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[fred lever]

Hi Guys, "a contra deal?" Basil are you referring there to the penny dies ordered in a panic by the Melbourne mint from Calcutta in early 1920? reference there is "Australian coins 1919 to 1924" by John Sharples and other researchers. Tooling was supplied by Calcutta in the form of annealed dies and Melbourne then completed the machining and hardening required to use those tools in the presses. All of this is well known and well detailed.
I have never read of a "contra deal",  implying we sent stuff back to india in exchange?
What would have we sent back?
Can you supply a reference to read about this "contra deal"?
Cheers, Fred.

[Basil]

I have never read of a "contra deal",  implying we sent stuff back to india in exchange?
What would have we sent back?
Can you supply a reference to read about this "contra deal"?
Cheers, Fred.

Hi Fred,no reference but i remember it being discussed in the 1960's in Sydney so written Records will exist somewhere.
It would have been in Gold to pay for the 'starters kit' we got from the Calcutta Mint,or wherever in India it originated from.
 I know,to settle an argument back in the 1960's,one Numismatist was going thru. Bills of Ladings to find out exactly what Cargo was on the Ship when it berthed in Melb. because i was at a Coin Club meeting when he got up to speak.
When i read about all the Oz Sovereigns turning up in India i joined some dots and suggested that's why assuming the Indians weren't Minting them locally.

Like the 1930 Penny its not a subject i know enough about to offer an Opinion but i will do when i find copies of the Articles i read back in the 1960's.

Edit...not that it matters but my Brother has reminded me there was more than 1 ship involved,i think the first was around 1918. What they were trying to find out by finding the relevant Bills of Lading was whether India sent out Barrels of Silver and Copper Blanks along with the Dies.

[r9453]

little or no interest  in real pre-decimal coins on this forum
pics removed therefore

Definitely not zero interest. Your pics are always excellent. In fact I usually make copies for my own records.

[ausproofs]

little or no interest  in real pre-decimal coins on this forum
pics removed therefore

Definitely not zero interest. Your pics are always excellent. In fact I usually make copies for my own records.

I am very interested Echidna, at times I dont comment as such. But admire your pics and the various types you post. Still trying learn especially pennies varieties. So please keep posting..

[Basil]

little or no interest  in real pre-decimal coins on this forum
pics removed therefore

Definitely not zero interest. Your pics are always excellent. In fact I usually make copies for my own records.

+1 here as well,keep posting Echinda,i always appreciate your knowledge and opinion and have purchased several of your Ebay listed Coins. 80% of my interest in Coins are Oz. pre-Dec.

Forum is going thru a quiet patch but will bounce back,i'm semi retired and still have problems finding time to reply to some of the Topics i'm interested in and usually just do a quick browse.

[Robster]

As above - always find your stuff interesting!

[nealeffendi]

I have never read of a "contra deal",  implying we sent stuff back to india in exchange?
What would have we sent back?
Can you supply a reference to read about this "contra deal"?
Cheers, Fred.

Hi Fred,no reference but i remember it being discussed in the 1960's in Sydney so written Records will exist somewhere.
It would have been in Gold to pay for the 'starters kit' we got from the Calcutta Mint,or wherever in India it originated from.
 I know,to settle an argument back in the 1960's,one Numismatist was going thru. Bills of Ladings to find out exactly what Cargo was on the Ship when it berthed in Melb. because i was at a Coin Club meeting when he got up to speak.
When i read about all the Oz Sovereigns turning up in India i joined some dots and suggested that's why assuming the Indians weren't Minting them locally.

Like the 1930 Penny its not a subject i know enough about to offer an Opinion but i will do when i find copies of the Articles i read back in the 1960's.

Edit...not that it matters but my Brother has reminded me there was more than 1 ship involved,i think the first was around 1918. What they were trying to find out by finding the relevant Bills of Lading was whether India sent out Barrels of Silver and Copper Blanks along with the Dies.

If India was sending anything to us in 1918 it was struck pennies. As for penny dies being sent it wasn't until 1919 (and direct from London). Any gold shipments to India would have been payments for imports (be it pennies, chests of tea or jute to make wool bales etc).
No logic to importing penny blanks from India as we were an exporter of copper.

[Basil]

If India was sending anything to us in 1918 it was struck pennies. As for penny dies being sent it wasn't until 1919 (and direct from London). Any gold shipments to India would have been payments for imports (be it pennies, chests of tea or jute to make wool bales etc).
No logic to importing penny blanks from India as we were an exporter of copper.

