Tyneside Numismatic member Brian Harrison recently had an article published in coin news. Brian has done some fascinating research on variants of the decimal penny. We asked Brian to tell us his story which is below. Underneath that, you can download the pages from Brian’s article in Coin News.
Here is Brian’s story in his own words:
“After a lengthy break from the hobby I came back to coin collecting about 3-4 years ago. I had dabbled a bit but nothing serious. However, an old friend of mine passed away in 2012 and had left me a massive bag of old predecimal bronze coins. I initially just sorted through them and placed them into date sets and suddenly I had to find the missing dates, I was hooked again. Since then I had basically specialised in Bronze coinage, specifically 1895 -1970, although lately my collection is definitely expanding into many other avenues.
Anyway, a few months ago, and after being inspired by some new decimal penny findings on the predecimal.com online forum, I decided to bring my bronze penny collection up to modern day. So I started by finding all the known decimal penny variants already found. While doing this however, I noticed quite a few anomalies. I shared these online and was encouraged to take it further by the predecimal.com members. I was also inspired by David J Groom who also encouraged me to get my findings published in Coin News, the contact details of which Ian provided me with. John Mussel contacted me back very quickly and seemed very interested. After a few amendments and help from some TNS members, I finally got a draft ready that I was happy with and that you see online today.
It has been a great exercise and I have really enjoyed the research. I have now almost finished an additional section dealing with Uncirculated and Proof issues. Again there are some very interesting finds and a few new variants amongst them too. Obviously it is considerably harder to find multiples of these compared with the circulation issues so I have had to find some unique and interesting ways of compiling the information. It comes down to a little bit of insanity and a passion for researching a fairly untapped area.
I think the penny variants just shows that in our hobby you don’t have to spend a fortune to collate an interesting and diverse collection. Infact you can do it on a very tight almost zero budget
Brian Harrison”
You can download Brian’s article from Coin News from the links below:
