Today I'm going to show you all the fun you can have with one of these
and one of these.
Hello. I'm Tom Hockenhull
Curator of Modern Money at the British Museum
and welcome to my corner.
I used to think that coins, like quite a lot of people, can actually be quite small
and therefore a little bit boring.
And it's only when I realised that one can use these objects
I'm always interested in how objects tell stories
that these can actually reveal the most interesting stories about politics
about the machinations of state, and the ways in which they want to be viewed
and the ways in which their subjects view them.
And yet the object I want to talk to you about today is a subversion of that authority.
It's about the ways in which people use and more pertinently abuse money.
Namely by defacing it.
I first heard about this object about eight years ago and it kind of intrigued me
for the simple reason that it is a 1903 British penny.
Across the face of it, across the face of the King
someone has defaced it with a political slogan
which says 'VOTES FOR WOMEN'
So I thought, what can we find out about this object?
Who defaced it?
Why did they deface it?
How many more of such objects were defaced by these same people?
One only needs to look in the history books to find that in about 1913/1914
just before the First World War
there was this intensity of action – 'Suffragette militarism'
where activists started to try through violent means
as well as non-violent means
to gain the vote for women.
So I thought the most likely place to find evidence of people attacking the coin
would be through newspaper reports from 1913-1914
and lo and behold...
I'm going to fast track through the hours of relentless research
and boring poring over of archives
which I found personally quite enjoyable
to get you to the newspaper report. Which was that yes!
Well actually the report is about anarchists
so 'Anarchists are defacing coins with the phrase or the motto
"Viva la anarchy" and it is said the militant suffragists have expressed an interest in doing exactly the same thing to coins.'
Now the next thing I needed to find was other evidence of coins because it's very, very unlikely
that just one of these coins would have been made because surely somebody who went to all
the trouble of engraving one coin would perhaps do it to more coins.
And lo and behold more coins were found.
Somebody in the 1980s went out with their metal detector
to a field and they found one of these coins. And crucially the letter stamps that had been
used to deface that coin were not only similar, they were identical to the stamps that had
been used to deface our coin.
Now why is this important? Because that coin was dated 1913 which gives us a kind of terminus
date for when the coins were defaced. Bearing in mind that the Museum's coin is dated 1903
so I can therefore sit here and say 'Well, okay, the coin was defaced some point after
it left the mint' which was 1903.
But here we have a terminus date, 1913 when this coin was most likely defaced.
An interesting element emerged that all the coins had been defaced on the head of the coin.
So we all know coins. Head. Tails. They'd all been defaced on the head.
So this was literally a defacement of the King's head on a coin. Why am I saying this?
Because there was one coin that we found with the head of Victoria
and on that coin they hadn't defaced the head.
No. They defaced the tail.
So for the last part of my study, what I decided to do was to channel my inner suffragette.
I decided to engage in this nefarious activity myself.
You could say what Marlon Brando took from the method school of acting
I brought to numismatics.
And I'll show you how.
So. This is a hammer and this is a jewellery engraving punch.
This is the kind of punch that you might use to...I don't know...engrave the name tag of your favourite cat.
And it's most likely that somebody used a punch a little bit like this to engrave the
coins in question.
This is somebody sat at their table one night diligently tapping away with a hammer to engrave
these coins.
So here's a coin.
DISCLAIMER: By the way, this is NOT a Museum object. It's one I brought in earlier.
DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.
What am I saying, give it a go, it's fun!
So what I did was I sat in for one evening and just like this I very diligently went
and defaced a load of coins with a political slogan.
Now this was a very rudimentary experiment. I'm not going to pretend that there was anything
amazingly scientific about it. But what it taught me was that this process
if you repeat it several times a) you can make lots of mistakes so you have to be quite
careful about how you do it.
It took at least a few minutes per coin to do.
and the second thing is
**yawns**
It's really, really boring.
So, if we quickly do the maths then it took me about two or three minutes to deface each coin
if I didn't make a mistake.
Now if you multiply that by however many, you could potentially be sat doing this evening
after evening and deface thousands of coins over the course of maybe a year.
The problem was that you couldn't actually get these coins into circulation without somebody
spotting them. And that was the problem. Shopkeepers were unlikely, we know this from other stories
from the time and other contemporary news accounts, that people were unwilling to accept
coins that were defaced because they were worried that they wouldn't be able to pass
them on again.
So there's no guarantee that this coin would have been widely circulated or had the same effect as other acts of suffragette militarism
such as arson, bombings and window smashing.
But the act itself was also one of destruction
deliberate iconoclasm against the head of the king.
So what this simple experiment did was gave me a small glimpse
into the labour and dedication of just one individual
in their fight to gain what we now regard as a basic right.
And that's why, for me, I felt that I was connected to this coin in a way.
that I've never really felt connected to any object in the Museum collections before.
And that's why I love it.
You can see this object on display in the Citi Money Gallery.
Also my colleague, Ben Alsop, did another Curator's Corner about a similarly defaced coin – see here.