A great many households have collections of old coins that they have either inherited or simply forgotten about and packed away. Baldwin’s, home of numismatics since 1872, are urging people to take this time to go through those collections with a view to finding a small piece of history that may be far more valuable than you can possibly imagine.
“Sadly it’s all too common a story,” says MD Neil Paisley. “We are constantly meeting people who tell us about these fantastic collections that were left to them but they either threw them away or sold them at a boot sale for pennies as part of a house clearing exercise”.
It’s hard to believe that these ‘needle-in-a-haystack finds’ are commonplace but as Neil explains, “It certainly isn’t an everyday occurrence but it does still happen. In fact towards the end of last year a couple came into Baldwin’s with two gold coloured 1806 farthings, one British and one Irish, they had kept in the back of an old drawer...