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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;afantiques, post: 2063874, member: 71234&quot;]When I was a small English schoolboy you&#039;d often get Victorian pennies in change, and also Victorian silver occasionally. It would be unusual but not impossible to get a well worn George IV or William IV silver coin such as a sixpence.</p><p><br /></p><p>The farthing ( 1/4 penny) was still just about in circulation but seldom used in the mid 50&#039;s, so it was possible to tour the shops asking if they had any farthings in the till and paying for them in pennies. 48 farthings for a shilling was schoolboy pocket&nbsp; money sized collecting, and of course, the culls could be recycled, so for a few shillings you could complete a set from mid to late Victorian times to the latest issue.</p><p><br /></p><p>Since the coins saw little general circulation compared with the half penny and the penny, EF or better was not unknown for quite early dates. Even if you&nbsp; had the year, there was always the chance of&nbsp; improving the grade.</p><p>This has the useful side effect of learning grading almost in the cradle.</p><p><br /></p><p>As a bonus some shopkeepers would simply give you the coins if there were just a few, occasionally adding any odd foreign coins they had in the odds and sods compartment of the till. In those days being kind to strange children was not considered potentially &#039;dangerous&#039; and society did not crumble into anarchy.</p><p><br /></p><p>Slightly increased funding, say an extra shilling a week pocket money or earnings allowed an expansion to threepenny bit collecting, the tiny silver coins that were just about no longer minted but still plentiful and could be accumulated and upgraded in the same manner as the farthings. This was years before the Bunker Hunt silver spike caused all the old silver to be filtered out of the system and cashed in for a profit at several times face.</p><p><br /></p><p>I came late to that party but the high graders seeking the biggest nuggets had pretty well cleaned up all the larger denominations. It was still possible to find a reasonable number in bags of sixpences that the pickier pickers had not bothered with, because of the poorer search effort/profit ratio, so I&#039;d cycle round all the banks in ten miles or so getting a few £5 bags of sixpences (240 coins per bag) and find maybe 10% silver.</p><p><br /></p><p>I feel sorry for modern folk who have nothing but trivial errors and the occasional modernish silver coin to look out for.</p><p><br /></p><p>None of my early collections survived various financial crises in the ensuing years, although much later I have accumulated big piles of farthings and silver 3d as some sort of nostalgia.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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