16.
A Day in the Life of a Penny.
Sunday 23rd
December 2007 -
but starting sometime after circa 300
A.D… Ah! Christmas approacheth fast; this morning we finished the last of our
shopping for groceries to sustain us over the next few days. Mind you, our
local mini-supermarket displays a notice saying that it will be open from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m. on Christmas Day; most commendable. I
could, perhaps, do with another jar of olives, and some sun-dried tomatoes; but
there is yet Christmas Eve to come, and I shall be travelling tomorrow morning (by
’bus, naturally), to the annual Christmas Eve Booze-up… er,
ahem: I mean the refined & wholesome Traditional ‘all-comers-welcome’ Jazz
Session at The Malt House pub in central Birmingham, the most excellent ‘Jazz
Bandits’ being the host band. So I could pop in and get last-minute groceries en route. We are currently enjoying a
few days off from the life of a ‘musician-errant’ (I won’t be offended if
anyone inverts that phrase), which is great, because the last week has been
very hectic & I’m 64 years old in a couple of weeks. However, to get to the
point… I was slightly irritated when I put my wine-glass down on the coffee
table, and it rocked dangerously and came near to spilling some of the precious
elixir. The cause was a small coin which was lying on the table. I thought it
might be a penny or some other odd current coin of the Realm which just
happened to be there. Reaching out to get rid of it, I saw that it was actually
a small Roman coin. Now I used to get coins of various sorts, and fix them with
epoxy onto blank cuff-links. Making such simple (and cheap) cuff-links was a
harmless pastime, but also a very constructive one. It’s quite surprising how often people will
turn up to a distant gig in casual travelling clothes, then, when donning their
dinner suits & wing-collar shirts, find that they have left their
cuff-links at home - or perhaps they only have one cuff-link, which is even
more annoying. It has happened to me many times over the years. Indeed, I
recall one instance, at Hexham in Northumberland, when I played a gig with my
cuffs held together with Blu-Tack: the local
newsagents had no paper-clips, and none of the other musicians had any spare
cuff-links. Later that day, before the evening gig, I bought a really nice pair
of Celtic-design cuff-links from the souvenir shop in Hexham Abbey, and they
lasted for a couple of years, but finally disappeared. Mind you, I think they
cost ten or twelve quid. No: the long-term answer to the problem of cuff-links
was to make your own cheaply, and so have many pairs freely available at all
times. You would keep a few in your clarinet case, or in the glove compartment
in your car, &c. So you always had some; and if anybody else didn’t have
any, you could actually give them a
pair, and say: ‘No, please keep them - it’s nothing, honestly!’
Living in Birmingham has quite a number of advantages, and one
of them is the shops in the Jewellery Quarter. They will sell you things like
bags of 100 cheap blank cuff-links for ten or twelve quid. So you have fifty
pairs of cuff links! You just need to have something to stick on the end of
them with epoxy resin. Small coins were an obvious thing to use. I started with
farthings, which you can buy at any coin fair very cheaply. I had four sets of
farthing cuff-links, viz. Queen Victoria, Edward VII, George V, and George VI. I can’t
remember on what gigs I wore the Queen Victoria and Edward VII ones, but am
perfectly clear that I wore the George V (1910 - 1936) on ‘Classic Jazz’ gigs,
where the music was essentially of the 1920s; and the George VI (1937 - 1952)
on ‘Trad.’ or ‘New Orleans’ gigs. I was most
punctilious about that ‘proper chronology’, daft as it must sound to you, dear
reader!
I admit I used to polish the coins -
which will greatly distress any numismatist who may read this -; but I can
assure such numismatists that the coins so treated were of no value, and still exist
in their tens & hundreds of thousands, nay! millions:
undefiled, & still very cheap.
At least, this does bring us slightly nearer the purpose
of this page. Eventually, farthings seemed a little ‘commonplace’; so we cast
our ‘cuff-link net’ wider. Inevitably, ancient
coins became the desideratum! But surely, you may ask, ancient coins must be very
scarce these days? Not a bit of it! That is, as long as you don’t insist on e.g.
