Peckris 2

[Adopts tone of voice of the railway bore you dread sitting next to you...] Ah well you see, it's quite easy to tell. I can see from the riffle squod mark that the bullet was made in the North Croydon Works of the Machine Arms Co and they only made them with that particular riffle squod up to 17th August 1914 and the entire consignment apart from one case was used before November 1914 in the Belgian trenches on the Western Front - the one case was used in 1915 but only at Gallipoli so if I was a betting man I'd feel my money was safe in saying that is a 1914 bullet. As I was saying to my friend Roger only last Tuesday - and there's no-one knows more than Roger about riffle... [cont p.94]

Blimey. Even if the other 10 had never heard of QI it doesn't take a great stretch of intellect to realise that there is only one possible anagram of "IQ" !

Yes it does! "No actual squirrels were hurt during the making of this video..." Thanks Paddy.

Just the usual blank screen I'm afraid Paddy. Couldn't you try Dropbox? That works for me.

Compare the average halfcrown mintage from 1902 - 1913, with those from 1914-1918 for real dramatic effect!

Design visibility (i.e. wear) first and foremost, and also strength of strike, and any damage. Visual appeal is one of those hard-to-quantify things which people just gain from experience and which leads dealers to adding a premium to the price!

That is fractionally preferable to "He's taken the guy at knee height....".

I share your pain. That abomination seems to be everywhere. It's always in answering a question - "What started you in collecting coins?" "So I was at home one day..."

Yes, because Edward's portrait was both larger and shallower so was a better design. The ghosting reduced in a few stages : after the shallower portrait was introduced in 1920/21 after the ME portrait after the reduction in size of the ME (on bronze) with the new reverse designs (small for bronze, 1925-1927), radically different for silver from 1928

Probably for the same reason that 'massive' is now a synonym for 'important'.

That right hand one definitely looks wrong. Absolutely a different die.

It suddenly started in 1911, when the deep profile portrait of GV came in. For comparison, the portrait of Ed8 is sufficiently shallower that ghosting is less pronounced and Britannia suffers much less. As the ghosting was an accidental effect, it is neither intentional nor invariable so there are good strikes out there, but they're hard to get hold of. As for the poor hair detail on some, that's purely down to the overuse of dies - note how the increase in penny mintages was sharp and dramatic, and "there was a war on" too. Bear in mind that the obverse 'sucked' metal from the reverse even when the die was worn; the hair detail was simply the icing on the cake, not the priime cause of ghosting. I think you're probably right about the war ending the recessed ear experiment.

Here is the conundrum : the stronger the obverse and the better the hair detail, the more likely it is that there will problems with ghosting and weakness on the reverse. It's rare you will get both - the high profile obverse sucked metal from the reverse, which had thin rims and little protection. Ironically the short-lived recessed ear experiment of 1915-16 went a long way to curing the problem, so why it was abandoned... (answers on a postcard).

You mean the nearly 52% who actually voted for Brexit, which was 37% of the electorate. No doubt you will recall that the ballot simply asked "Do we stay" or "Do we leave"? Nothing about the single market. Nothing about the customs union (and most people had never heard of that on voting day). Nothing about the implications for Ireland. Nothing about the impact on all the "just in time" goods required by some industries. Nothing about the impact on medical supplies. Etc etc etc. I'm prepared to bet that many Leave voters didn't realise the implications of that decision.

You could argue it's just an indicator between the start and end of the legend.

The rare or more common one?

Tell me about it. I once worked for a company that issued a sheet saying - I kid you not - "We intend to cascade information throughout the enterprise going forward". Meaning that from the next month they were going to publish a company newsletter.

I became a grave digger but my boss told me to lighten up.

That's a good point, but I have an instinct that the masters are still in China. (Just a hunch).

I was caught out when the Tories combined the Job Seeker’s Allowance with the New Seekers Allowance - I ended up having to beg, steal and borrow...

I used to be a werewolf but I'm alright nooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwww

It's why Format Coins in Birmingham stopped dealing British coins - they got fed up telling people their coins were fakes.

Exact Chinese copy, taken from a good coin which is why the fakes are all absolutely identical. The same problem occurs with some Northumberland shillings - the only way to tell a fake was side by side with another, but by now we should know what to look out for.

And some of them owed their lives to a strategically placed penny...