Red Riley

I have known Michael for upwards of 15 years, although he has been trading for at least 40. Reliable and specialising in bronze pennies, he nonetheless has an enormous stock of milled British coins (not so much ancient or hammered) and has a shop near Notting Hill Gate tube station. I have bought many coins from him and he was very helpful in allowing me to photograph coins for The Standard Guide to Grading British Coins.

I am going to rename you Pessimeter! A true Fine 19KN would go for a few pounds, maybe even £10 - £15 on the right day on eBay, maybe half that at a fair. It would have to be pretty damn worn to only fetch 99p. It would probably only go for 99p if the 'KN' had worn away... A true VF coin (i.e. one in which you could still see the complete union jack on the shield) would go for around £50 at the moment.

And he's laughing all the way to the er...

There's no mystery. You have a bad day at work, find an old sixpence and lob it into the blank hopper. Et voila.

Actually, I believe TVR was asset-stripped out of existence by the Russian owners; Land Rover and Jaguar are owned by Tata of India although operate very much as an independent organisation (a friend's son is a design engineer for them and he says the new owners are way better than Ford who just couldn't resist meddling). Vauxhall is really no more a British operation than Nissan, Honda or Toyota as all their cars are re-badged Opels. Ford only make components here. Somewhere along the line though we seem to have forgotten Aston Martin...

On the other hand, a lack of regulations or at least effective enforcement of them has led the banking industry to its current state of international pariah and to go one stage further, another dearth of regulations has led to 12 people losing their lives in Colorado.

I've not seen the Jubilee crowns, but I always likeed the currency obverse - it's punchy and fairly realistic too. My pet hate is the Maklouf portrait which I find is not only very shallow but also boring. It's the only portrait I don't like at all. I actually think the current portrait is a very good likeness. The queen is an old lady and its a pretty good impression of one of those; do you think we should go back to the Gillick portrait and pretend 60 years hasn't gone by? I think as you said Peck, the Maklouf is the worst of the lot and you'd have to go a long way back in history to find such a dreary portrait. The Machin portrait is a little better but it's very 1960s (nothing wrong with that) and any resemblance to the queen at 40-odd or whatever she was, is purely imaginary. I too am unacquainted with the tat er... coin the Royal Mint has produced for the latest Jubilee, so really can't comment!

Rolls Royce and Bentley are still made in this country as are McLaren, Jaguar, Lotus and that old perennial, Morgan. Nissan, Honda, BMW, Toyota and General Motors all have substantial manufacturing plants in the UK. Mostly foreign owned but they still provide large numbers of engineering jobs here. Ford don't have an assembly line any more but still make a lot of component parts in various locations around the UK.

Aw shucks... Thanks Chris, it's great to be appreciated (as I assume I was included in this!).

I did read the other day that production costs in the Far East are rising in comparison with maintaining a wholly UK based production, which is in itself the inevitable result of increasing affluence in the Far East. We can't turn back the clock and un-invent the global market (horrible phrase Iknow...) but when it has become cheaper to manufacture goods here, then the factories will return. In the long-term, manufacturing will zigzag across the globe looking for the most efficient (not always the cheapest) place to site their production facilities. At the last count a lot of the small engineering works you are referring to were sited in Eastern Europe.

I would take everything that man says with a barrel-load of salt.

Moving on from that, the people I won't give a discount to, are those who wander up to my stall, don't say a word and then spend the next 10 minutes fingerng through every coin I've got, put some of them back in the wrong place, keep genuine customers from my wares and without making eye contact pick up a £2 halfpenny and say 'how much is this?'. I'm afraid under those circumstances my response will be, 'the price is on the ticket'. Communication is everything in life.

The short answer is 'yes'. Standard approach is to pick up a coin, disregard the price and say. 'what's your best on this?' Doesn't offend, uses standard terminology and the dealer can always say, 'I'm tight on that one, really can't come down at all'. Or he might knock a fiver off. I shouldn't really be telling you this...

There is already a website, as I think we've said before; http://www.forgerynetwork.com/Default.aspx . The reason for the Chinese flooding slabbed forgeries onto the market has just occurred to me, when a coin is in its plastic tomb, it cannot be weighed. No doubt the TPGs can provide a weight for their slabs but it would presumably be easy enough to introduce some denser material into the faked slab. Makes you think...