Greek gold coins of several centuries B.C. in immaculate condition. For
example, here at the left is a Greek gold coin I just trawled off the web - I’m
sure the vendor won’t mind - which is in EF condition. It dates from about 450
- 400 B.C. and only weighs 2.7 grams; but is still US $1650 - about £830. Also,
I know that gold is very dense, and it doesn’t tell you what the diameter of
the coin is. But I also know that early Greek coins
were relatively thick, so it probably isn’t very big in diameter & so mightn’t
make a very good cuff-link, which is great really, as £830 is quite a lot of
money. If you are prepared, as I was, to accept very ordinary ancient coins,
there is no problem. It seems that Britain is particularly rich in ancient coin
hoards. Small inconsequential bronze coins from the Roman Occupation are
amazingly common - and hence cheap. The Roman Occupation of Britain lasted
roughly from er… 43 A.D. to about 450 A.D? (he said, evasively); but which is anyway a Very Long Time,
and so many millions of SIBQs * must have been sent
here (or even minted here - I don’t know) during that time. And there are lots
of them still knocking about, and you can buy them for as little as 50 pence
each! Ones that cheap may not be in very good shape after 1,600 - 1,900 years,
but who 
cares? You’re holding a direct link to those far-off times! Does
not this fire your imagination? Who designed the coin? Did they design both
sides? Who cut the dies? Who stamped the blanks out? Who bagged them up? Where
did the bag go first? Who decided where the bag should then be sent? Who
received it? Who disbursed the coins? Who first received them, and why? What
did they purchase with the coin(s)? Who did they purchase the stuff from? What
did the recipient do with it? How long did it stay in circulation, & how
many people had it also? How did it get lost, and where? Who dug it up? The
mind truly boggles…
So here we are. On the left you see the reverse
of the coin that nearly upset my wine glass! It is in better condition than the
obverse at the top of the page. Heaven knows what the actual coin is. But I can
see that the figure holding the bird in their right hand also holds in their
left, a banner bearing the X-P (Chi-Rho) symbol - the Greek ‘Christos’, and this tells us that the coin dates from after
the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire. Which was er…
about well: let’s say no earlier than the early part of the fourth century
A.D., OK? The Emperor Constantine I was supposed to have declared Christianity
the approved religion of the Roman Empire, wasn’t he? He reigned from 306 - 337 A.D. (A very long time by then-current standards
for Roman Emperors). But I really don’t know. It’s about 18mm in diameter,
though as you can see, it’s not actually perfectly round. The main point is,
that the essays we had to write - or ‘compositions’ as they used to be called
when we were at primary school so many years ago, would at some point invariably
include one called: ‘A Day in the Life of a Penny’. We were supposed to use our
imagination to write about the scenario of the penny coin we had paid as our ’bus
fair to get to school. Who had had it before, what would happen to it after we
had it; and all that sort of thing. Even in the 1960s, there were still some
well-worn thin pennies that had the date just still visible, & I recall
seeing some that dated to the late 1860s; so they had been kicking around for
100 years. But how much more challenging to deal with a coin that has been around
for over 1,600 years! Even if it did spend most of that time buried in the
ground… Still, the Christian symbol on this Roman coin ties in with Christmas,
which is the day after tomorrow, so it’s very good really.
Briefly reverting to cuff-links, it’s
much more difficult to have pairs of
cuff-links with Ancient coins, simply because you need two examples of the coin
to make a pair. So you had to settle for two contrasting - but hopefully
complementary - items. My favourite pair for a couple of years, was (a) a
silver denarius of Vespasian
(died 79 A.D.), and (b) a silver-dipped bronze denarius
of Julia. I don’t know which one of the many Julias
she was, but it was from quite a long time later, say around three hundred
years after Vespasian, and time had certainly taken
its toll. Vespasian’s luxuriant small (but thick)
silver denarius of the first century had evolved - or
rather degenerated - into a thin bronze coin, merely dipped into molten silver
to give it the appearance of value. I don’t know what happened to that pair. I
probably left them in a hotel bedroom somewhere. Still, they symbolised in a
crude way a culmination & a subsequent fall, and isn’t that what life
always consists of?
Finally, why was this little Roman coin
lying on my coffee table? Why was it not attached to a
cuff-link? Well, the answer is prosaic in the extreme. I gave up wearing
wing-collar shirts a year or so ago. They are so fiddly, and the bow-tie keeps
getting tangled up with the saxophone sling, and it’s very embarrassing if your
bow tie falls off in the middle of a solo &c. So I bought six new white
shirts, with button-down collars, for band use. And they have button-up sleeves
so you don’t have to wear cuff-links with them. And the last few cheap Roman
coins I bought just kept kicking about on the coffee table; then I moved house,
& three of them have disappeared - just this one was left.
Q.E.D.
But I must admit, I rather
miss cufflinks. For instance, I would have liked some pairs incorporating
small silver coins of late Imperial Russia: say 1900 - 1917. That period of
history has always fascinated me, and..
OH, DO SHUT UP, FIELD!
Oh; all right then. But just for now,
mind you…
* SIBQ = Small inconsequential bronze
coin... ☺
Page written 23rd December 2007.