Edited on advice.

All this was thoroughly researched and discussed  back in the 1960's,anyone with the time and will should find some Documentation.
IIRC there was more than one ship  from Calcutta and the Bills of Lading were dated around 1918/1919 after the Royal Mint instructed Calcutta to send all Tooling and Dies to Melb. after the War.
Paul Holland states Mint records as receiving Dies in 1920 which would be correct as it would take some time for delivery once the Ships finally berthed in Melb. 

....."way round. Nonetheless, the Indian obverse die has played an important role in Australian numismatics, especially since the remaining tools and dies from Calcutta were later sent to Melbourne in 1920, with the Indian obverse die eventually emerging as a key identifying feature for the 1930 penny."

Anyway its not a subject i wish to get involved in for the simple reason i don't care what happened at the Melb. Mint 100 Years ago. However if i find any Documentation on the above or the origins of the 1930 Penny i will Post.

[fred lever]

Hi Basil, thanks for that, i'll get back to the 1919/1920's in the future (stuck on other projects at the moment) and re-read all my documents and Holland/Sharples etc. I focussed on the coins of the time and really did not absorb anything (or forgot from old age!) about the angle of the Mint ordering and receiving stuff.
Cheers, Fred.

[nealeffendi]

All this was thoroughly researched and discussed  back in the 1960's,anyone with the time and will should find some Documentation.
IIRC there was more than one ship  from Calcutta and the Bills of Lading were dated around 1918/1919 after the Royal Mint instructed Calcutta to send all Tooling and Dies to Melb. after the War.
Paul Holland states Mint records as receiving Dies in 1920 which would be correct as it would take some time for delivery once the Ships finally berthed in Melb. 

....."way round. Nonetheless, the Indian obverse die has played an important role in Australian numismatics, especially since the remaining tools and dies from Calcutta were later sent to Melbourne in 1920, with the Indian obverse die eventually emerging as a key identifying feature for the 1930 penny."

Anyway its not a subject i wish to get involved in for the simple reason i don't care what happened at the Melb. Mint 100 Years ago. However if i find any Documentation on the above or the origins of the 1930 Penny i will Post.

Is there any evidence that the Royal Mint instructed Calcutta to send all Tooling and Dies to Melb after the war? My understanding (from reading Spinks from that period) is that after striking the 1919 pennies (London supplied dies and Melbourne clones) the intent was to go to the square Cu-Ni penny. When that was shelved in mid 1920 (for racial reasons, whites don't use square coins was the reason given in Spinks) the need to urgently obtain hubs/dies meant that we turned to India (any number of reasons why London didn't provide them, there was a huge demand for coinage for the Empire and London would have been backlogged with producing dies for themselves as well as other mints such as Heaton and Kings Norton)). Now it is certain that the hubs sent from India were clones (Fred's recent article touched on the reason why, the master sent in 1916 had a chipped pearl) and the 20 pairs  of dies sent were also off cloned hubs (but a different set to those sent, India had made a cloned master of both the obverse and reverse (the obverse had a poorly done fix to the chipped pearl and the reverse needed to have the date as 1920) and prepared at least 2 hubs off each with one pair used in India to strike those 20 pairs and the other pair sent to Melb).
Ships from India to Melb only took a couple of weeks. There was an excellent telegraph system and India's rail system is top notch; so why would it take until late 1920 for dies to get here?
As for the 1930 penny that was off hubs sent from London well after the Indian supplied gear. The London supplied Indian dies were used on some of the 1920 CBLs, many 1921 and 1922 Indians and then again for 1929-31. London of course had the original masters for the English and Indian obverses and used them for various places in the Empire (and not just the penny obverse but other denominations, check out the coins of British West Africa and Jersey) so besides the 2 Indian hubs prepared in 1916 (see Paul Hollands excellent article) they must have made more at a later date to still have an Indian hub at the Royal Mint after 1921.

[Basil]

"Is there any evidence that the Royal Mint instructed Calcutta to send all Tooling and Dies to Melb after the war?"

It should be out there somewhere,i remember reading about all this back in the 1960's but i don't have any access to any documentation but will Post if i find anything. Also my understanding of the square Coins was that it was an Australian folly that was quickly knocked on the head by the Royal Mint via the Australian Govt.