Not if you took scales around with you. The one I currently have is on the money at 11.31 precisely. Although I don't have a low grade godless I do have a variety of early Victorian Gothics to hand and these are how they checked out for weight; 1852 EF 11.33 1857 GVF 11.28 1864 NEF 11.25 1864 Poor 10.47 1870 NEF 11.30 1878 GF 11.20 And for comparison; 1888 AU 11.33 1889 GVF 11.32 1897 GEF 11.36 1902 EF 11.35 1902 GF 11.13 etc. So, reasonably consistent and shows how much metal coins lose as they descend the grades. From that, I think we can safely say that an EF Gothic (and probably a Godless) is unlikely to weigh less than 11.25g. So, until the Chinese perfect their techniques or actually stump up for the relevant quantiy of sterling silver, we can simply rely on the weight. Just a simple question though, I know that CCGB gives accurate weights for all later milled coins but for anything earlier I usually have to do my own calculations. Is there one publication that gives the average weights of earlier coins?

Sold to one of his mates at the Dog & Duck

Having attended a number of auctions recently, it is my contention that e-bay is actually the cheapest place to buy coins at present, and you are right as a seller there is no way I would sell anything of any quality in a one week auction format. Even so I think the 1868 penny at £285 (as opposed to £1k in the latest Spinks) would seem to represent an exceptional bargain. How much longer there will be such rich pickings on there, I don't know but over the last few years I have noticed a drift away from auction format to BINs for even moderate quality lots which, if it continues means that e-bay bargains will be a thing of the past. E-bay may have kick-started the upward drift in prices, but it has really only been a catalyst and the market is now sailing full steam ahead irrespective of what goes on in online auctions. Notwithstanding any of the above, there are still regular sellers on e-bay who always seem to get high prices for their auction lots and that obviously makes me doubt that their auctions are fully above-board. Much of the stuff on e-bay, you wouldn't see in a traditional auctioneers catalogue except in the bulk lots section but perhaps this is the future as far as coins on e-bay are concerned when sellers of quality lots realise that they will get better prices elsewhere. There also must come a time when more buyers realise that many of the more successful vendors 'sell dirty'. But I wish I'd seen that 1868 penny...

I see what you mean but I haven't got access to another 1863 shilling with which to compare it, so really can't comment. What I would say though is that I personally don't think the coin is that ugly, it's got wear yes, but nothing untoward like edge knocks, scratches or unsightly toning. Coins are made to be used and that's what this one is, I would rather have a coin like that than a gap in the collection. Whether I would pay £250 for it is another matter...

Hi David, Welcome to the forum. I don't know whether anybody has mentioned this to you yet (I know it's one of John's favourite sayings) but buy the coin not its grade. When I was collecting I would try to get the best coins I could afford but always found that when upgrading there were lower grade coins I just couldn't part with. Whether it was that I liked the patina or something about the process of acquiring them, I know not but for example in a run of George V pennies mostly with high percentages of lustre, I had a VF 1922. Not particularly difficult or expensive to find in better grade but I just liked my old '22 and didn't see the need to upgrade it. I guess in a way this kind of personalises a collection and to my mind makes it a little more interesting. So by all means start out with the intention of collecting runs of coins in very high grade but don't be surprised if what you end up with is just that little bit different.

I agree, but I think the most attractive Britannia design was the one on the copper farthings (1826-1859). The standing Britannia does not appeal to me on the Edward VII florins. I also think some of the £2 Britannia designs are nicely produced I think most portrayals of Britannia were quite reasonable but I didn't like the 1937-70 version much - too stiff and starchy. The standing Britannia of 1902-10 is something else however. I would agree about the 1826-59 Britannia but of course it looks much better on a penny! (dons hard hat and hides behind sofa).

Eeeeyukkkk!!! I get a feeling of deja vu about this thread... Sorry Mongo before your time.

At least he's got some clothes on. Looks to me as if that lance has just gone through the creature's lip which means St. G will have shortly have one mighty angry dragon on his hands.

In the days of internet selling with photos used in the description process, the real use of grades is to tie the coin down to a place in a price guide or to give some comparison with a similar coin for sale on another website. In the example you give above, I would expect to see a photograph of each surface with blurb something along the lines of; 'Scratch on obverse (nobody is going to say 'bloody great scratch...') otherwise EF'. This also points to what is the futility of price guides in that to get a value you would also have to grade the severity of the scratch. The moral I guess is 'buy the coin not the grade'.

Suffice it to say, I still disagree with you but would take far too long to explain why...

A little further down the scale I reckon wreath crowns should at least hold their own (but beware of Chinese fakes) and shouldn't bust the budget at £250-£300. I am always a bit chairy of gold as so much is tied up in the price of the metal and to be honest the later sovereigns and half sovereigns are a bit boring and frequently badly produced. Guineas and their fractions/multiples have some appeal and you are paying more for the numismatic value rather than the metal. I would say that bronze pennies are now probably past their best in investment terms (which begs the question of why I have so many in stock...) but rarity is always worth investing in, even if by its very nature is hard to get hold of. Oh, and anything BIG excepting cartwheel twopences and Churchill crowns...