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Message:: [QUOTE="John the Jute, post: 662032, member: 17740"]Canadians are more common, and Australians are less common, than you’d expect Hi Clive, May I bounce some ideas off you? This post is part observation, part inference, and part question on the subject of sovereign rarities. Are my observations correct, and are my inferences reasonable? Daniel Fearon has estimated [1] that “Of the billion sovereigns that ever existed … the number of sovereigns in collectable grades is probably fewer than five million.” This half-percent survival rate enables me to give some approximate numbers to Michael Marsh’s rarity ratings [2]: Scarce—1000 or so remain in collectable gradesRare—several hundreds remainVery Rare—100 or so remainExtremely Rare—several dozen remain OK. Now the survival rate for early 20th century sovereigns should be rather higher than the average, say one percent or so. But this doesn’t work for the postwar Australians—there are fewer of them than you’d expect; nor for the Canadians—there are more of them than you’d expect. Michael, of course, used more information than this simple rule of thumb, but even his ratings suffer from the same problem. He gives R4 ratings to 1913C (mintage 3717),1920S (mintage 360,000),1923S (mintage 416,000), and1926S (mintage 1,031,050). Of these coins, the 1913C could well be the most common. It is certainly much more common than the 1920S. So, why have Australians sovereigns disappeared in their millions, while Canadians (of which fewer than a million were minted) are still reasonably available? It is may well be, as James Cullimore Allen believed [3], that the round numbers published by the Sydney Mint were the numbers authorized, and were much larger than the numbers issued. But can that really explain the size of the discrepancy? This is where I start speculating. In another thread … <a href="http://www.cointalk.com/t49579/" class="internalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.cointalk.com/t49579/">http://www.cointalk.com/t49579/</a> … I describe a couple of what I call “sovereign extinction events” in the US and the UK, which certainly affected London-struck sovereigns (most notably the 1917). Were the Australian coins caught up in these events, and was there another, Australian-specific, extinction? According to John Sharples [4], Melbourne and Sydney sovereigns from the 1920s were entirely for backing the paper money issues. So they would have been kept in bank vaults and not issued to the public; unless, I suppose, someone turned up and demanded gold in exchange for bank notes. That could well lead to very few being left if officialdom decided there was no further need for the gold coins in the vaults. It’s these sovereign extinction events that I suspect of being behind the shortage of postwar Australians. I don’t think Canadian sovereigns circulated much either, but for a different reason. The agreement reached for gold coins from the Ottawa Mint was for gold sovereigns, each worth one pound sterling. But by 1908 Canada had long since, like the US, opted for a currency based on the Spanish-American dollar. So the coins were an instant curiosity, rather than useful money. That would explain the tiny mintages of Canadian sovereigns … and it could also result in a lot of the coins being kept as keepsakes or in coin collections. This would protect them from being melted on an official whim; and would result in a steady stream of coins coming onto the market as Grandpa’s old coin collection ceases to have sentimental value to the next generation but one. And that’s my speculation as to why Canadians are more common than you’d expect. Later, John [1] Introduction to The Sovereign: The World’s Most Famous Coin: A History and Price Guide (Hillden Publications, 2001) [2] The Gold Sovereign, Jubilee Edition (Michael A Marsh Publications, 2002) [3] Sovereigns of the British Empire (Spink 1965) [4] “Sovereigns of the Overseas Branches”, in Royal Sovereign 1489–1989 (edited by G P Dyer, Royal Mint, 1989) [/QUOTE]

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