In the early 1960's,around 1962-63,i used to spend Saturday afternoons,and sometimes Sundays,sorting thru hundreds of £. of Pennies and Halves for a Crows Nest,Sydney,Antique dealer by the name of Gibson.
He was basically only after the 1930,but of course the 1925,1946 & 1923 were also kept along with outstanding egs of other dates. He obtained staggering(for me as a School Kid) amounts of Change every week  and had several people including his wife and Kids sorting(Noodling).  
I remember once finding a 1930 Penny in a pile and started yelling and hollering and jumping around the floor and couldn't understand why he and his mates were laughing their heads off.He salted the pile with the 1930 and i guess he was testing my honesty and playing a joke.,always stuck in my mind.
Anyway,point being he also had multitudes of Coins Books,Numismatic Society & Coin Club Newsletters and also rival Dealers Newsletters and i read them all. 
Anyway that's,along with a period a week at School with another Coin/Stamp Dealer,is  where my knowledge of 1960's Sydney Centric  Coin World came from. I'm only a hobby collector but i remember what i read or was told back then clearly,you may scoff/ridicule and impose contemporary views on this forum or in CaB,but be careful because one day documentation and research from the leading Numismatic from the 1950'/60's will turn up and there will be a lot of red faces i predict.

My 2c.

[nealeffendi]

Hi Basil. I'm sorry that my replies seemed to be scoffing/ridiculing but I'm just a pedantic researcher trying to get to the bottom of everything of what exactly happened. I have read a lot of the society journals from the 1940s and 1950s and 2 things struck me. One is that much of the knowledge from back then has been forgotten about and the second thing is that many things we know now (even obvious things like die pairings) were not known then. Those 2 points mean that many "facts" in the coin catalogues from then and now are wrong. Even most research papers (written by museum curators) are full of errors (I once found over 30 errors in a single paper published by a certain curator and yet that paper is cited as a reference in just about every article on the pennies of the early 1920s).
The only researcher I have no trouble with articles by is Dr Paul Holland. His article on the origins of the Indian obverse really answers many points and his research is based on records in the Royal Mint (the mother lode of facts and much more reliable than anything that may be in journals and club letters from the 1950s and 60s).
I do spend a lot of hours in reference libraries and archives (helps that I have a brother who was a librarian and is now an archivist).
Spending your weekends sorting through pennies in a coin shop sounds like more fun than even a candy shop.

[Mister T]

His article on the origins of the Indian obverse really answers many points and his research is based on records in the Royal Mint

Which one was that?

[Basil]

Hi Basil. I'm sorry that my replies seemed to be scoffing/ridiculing but I'm just a pedantic researcher trying to get to the bottom of everything of what exactly happened. 

No worries,until i find some documentation my views and opinions are only hearsay and open to discussion both for and against,i know that.
I can't explain why nothing shows up these days on the Internet,there would have a been a new article almost every Week on the 1930 and Pre.-Dec. Coins in general during the 1960's and surely someone must have kept Copies.

[nealeffendi]

His article on the origins of the Indian obverse really answers many points and his research is based on records in the Royal Mint

Which one was that?

Journal of the Numismatic Association of Australia 20 (2009)pages 43-57 (page 48 lists the dates they made the Indian masters and master punches). With 2 reverse and 2 obverse punches made they sent one pair to India and retained the other pair (plus they retained the master). From either the retained master or the retained master punch London could provide us with the tools used for the 1930 penny. 
Now the chipped pearl that Fred covered is found in 1916-18, most 1920, many 1921 and 1922 and all 1924 and 1927 (24 and 27 were dies left over from 1920 with Sydney striking the 24 Indian and then one of those dies used again in Melbourne in 1927). As the last of the 1920 dated pennies (struck in Melbourne 1921, possibly even later) have no chipped pearl then Melbourne MUST have got fresh tooling from London in 1921 (here the evidence from mint records is patchy/missing but the coins themselves reveal what must have occurred).
Basil is correct about there being articles on the 1930 penny just about every week back in the early 1960's, I've spotted many over the years in old magazines (like Post and Pix) from that era that mention people lucky enough to find one in change or buying one for a couple of quid. Interestingly none of those articles (less than 35 years after the minting and when most mint visitors of the early 1930s were still alive) mentions a single person recalling visiting the mint in 1930-31 and swapping a penny for a penny.