PAUL WITHERS ON NUMISMATIC WRITING, PART 2

No matter how long your holiday actually is, once you reach the second half it feels like it’s already over. I’m sure you know the feeling. After a month in France the day of our return to the UK dawned with the sun shining from a cloudless, blue sky. After breakfast we drove to Mortain. This is the Mortain of which John Lackland, king of England 1199-1216, was count, a title which he is said to have valued above that of Lord of Ireland. These days it is a very small town, and we went there to pick up a box of oysters that we had ordered. We also bought cheeses, wine, honey cake, smoked duck breast and ham, various sausages, and other edible goodies. For the rest of the day we worked on the gunmoney manuscript until 4 pm, when we packed up, locked up and set off for the ferry. We joined the evening rush with some very impatient Frenchmen trying to hurry home at twice the speed limit, no matter what it was !

The lovely day had become a blissful, warm, summer evening, and an hour and a half later we arrived at a restaurant that has had good reviews, a couple of miles from the port. It is in a delightful village reminiscent of Devonshire half a century ago, especially the not-so-faint odour of cows. It too has history, for it is but a short walk from the Pegasus bridge of WW2 fame. Incidentally, as we left the restaurant later, the second full moon for the month showed that this was a once in a blue moon occasion. The moon is not literally blue, it’s just that there are two full moons in one calendar month, which doesn’t happen often.

The restaurant/hotel had a quiet air of comfort and relaxation, though the prices for rooms and food, displayed outside as demanded by French law, were quite affordable. We went inside and rang the bell. Eventually, someone appeared and we were ushered to seats in the dining room. The service was a little slow, but we were not in a hurry. The maitre d’ brought the menu and the wine list. Alas, we could not even consider the latter, French law is very strict on how much alcohol you can consume and still drive and in Europe you are allowed slightly less than a sniff of the barmaid’s apron before qualifying for disqualification.

We perused the delights of the menu and it all looked good, even the cheap menu, costing just 19 euros, but this was the last night of our holiday, so we chose the crab, smoked eel and langoustines starter, followed by veal.

The place was getting busy. Now, I love observing my fellow diners, and speculating about them. A French family group came in. It consisted of a man, two older women, one girl in her early 20s and a younger one who was probably celebrating her 18th birthday, and the man’s son, aged about 12. The girls, we reckoned, were cousins, not sisters. The elder of the two was elegant and sophisticated, the younger was slightly wobbly in comparison because she was wearing platform shoes. All three children, however, were capable of dealing with their half lobster when it arrived. French young people are at once so much more innocent and yet so much more experienced than Brits of the same age. Most British teenagers wouldn’t know what a lobster was, let alone how to use a lobster pick ! The younger of the girls was a typical teenager and carried a fashionably capacious black leather bag, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to contain her mobile ’phone, which was checked every few minutes, in such matters teenagers are the same everywhere.

One of the tall, young and handsome waiters, dressed casually in the house style, was eager to practise his English. He approached and enthusiastically stated “the chef wish to propose you a pea purée”. It arrived topped with whipped cream and small pieces of crispy-fried bacon, served in a shot glass. Although small, it was very good. We love this practice of serving a tiny appetiser - which the French call an amuse bouche, before the starter course. The meal was good.

We travelled overnight on the ferry and early the following morning arrived in Portsmouth. We then spent six hours driving home to Wales, most of it in bright sunshine, until we were a mile from home when it rained !

The next week we dealt with the orders that had piled up in our absence, but that’s one of the perils of being a small business and going away.

We soon got down to reviewing our findings. The first was that the gunmoney coinage was much larger than we had thought. Exactly how large ? Certainly there are 50+ pairs of dies for the crown. However, our knowledge was derived from only one collection, so we now had to examine other collections and compare them to our virtual reference collection. Hence, a week after getting home, we were off again to look at the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. From e-mail and telephone conversations we knew that they had over two hundred pieces, not large, but nevertheless fairly substantial.

We allowed three days for our trip: one day to get there, one day to do the photography, and another day to get back. Several other errands were also planned, including seeing another, much smaller, collection of gunmoney. When you are compiling a catalogue, though, you look at everything, regardless of size.

Being aged, we have accumulated friends around the country; luckily, one of them lives near Cambridge. We arrived at our friend’s house after visiting the local supermarket. We had been to the nearest supermarket so came bearing gifts: tiger prawns, steak, chicken thighs, a big pack of lamb’s kidneys, and a few other odds and ends: the makings of two good dinners: a prawn and chicken risotto one night, and a steak and kidney stew for the following day, along with two bottles of wine, a white from Chile and a red from Spain. The French, of course do not encourage the sale of non-French wines in their supermarkets, but French wines are becoming expensive in the UK, and we care about quality, not nationality. Our friend lives alone, so he was delighted to see us, particularly as we had promised to cook whilst we were there.

The Fitzwilliam museum is a normally a place of quiet calm, but we had not realised that it was the school holidays. So the galleries were full of shrieking children, but fortunately, we were in the coin room. It is a wonderful museum and the staff are both accommodating and helpful, but if you want to see coins that are not on display, make an appointment well in advance. Before we left we downloaded the photographs from camera to computer and checked each one on the screen. We know from bitter experience that it is all too easy to forget to photograph a reverse, or for a shot to be slightly out of focus. So you check and double check, for as sure as eggs is eggs, the one shot that you miss, or is out of focus is the one that according to Sod’s law will be the one that you really need ! All was well, it had been a worthwhile day.

