint at the time who spots them and buys them auction is none other than Isaac Newton so not only do you have Cromwell and the whole Cromwellian story attached to these tools but we actually know that Isaac Newton himself during his time as master or mint identified these tools at auction and would have probably handled them himself as they were brought back into the Roman museum and now form part of the collection so in terms of provenance and stories behind them it's a fantastic story to tell and touches on so many different things that you know so many different aspects that you could help you bring out with these set of tools sort of segueing a little bit into other objects that we have in the museum and highlights one of them you know we've got a nice lead in here really because we've got a massive massive set of tools that we see at the bottom and that is for the other Waterloo medal so you get a Waterloo campaign medal which is what we see on the roll up there that is the campaign medals the first official campaign medals we would understand it today is produced for the Battle of Waterloo and that is individually named which explains why the campaign medal is that on that big old ledger because that big old ledger lists the names of all those who fought at Waterloo and should receive a named Waterloo medal the ledger itself yet again wonderful object and is currently on display in the Roman experience those who want to come down to South Wales to look at it but it's also digitised online so people can search through it and see if they can find their ancestors if they know they fought at Waterloo but the other object in the foreground is for a set of is a set of dies for the other Waterloo medal and this was meant to be the big impressive commemorative medal that Bernadette of Pastrucci he of the sovereign fame was commissioned to produce shortly after the Battle of Waterloo and this was meant to be a real showpiece struck in limited numbers in gold and presented to the victorious heads of state and commanders associated with the Battle of Waterloo now Pastrucci is a very fiery temperamental Italian very very difficult to deal with really really gifted as you can see here but a man who must have been a nightmare to manage because in the 1820s he refuses to copy another artist's work and he's basically pushed to one side and ignored but the ace of his sleeve that keeps him employed at the Royal Mint is this tooling because the treasury rather cillily in their part paged Pastrucci an awful lot of money upfront to produce this tooling so he can keep playing this ace in in his card deck to keep himself employed at the Royal Mint because he burns all his bridges there by the mid-1820s so what he does is he spins the work out spins the work out spins the work out spins the work out and he doesn't actually deliver the tooling for this great ginormous Waterloo medal until about 30 odd years later in the 1840s late 1840s is when he finally delivers this and by which point all of the originally intended recipients barring the Duke of Wellington had died so the medal is never struck and all you're left with to there is a testament to the talent and the temperament of Pastrucci are these tools that we see on screen wonderful things really that help demonstrate that aspect of Pastrucci's ability but also just how much of a difficult man he must have been to deal with you know we know he when he was complaining to people to the various Deputy Masters at the Royal Mint about lack of pay and lack of money he went to the lengths of writing those letters in Italian full well knowing that the Deputy Masters didn't read Italian so it gives you a sense of the man himself coming across by that and that's more of a sort of a close up there as we see of the Waterloo medal roll generally you are in South Wales in the Royal Mint experience so definitely urge you to go and have a look at and again sticking with medals I can't sort of not mention these because the first sort of things I saw when I came to the Royal Mint Museum in 2012 were the Olympic medals so bear in mind this is in February 2012 I have just started at the Royal Mint and just started at the Royal Mint Museum I'm pretty much I think it's day two I get to hold and look at the Olympic medals the Olympics haven't even started yet so to actually be able to pick up and hold a gold Olympic medal was a real highlight for me personally in February 2012 you know months before the Olympics actually began and it was a massive program for us you know we had to push I think like 4,900 medals and bear in mind that each medal needed to be struck 15 times in order to give the level of detail that we see on there it was one hell of a job and they had to have a certain number of medals on standby should any events be tied so you've got these nervous security people sat there watching and waiting having to whiz up these medals to London at a moment's notice if there was any tied events that needed extra medals to be made that is a little bit of a personal highlight as well as a highlight of the collection itself and they're yet again currently on display in the Royal Mint experience in South Wales a rather random one starting to sort of draw to a close and yet again just to give you an idea of just variety is this it doesn't always have to be great rarities that we have in the museum that help highlight and showcase a story this is a beach him's pills box from the 1950s I think why on earth am I showing you a beach him's pills box from the 1950s after everything else that you've already seen all the gold all the great rarities but the thing about this is it helps to demonstrate the sheer pervasiveness of the term guinea it's the gold guinea is the preeminent gold coin of the 18th century and it sort of disappears from active use in the sort of 1830s 1840s by that sort of point is really disappeared from use despite that beach him's are still going to some effort to put on their advertising worth a guinea box by the 1950s and demonstrates how this term guinea is hung around in the popular consciousness long after the actual you know coin itself has disappeared from use and that is why we have this in the museum's collection it just really helps to demonstrate that element of it and I will start I'll draw to a close there because I could go on for a long long time with highlights of the museum's collection because there are lots of them and they are very idiosyncratic to whoever comes into it but I