My name is Ben Alsop.
I am the Citi Money Gallery curator at the British Museum
and welcome to my corner!
I've always been interested in museums.
As a child I was kind of the annoying kid that would want to go to a museum
when I was spending time with my relatives
or when I was on holiday, or a school trip.
And it didn't really matter what museum
but I remember them having quite an affect on me.
So I remember going to the Dorset Tank Museum and leaving there
and wanting to be involved in tanks
to drive a tank for instance
and then I remember going to the Yelverton Paperweight Museum
and wanting to be a paperweight.
But whatever the museum I went to, I really enjoyed the atmosphere
and I never really thought I'd be a curator
because I didn't even know what a curator was.
I didn't understand the whole infrastructure that goes behind a museum
and luckily through volunteering, through study that I did
I kind of found my way into the British Museum
and I've been here for something like 8 years.
And it's an amazing place to work.
So my job here at the British Museum is as the Citi Money Gallery curator.
Now this gallery charts over 4,500 years of monetary history
but also we tell a history of the world through money.
Now money is that great through-line through history.
It touches all manner of different areas of society
and all 4 corners of the globe.
What you think about money is exactly the same as what someone thought about
50 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago.
It still consumes people in the same way
and that's what I find fascinating.
Charting a history of money you can also see the history and movement of ideas
of religion, of politics.
You will see portraits of some of the most famous and influential people in history
but you will also see objects that just ordinary people have been using for 4,500 years
and that's what I find most fascinating I suppose.
It's that idea that what have in the gallery touches all elements of society
and it's something that you, when you enter the gallery
immediately have an affinity with.
You don't need to know a great deal about the history of money.
You know what money is, you know how it affects you
and therefore you can put yourself in the shoes of someone 2,000 years ago.
The way the Citi Money Gallery works is
on one side it's how money is used by those in power
so central banks, authorities, rulers
and on the other side it's actually how money is used in general society
because there can be a tension between those two things.
I particularly love the way that money is used once it's entered into general society,
into public usage.
So what I want to draw your attention to is one particular object that I find fascinating
and one which through a bit of social media
and through trying to talk about the object to the general public
I actually found out more information than I knew to begin with
and the department knew when it came into the collection.
So let me show you something.
If I show you this, which is a shilling coin of George V.
He's got a wonderfully big, bushy mustache on one side.
Now if you see this as a coin that's fine
but you could also see it as a canvas.
So you could see it as a material which you can use to send a message
or make an inscription, or do a design.
And that's what drew me to one particular object that we have.
What someone has done is they've taken a 1 shilling coin
and on the other side they've written a message
and they've written a message of love
from Fred to a lady called Nellie
and they wrote this in 1916
and on it he's inscribed the word 'France'.
Now these fit into this idea of love tokens
and we have a number of these in the collection
and they date back to the 18th and 19th centuries
when they were at their height
when they were used most famously by people who had
been convicted of a crime
and were to be sent to penal colonies in America or Australia
for committing a crime in Britain.
And so they would take a coin, they would smooth it down
and they would put a message on it.
Things like 'To my loving mother, from your unfortunate son'
or 'When this you see remember me'
and they used it because coins are durable.
If you come into the Citi Money Gallery you will see thousands of years worth of coins
and some of them, especially the gold and good quality silver
look as good as they day they were made.
These are durable objects.
And often they are some of the best objects to tell us about society
when no other objects exist.
So this guy Fred took a coin, smoothed down one side
and wrote a message of love.
Now using one of these
which is a register.
So every objects that comes into the Museum is given an independent registration number
it's very own independent registration number.
Now we do it digitally, but before the dawn of computers
if you can image such a thing
we used to write it all down.
So this is a register and in it I'm looking for a particular reference to this token that
I mentioned.
The reference itself says very little indeed.
It simply says that the token came into the Museum
presented by Mrs Carvell of Hampstead in 1966.
Now I have no other information.
So I wanted to maybe find out more about who this Fred and Nellie were.
I mean I didn't really hold out much hope.
As I said we didn't really have much information to go on.
So I wrote a blog, and the blog was put up on the British Museum website
and in it I explained the coin, how it fits into our wider collection,
how it's on display in the Citi Money Gallery
and how it would be amazing if we could maybe find out some more information.
This love token was tweeted by the British Museum
and it did rather well,
it was retweeted by Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet,
which is interesting because it's a silver coin and I always thought he was more interested
in gold...
and then just a few weeks later the Museum was contacted by a lady called Joy.
Now she came up with some really compelling evidence that suggested that the Fred and
Nellie on this coin
were actually her grandparents.
She said that they were married in 1916, her grandparents Fred and Nellie,
they were married actually in London.
He went off to fight at the Somme in 1916
and fought in the First World War.
In 1966, which is when the token actually came into the Museum's collection,
so it is at this point that we record it in a book such as this,
is the year that Nellie died.
Now we can never be certain that this is the Fred and Nellie mentioned on the coin
but rather wonderfully as well, Joy did send a photograph of Fred and Nellie
and there they are on their wedding day if I remember rightly.
And there's Fred in his uniform and there's Nellie sitting by his side.
So what I particularly found fascinating about this story
and fascinating about this object
is that it's taking something really every day
really utilitarian.
It's a coin, they're mass-produced
but they're completely changing the nature of it.
It's no longer a coin to be used in exchange, or trade, or to pay for something
it becomes a testament to two peoples' relationship
so an image has been removed from it
and on it has been inscribed this message
'From Fred to Nellie France 1916'
The words are simple, there's no great flowery language
but you know exactly what is being said.
And of course he is making this token
not entirely sure if he will come back from France in 1916.
It really does show that these objects which are
kind of utilitarian and very usable and very disposable to some extent
can actually be fascinating
and talk not of money, talk not of trade and exchange
which are obviously very important parts of history
but it can also just talk about human relationships.
So if there was a curator I'd like to swap corners with
it would probably be my colleague Eleanor who works in the Asia department.
She works with the Korean Gallery and it's a gallery like the Citi Money Gallery
which combines both the contemporary and the ancient.
So I'd love to find out more about what she does.