So, a successful trip, errands completed, photographs taken, it was back home to process the pictures and digest the results. So far I have written plenty about writing, but said nothing about photography, and with, allegedly, one photo being worth a thousand words, I now remedy this.

I took my first photograph on a ‘box’ camera 65 years ago. In subsequent years, I have found with cameras (and computers) that it is no good chopping and changing, get a good one, learn how to use it, and stick with it. In the days before digital photography I used an F2 Nikon, which I wore out. I processed my own films and printed my own negatives. Why ? Because the only way to be sure of getting the quality that I wanted was to do it myself.

I don’t do ‘arty’ pictures, and when I go on holiday, I take a small, cheap digital camera and the ‘work’ camera and its stand are consigned to the strong room whilst we’re away.

For coins, I need good record photographs, so I use the same camera setting each time, to keep it nice and easy. If you follow the same plan and pattern each time there is less that can go wrong. There are several important rules:

1. Keep the camera still: mine sits in a cradle on a solid, heavy, robust laboratory stand that was built for Michael Dolley. I inherited it from the late Elizabeth J E Pirie, a lovely lady numismatist who is still an inspiration.

2. Use a spirit level to ensure that the camera is parallel to the coin being photographed.

3. Get the lighting right. There is insufficient space here to explain that here, but basically, you take the lamp, point it at the coin and take a series of photographs at varying angles to the vertical and the horizontal, noting precisely what you have done and look critically at the results. I still do this now and again even after half a century’s experience. Sunlight ? Wonderful stuff for a tan, but for book illustrations, forget it. You need a light source that is reliable, consistent and repeatable and one that that you can switch on and off at all times of the year, and any time of the day or night.

4. The camera that I use has a white balance facility to make sure that the resulting image looks exactly like the coin.

What camera ? We use a Canon Eos with a 50mm Canon macro lens, the nearest available equivalent now seems to be the 70D. However, I am sure that there are others, which are equally good. I bought it, not from a box shifter on the internet, but it in person from a dealer, one who knows his wares and can give good advice, and who has a selection of cameras for customers to handle, prior to making the choice, this is well worth the few pounds that I might have saved. You really don’t need a massive number of megapixels if all you want is pictures of coins of a moderate size. 10 megapixels is more than sufficient. Many of my best pictures were taken with a camera that had a lot less ! Remember too that you have to be able to set the focus and the aperture yourself, automatic is all very well, but I prefer to switch it off and do it myself. Automatic cameras often get things wrong. You don’t need video or other bells and whistles. If you get the lighting and the settings right, little processing is required, apart from trimming the images. Indeed, for most of my photographs I can press the ‘auto levels’ button in Photoshop and there is little or no change. One essential accessory, for coins that will appear in a book, is a light box, on which to put the item being photographed to ensure a shadow-free, clean background. Sure, you can clean up one or two pictures by hand, but if there are hundreds it becomes very tedious.

On our computers we use an old version of iPhoto that came bundled with our last but one Mac. This enables us to compare and view large numbers of photographs, and put them into the order and add, or remove, when necessary. This is essential when comparing dies.

One of the things we discovered from looking at the photographs of the coins was that there were remarkably few mules between the gunmoney obverse and reverse dies within a month, and apart from the later issues struck at Limerick, after the Battle of the Boyne, none known between months.

Our observation says that pairs of dies were used practically to destruction, and then the pair abandoned, even if there was life left in one of them.

How many pairs of dies were used ? Certainly, for some months, the Dublin mint was using dies at a rate greater than a pair per day, per denomination. So we can say that the coinage was vast, and we are still finding exactly how large.

Sadly, the lack of mules means that we are unable to establish a chronological sequence for the dies. However, the good news is that it does mean that we can classify the coins, other than the crowns, by their reverse dies, which is good as the obverses are much more difficult to classify than the reverses.

We hope that the system that we have developed will enable people to find their coin quickly and easily, providing, of course, that the coins are complete, adequately struck up and not detrited. Indeed we have been able to identify the month of issue of some coins, even when it was not visible on the coin due to corrosion, damage, holing, etc. We have classified the obverses too, so we can use them to check that the pairing is correct. However, to find out what the system is, you’ll have to buy the book when it’s printed and published ! For the moment we have put the photographs away. We have established from having seen the Fitzwilliam museum collection and another collection, that apart from large-size shillings, we are within our 5% criterion, which means that we could already publish a reasonably good catalogue now. However, to make it the best possible catalogue, we need to visit Dublin and the Ashmolean museums to photograph their collections, and British Museum to see what they have, and that depends on us finding windows of opportunity at a time when there are fewer tourists around.

So, there’ll be at least one more episode of this chronicle to come, with this part of the story ending with our return from France, when our first task was to arrange a dinner party for a few selected friends to celebrate our return to the UK, the work we had done in France and the French food we had brought back. Numismatics is the day job and a bit more, but after hours our hobby is food.

We started the celebration of the joy of food with an amuse bouche, before the oysters. They were not small oysters, they are on a large charger, and there was a refill waiting. Incidentally, none were wasted !

Saki wrote “I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion. They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. ”

One might also say that there is nothing that quite matches their taste either, or the generosity of a friend who stands in the kitchen for an hour shucking them. Bon appétit !

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
PAUL WITHERS ON NUMISMATIC WRITING (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v18n34a21.html)

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