hope you've all enjoyed that to some degree feel free to fire away any questions that you may have because no question is a bad question and I'm always interested to hear feedback and thoughts and opinions but thank you thank you so much Chris that was brilliant so many treasures as we've called it the webinar we were definitely justified in calling it treasures there's so much there presumably I mean are some of the artifacts and the coins in the museum I mean are they all on display or some of them can you go and have a sneaky look at them so we we welcome I mean a lot of them are on display a lot of these treasures a lot of these highlights are actually on display in the Romance experience so people can go to South Wales and can go to the Romance experience and see these things on active display there some of them aren't on display for example the beach and spills box I threw that in there just because it sort of is just a bit of variety and that's just a collection but we welcome researchers we always welcome researchers into the museum itself there's a there's a few hurdles that people have to jump through to get into the actual museum in terms of security but if you have a research topic or if anybody out there is wanting to conduct research into the coinage or medals or tooling or whatever it might be do please get in touch and and we can arrange things for you to come in and look at some of this material okay and in terms of your are you your role and your colleagues role at the museum I mean what what kind of is it an everyday kind of day for you what would you get the difficulty with that is that there's very rarely a sort of set day the my role particularly I work as information and research manager so my job is to manage the flow of information out from the museum to members of the public so that is what I do in many different ways whether that's by writing content for the website or answering inquiries or helping colleagues in in the raw mint deal with copy so I do a lot of you know advising them as to numismatic accuracy and also actually helping the business itself the raw mint itself come up with historic sets for sale to customers so there's a huge variety there in my role but we currently we're developing a bit of a different way of working than what we have done previously so we're trying to develop a programme of events so that's themed each year this year has been a bit torpedoed by the coronation and the death of the queen from last year but the next big events you know that we're sort of working on at the moment is on the themes of coins in the sea so that's our next big research project for all of us in the museum is to try and pull together a lot of material ties in with Britain's maritime past and the coinage and yet again for anybody listening or anybody on you know on on today or who sees us at later date we'd welcome people getting in touch about any stories that they have that touch in with coins in the sea you know we really want to engage with the public on this so that's that's our latest thing and we've got a whole series of themed years coming up which will help to try and touch on different different aspects of the collection some of them anniversary driven some of them just because they you know we find them interesting yeah hopefully the public will as well absolutely and do you think when you're working on these themes or in particular exhibits do you ever uncover new stories that haven't you know kind of unearthed new stories or new aspects of of the history yeah and that's that's that's what always engages me so there's you know every day for me as a school day always learn something new every day and that really is what's kept me in the job for 11 years it's just a continuous learning and also the research aspect of it that is something I particularly love we're always bringing out stories different stories a research strand that I've been working on at the moment is the sovereign story after the Second World War and there's loads of things I've been looking at down in the National Archives at Q and these documents for treasury files which are absolutely fascinating which very few people have looked at before which is writing up but even down to individual levels you know when it came to the centenary of the First World War some years ago we've got a war memorial a big old oak war memorial in the museum which lists the names of those mint employees that died and at that time I went through you know ancestry and record offices and things just trying to bring out a bit more of their personal history you know what what were they doing what did they do at the mint where did they serve and just giving that level of detail and that sort of personality back to those individuals for me yet again was fascinating that gives personal stories real people because you've got to remember that the mint you know we make all these wonderful things but it's still about people as well we're about the employees that work there and still work there so the people stories always drives me and I find them interesting yeah there's so many stories that you've said tonight and I'm sure there's loads more just that show how coins can tell us so much about history and could kind of give us a window on different periods of our history do you think that's something that will that is continuing now will continue into the future with coins that's you know their significance certainly you know take a snapshot in time as of now at this moment in the last six to eight months the new coinage portrait of Charles Charles the third it does offer some insights into in even in small ways so Charles it caused a bit of a stink at times with some people but Charles didn't want to be careless you know he didn't want to have the Carolian era because who is careless what on earth does that mean but if you look back on Charles the first and Charles the second they are careless on their you know from the Latin on their coinage but Charles actively wanted to be Charles he didn't want that to reflect a more modern approach so even in that small way you're getting a sense of a shift and a change in the perception and the way a monarch is coming across on the coinage and I think that is where coins are interesting because you do they are a vehicle still that the the monarchy and also the government can use to put messages across whether that's just to convey a sense of identity so what is Britain what does Britain mean you know a good coin