With the great rarities of the British coinage tending to be locked away in the cabinets of museums, collectors seldom have the chance of obtaining any one of them, but with the 1933 penny there was always felt to be the possibility, however slim, that maybe if you looked hard enough and often enough one would materialise in your pocket or purse. There are coins that are more rare, there are coins that are more expensive and there are almost certainly coins that more beautiful than the 1933 penny, but because there was the sense that anyone might come across one in their change, it is a coin for which people have a special affection.
When people ask how many 1933 pennies there are we can say that we have a fairly good idea but the truth is that we do not know for sure. There is firm evidence for six specimens, and more tentatively we think that a seventh may have been struck. But with no record having been kept of precisely how many were actually made we cannot be absolutely sure of the number.
The Royal Mint strikes coins on demand. If there are enough of a particular coin already in circulation there will be no requirement for the Mint to add to the existing stock. This was no less true in the 1930s than it is today and it goes a long way to explaining why it is that the 1933 penny is one of the most valuable coins of which you are ever likely to hear.
There was a marked variation in the number of pennies produced in the fifteen years after the end of the First World War. Large numbers were issued between 1919 and 1921, but no pennies were released bearing the dates 1923, 1924 or 1925, and again by 1932 the major banks had such large quantities in hand that there was no need strike pennies dated 1933.
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In these circumstances no pennies of 1933 should exist. There is a tradition, however, of burying complete sets of current coins under the foundation stones of new buildings and in 1933 the Mint received three requests to this end. Robert Johnson was the Deputy Master of the Mint and in deciding that a very limited number of complete sets of British coins dated 1933 should be prepared to satisfy this demand he knew that he was creating a modern rarity. A set of coins, including a 1933 penny, was sent to the University of London in Bloomsbury and also to two churches in the diocese of Ripon in Yorkshire. The Mint kept two specimens for its own collection and in addition one was given to the British Museum.
The locations of the buildings that had received complete sets of coins dated 1933 eventually found their way into publication and unfortunately one of the churches had its set stolen. Fearing the worst, the other church sold its set but as far as we know the University of London still has its 1933 penny. With the uncertainty surrounding the actual number that was struck, speculation grew that there was a chance of the coin turning up in general circulation. A generation of children and adults therefore checked their change in the hope that perhaps they would find one of these extremely rare coins.
A genuine 1933 penny was sold by a London auction house in 1994 for over ?20,000, and in an attempt to fool the coin trade and the Royal Mint, pennies of other dates have been altered to 1933. But a safeguard against this sort of activity exists in the numismatic expertise of the Royal Mint Museum; it has the necessary skill to identify any spurious pennies of this type.
The Museum has specimens of counterfeit coins, of, for example, gold sovereigns or silver coins from the reign of George III and, in addition, in this part of the collection, there are examples of George V pennies whose dates have been altered to 1933.
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