A great job is being done in Bruton to supply local schools with much-needed laptops to support online learning.

On the Brook Cafe & Restaurant are the backbone of this project, and they have used the unwanted coins & notes donated to them to help fund their efforts.

So, if you can and if you are local of course, please think of supporting this scheme with any unwanted coins or notes.

From 1970 to 1980 John Page was the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England.

It looks like he forgot his pen when issuing this tenner, as it has not been signed.

An unusual item, which was in a car worker’s pay packet in the 1970s; back in the days of receiving cash in a little brown envelope each week.

A healthy total of £81,400 was raised for various charities from people simply donating unwanted foreign notes & coins and out-of-date UK money. A form of recycling I suppose, as quite often these things are thrown away.

Charities large and small that used my services include Naomi House Childrens’s Hospice, Royal Navy & Royal Marines, NHS Yeovil hospital breast cancer unit, Bruton Library, Friends of Verrington Hospital, Bruton Primary School, The Scientific Exploration Society, & Sherborne Abbey, and more.

I hope to be working with all the above in 2021 and have two new large organisations looking to come on board shortly.

I had a target of £150,000 for last year, but as we know, something got in the way!

I have set myself a target of raising £250K in 2021, which is readily achievable if COVID restrictions ease off soon.

Wishing everyone a safe and positive New Year.

Well, not quite......but it was perhaps somebody’s treasure once?

I just love the boxes and tins in which my coins turn up; this being one of my favourites from around the 1960s I would guess, with the contents being worth just shy of a hundred pounds.

🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

No, not this time - but I’m still always pleased to handle these high volume, low value lots. This photo shows just a few; in total there were just over 4000 of them.

They represent someone’s effort, thought and organisation, over maybe a few years, to bring this group of coins together; something I never forget when sorting and moving coins on to other collectors.

It is in fact always worth checking Victorian veiled head pennies for a few varieties, especially the 1897 O*NE version.

This relatively small accumulation of inherited pre 1947 silver coins made the owners in excess of £400.

The price of silver has remained pretty buoyant recently, pushing up the values of otherwise quite ordinary coins.

This beautiful little coin turned up in a ‘tin of junk coins’ offered to me the other day.

Its only a very small coin, less than 2 cms across & just over 4 grams of gold - but very desirable and keenly collected.

The owner got a happy surprise as his “twenty quid tin” turned into a £200 tin - always great to have visits and valuations like this.

It’s amazing what people spend time & effort doing. Nevertheless, a great piece of work !

This lovely bit of history, in great condition, turned up today from a deceased estate in amongst a large quantity of modern European items…….a fantastic surprise especially as it added a couple of hundred pounds to the value !!

Back in that time the government only issued pennies - so if you wanted a half penny or farthing you literally cut these silver pennies into halves or quarters.

Well, 2 boxes actually - dropped in today by a local wanting them converted into cash for donation to a hospice.

A great mix, literally covering A - Z……..Australia and Azerbaijan, through Cyprus, Hungary, Malta, Russia, Singapore, Turkey and Yugoslavia, and ending up with Zambia and Zimbabwe.

I actually save up the better boxes and tins that coins arrive in, and once I have accumulated enough then I pop them into one of the local auction houses to raise a few more pounds for one of my charities…..I’ve now got around 50 cigar boxes & tobacco tins, so once lock down is over I will get them to Dukes Avenue Auctions in Dorchester.

Anyway; a big thank you to the generous donor of these notes.

Just passed the £35,000 mark !!

This brilliant, hard working charity have to raise hundreds of thousands on an ongoing basis, so my help is but a tiny contribution along the way.

Anyhow, just before lock down my total converted into cash is now moving up towards £40K……all from many hundreds of small donations dropped into their many shops in Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Berkshire & Bournemouth; as well as from some larger workplace collections.

The shops, and their main warehouse, are in shutdown right now, so please save your coins until they reopen, or if not contact me and I am sure we can arrange something to get the cash sooner than later.

For more information on this wonderful & vital charity please visit www.naomihouse.org.uk

No, I had never heard of it either !! Until I was approached by John Blashford-Snell, renowned explorer & supporter of world ecology, and currently Honorary President of the SES.

Two bits to this one - firstly the banknotes, which did the charity very proud………

John had inherited, many years ago, numerous boxes of papers from an old friend and amongst them was a single envelope with 40 or so foreign notes dating between 1900 and 1940. If they were “worth a few bob” then he would donate them to his charity……well, after much research and with help from Spinks in London, the “few bob” turned into £10,200.

John kindly traced the nearest living relatives and the funds were split 50/50 between their care home fees and his charity.

The other side to this is to suggest you peek at the SES via www.SES-EXPLORE.ORG. Brilliant people doing brilliant things for the planet, with a massive degree of support for highly driven youngsters working in ecology, medicine, science, oceanography, etc, etc.

Time for updates on some of the ongoing charity & community things; large and small. So today…….

Bruton Library is a brilliant community hub, not just “doing” books but hosting meetings for mums & kids (like Rhyme Time) and being a social space for more isolated villagers. No longer funded by the Council it is run by volunteers and struggles to do basic things like repairs & renewals.

In association with On the Brook cafe & restaurant we held an open session to drop in unwanted coins & notes just before the lock down, which raised over £300 on the day (on a joint basis with a school induction project), and we know there are more donations in the pipeline as soon as our world restarts once more.

Please visit On the Brook’s website for details of how to donate, and see what good things they are doing to stay afloat and how they are helping others along the way - www.onthebrook.co.uk

The process of printing sheets of banknotes is very high speed process and errors do occur, especially at the stage when the sheets are guillotined into individual notes. Any unusable prints are destroyed and a replacement, printed on another machine & with a different serial number, is substituted. These replacement notes usually have specially identifiable serial numbers and are very collectable……things like an asterisk before the number, or the letter M, or as in this Scottish example a ZZ prefix.

It’s been a great month for existing and new charity work - The Royal Navy & Royal Marines, Naomi House along with the Scientific Exploration Society and many one-offs for schools, villages, etc.

Welcome on board to a nice big project: the new Yeovil Hospital Breast Cancer unit who had a drawer full of currency & notes to change, and are now going to test run a bigger collection in the area on a rolling basis. Best of luck to them. They have a £2M target - please call them on 01935 383020 if you have anything to donate.

Here’s just a few of the currency coins & banknotes generously donated to the RNRMC this month by the home-coming Royal Navy ships at Portsmouth. I will turn this into cash for the charity in the next few days and get it credited direct to their bank. They are a well travelled lot - Israel, Norway, USA, Japan & Gibraltar are amongst the countries represented.

These beautiful pieces of personal history turn up every now and then; I pop them into a tin and sell them as a job lot to collectors who are keen to cherish such things. The top two are on a Victorian threepence & sixpence respectively; the bottom on a halfpenny - I think it’s from the W W I era and possibly a Suffolk church scene. I love the left hand one, an etched Kruger South Africa shilling. The final piece is another W W I example dated 1914 on a Belgian silver franc.

Hello - I was going to start with a photo of me, so that you get an idea of who you’re dealing with; but everything I have on file makes me look like a knitwear model model from a 1980’s catalogue. So, I will wait until I find something less unappealing !!

Instead, straight to news of things I do. My favourite is still the charity & projects works, where small and large accumulations have come my way.

This month has seen many small lots come in, raising from £30 to £650 mainly from foreign currency & notes, although one bag had a handful of modern 1 ounce silver coins that boosted the value nicely.

The things done with this cash raised includes a new computer screen for a school, a cancer charity donation, and pots of paint for a community hall redecoration project.