design should theoretically capture the essence of an actual country so you should look at a coin and say ah yes that's an American coin or yes that's a British coin um but even with um you know looking at coins as as from a political messages point of view you know we have done the brexit coin um that was a relatively recent one that marked a moment in time a change regardless of whether you're pro or anti brexit you can't argue that it wasn't significant um so you've got things coming across such as that where I think in future years coins will certainly at this point in time anyway will still be held up as sources that people can use and can read I think that is significant yeah absolutely okay and um so just just to reiterate people come along to the Royal Mint experience and see some of these treasures for themselves is there anything else any other sources they can kind of find online or anything to to find out a bit more yeah I would encourage people to visit the Royal Mint Museum's website so we have a separate website to the Royal Mint itself so there's RoyalMint.com which is the selling entity but there's the you know search for Royal Mint Museum and you'll come up with the Royal Mint Museum's website um which is a because we as a museum are a separate charitable entity to the Royal Mint so we've got our own website on there and we're starting a big program of what we have been doing a big program of digitization over the last years which is now starting to find its way online in a meaningful way particularly when it comes to the books that we've got in the collection so the Waterloo Medal Roll is digitized for any researchers involved with the coinage look for the Royal Mint Museum of the Royal Mint sorry annual reports which are digitized on the museum's website they're fascinating resources you know go from 1870 through to 1976 and give you a really detailed information about what was happening at the Mint in those particular years brilliant if you're doing research during that period and want to know anything and we're adding to that all the time you know we're currently just looking at how can we digitize employee records that we have from the 19th century and in the early 20th century thinking about how we can bring those online at some point in the future so do check out the museum's website because you know that's part of the structured way we'll be working in the future is we're bringing a lot more themes to this and equally if anybody does know anybody in care homes or from that sector there's a fantastic outreach that we do to care homes where we send out a museum in a box which are designed to bring back memories and we started this with the anniversary of decimalization some years ago where it's quite literally a box where people put objects on it and the box tells you about the objects and people can handle the objects so there's lots of coins in there lots of things that help to spark memories particularly for those with dementias and out dementia and Alzheimer's and that's proved hugely successful over the last few years you know it really is really worked well so do reach out to us if you know anybody in a care home setting who would like to borrow a museum in a box remember in session that we have that's fantastic okay I've just had actually one question over on YouTube someone's just asked how the museum acquires all the all the items presumably a lot of them are just you know historically passed from the wrong in but you did mention some of the pieces have been acquired recently it's a bit of a mix of all sorts really so we have established in 1816 and we from there on in we were meant to get everything from the factory it's not always been quite as clear-cut as that so we've had things from the factory when still today do get things from the factory so we're getting new material on a weekly basis what we're making but in that period we've also had bequests such as those from Sarasafaya banks I think it was about two and a half thousand coins a lot of them very rare that came to us in the early 1820s from her collection and there've been other bequests of the things that have dripped into us over the years we've also identified gaps and bought material in from auction we do have a budget to buy material in so it's a mix of all sorts really and the collection sort of built organically almost over time but our key focus really I should have said this before is 1660s onwards which is when you get mechanization of the coinage production process so that's our area of expertise prior to that we've got material and but we would actually defer people to the British Museum for an expert view just as they probably would for anything post 1660s that's made by the Mint and is that just that the 1660s is that because that's when the Royal Mint kind of became more the production states are yeah it's more to do with where the collection strength lies so because we've got a fantastic selection tooling from that point onwards and because the collection itself becomes very strong from the 1660s onwards it's helps to tie in with the collection itself broadly speaking and you've got a neat delineation with the instruction of machine struck coins in the 1660s in 1662 so you've got this sort of nice dividing line that you can you can put into place yes we have material from earlier periods but you know and I can certainly talk about material from earlier periods but if you were to ask me about the Anglo-Saxons or the Romans or the Greeks then you you know I mean that part of the sea where the the light or the fish have lights on the end of their nose in terms of my knowledge that's sort of an area really but yeah excellent okay I don't think we've got any more questions that's just about bringing us up to the hour so Chris thank you so much for your time pleasure do you want to just repeat the website as your address is at rollmintmuseum.org yeah rollmintmuseum.co.uk for Code UK okay excellent and just to mention to everyone obviously if you want to find out more about Coin Collector magazine or our website just come to all about coins.co.uk we're recording the video as you you're probably all aware we'll put that on the website as well so you can view it there so Chris thanks so much for your time have a lovely rest of the evening and hopefully we can do this again very soon perhaps about one of the themes that's coming up yeah in the coming years yeah yeah okay thanks everyone have a good evening thanks Chris bye bye