NUMISMATISTS NEVER DIE YOUNG

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 516, 13 May 1949, Page 7

NUMISMATISTS NEVER DIE YOUNG

are millions of stamp col- | lectors in the world but only thousands of coin collectors," says ‘Harold Mattingly, former Assistant Keeper of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, and president until last year of the Royal Numismatic Society. "I suppose it’s partly because there is always a large supply of cheap stamps available, while coins are neither as cheap, nor as readily available. And they are heavy things, hard to store in mass-why, a wellmade coin cabinet alone costs about £40. "I suppose there are other reasons too. One that I tell my friends out here is that you in New Zealand have~ the disadvantage of never having been conquered by the Romans. That means there’s no likelihood of ancient coins being unearthed periodically as they are in England. At Home some old Roman coins are remarkably cheap, like the Constantine the Great, which collectors can buy for a shilling. Of course there are the rare coins too, like the Agrigentum decadrachm from Sicily, which has sold for £45,000." ei OFTEN wonder why there

Mr. Mattingly, who is in New Zealand visiting his daughter, and incidentally lecturing on his favourite subject to the Royal New Zealand Numismatic Society and other organisations, has . made coins and medals his life’s study. His specialty is Roman coinage, and. his main occupation over the past 38 years has been the writing of five catalogues of Roman coins covering a period of 200 years, from Augustus to ‘Elagabalus. The largest of these is a thousand-page volume with about a hundred illustrations, He has _ also written an Outlines of Ancient History,

and a study of ihe Imperial Civil Service of Rome. "If you want to, study history — especially ancient history — you must _ take more and. more notice of coins," he says, "and I have found that Roman coinage is in itself a set’ of historical documents." That didn’t mean to say that numismatists "weren’t interested in miodern coins too, he said. For instance, every: one was keen to see the New Zealand crown piece» which was coming out soon. "It was originally intended as

some sort of: commemoration of the Royal Tour, although there is no special reference to this on the coin itself. They did the same thing for the South African Royal Tour with a Springbok crown, and although 300,000 were minted they are already cdllectors’ pieces, worth about 15/- each, "Another interesting CBin is the new English threepence, a 12-angled coin considerably larger than the old one, made of a yellowish metal, not brass, but one of these modern alloys. It was received, with considerable suspicion when it first came out, but now everyone seems to have accepted it quite well." From the expert’s viewpoint, Mr. Mattingly thought, our own New Zealand coinage was a very good blend of the traditional and the modern (the "new world," as he calls it), and he was interested to notice our widespread use of Maori figures and designs. There was a similar use of modern symbols on some British coins too-the Ship halfpenny and the Wren farthing were examples-although we in New Zealand seemed a little in advance of England in coin design. Personally he would like to see a greater blend of the’ historical and the modern in British coins. He’d like to see a Bulldog penny, for instance, and generally speaking he thought English designers could afford to- concentrate. less on the heraldic side, preserving one heraldic design (as we

had done with our New Zealand halfcrown) for the sake of congaaty with tradition. One thing about modern coinage which had often occurred to him, and this applied to New Zealatid too, was that we could use more effective portraits of the King. The present ones, based on photographs, tended to be a little flat, whereas there was just sufficient relief in a coin portrait for an experienced artist to put to good use, he said. "When you've seen the great art of the past which was expended on coins and medals you sometimes feel

you’d like to see better portraiture on our own coins. It’s really extraordinary how much artistic effect can be got on a little thing like a coin. "IT often say to my non-collector friends that it’s a curious fact that numismatists never die young," he continued. "‘Why is that?’ they — ask. ‘Because they simply can’t bear the thought of having to leave their collections, I reply. It’s certainly true that there seem to be two to three times more numis-

matists now than there were 10 years ago. It’s partly due to the war, of course, when people seemed: to turn more to hobbies of this sort. There are now 20 societies in Britain, and about a hundred in the United States, where they seem to go in for it with great intensity, collecting coins in a stamp way, you know. But they haven’t a national collection such as we have at the Museum." ‘ In his own work at the British Museum he said he had made only one really important find. That was when a schoolboy brought in a collection of about 20 pieces which his grandfather had left him. It included a brass Carausius whose existence had never even been suspected before. "Of course we always paid a fair price for any coin we wanted, since we weren’t in the business in a commercial way. We certainly werefi’t like Verres, the Roman governor of Sicily about 75 B.C.," Mr, Mattingly concluded, harking back once more to his favourite subject. "Verres plundered and impoverished everywhere during his governorship, removing anything of value, especially works of art, that took his fancy. He was also a keen numismatist, and used to imprison people in his dungeons until they would tell him where they had hidden their collections. He was one num‘smatist anyway who didn’t live to a ripe old age."