Lot 160
Rare variety and the single 'Finest Known'
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- The source of Penny varieties in the Australian Pre-decimal series throws up more conspiracy theories than the JFK assassination of 1963 and, like that terrible event, competing theories continue to be hotly debated to this day. One such debate concerns the 1921 English Obverse Penny which is found in much smaller numbers than the Indian Obverse Penny of the same date. It is a scarce coin in any grade and extremely rare in Uncirculated condition with only two coins having ever surfaced in Mint State. Records show that Melbourne and Perth were the only mints that struck pennies in 1921 and so there are really only two candidates for the role of ‘Lee Harvey Oswald'. Just as Lee’s failed attempt to defect to America’s Cold War foe Russia in 1959 was glossed over at the Warren Commission, the early cataloguers of Australian coins were quick to rule out any complicity in the striking of the 1921 pennies of the two sets of experimental dies that were forwarded to the Perth Mint by the Sydney Mint in 1920 so that it could trial penny production. The lazy conclusion that they reached was that the 1,008,000 coins that were struck in 1921 were all dated 1922. The Sydney Mint possessed three English obverse dies which it had used sparingly to produce the 1919 .//. Penny and just a handful of 1920 /./ pennies, and so it was definitely possible that one of the two obverse dies that Sydney sent to Perth was of this type. The supposition is that an English obverse die was used experimentally by the Perth Mint with one or more of the four 1921-dated Birmingham reverse dies that the Perth Mint received from Melbourne in early 1922. It was standard mint practice to experiment with redundant dies before a new year's production commenced and so it is conceivable that the 1921-dated reverse dies that were on hand were used for this purpose. A survey in 2014 of over 100,000 unsorted pennies that we had accumulated over 20 years revealed a ratio of about one in fifty 1921 pennies with an English obverse suggesting a very limited run. It is interesting to note that the reverse 1921-dated hub that resulted in the 1921 English obverse Penny variety still existed in 1931 when it was altered to produce the Birmingham reverse 1931 pennies. To paraphrase W.J. Mullet, a senior officer of the Melbourne Mint, a hub used to produce the 1921 pennies had a '2' removed and a '3' inserted on the subsequent master die. Both 1931 Penny varieties with the Birmingham reverse closely match the reverse on the 1921 Penny with the English obverse which would seem to affirm this connection. Like both the 1931 Birmingham reverse pennies the 1921 English obverse Penny has predominantly straight based letters in the legend. We will probably never know for sure if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, or if the 1921 English Obverse Penny was Perth-struck but, whether it was struck in Melbourne or Perth it is an extremely rare coin in Uncirculated condition with only a couple known in Mint State. This month Smalls Auctions offers the single finest known of this extremely rare variety graded PCGS MS64BN. As an historical aside, those of us old enough to remember "all the way with LBJ" the jingoistic catchphrase for the next American President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, probably didn’t realise that on his tour of Australia he was riding in the same limousine in which Kennedy was shot. Although it apparently caused LBJ some unease at the time he also probably thought that lightning never strikes twice in the same spot.
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