Making Money
By GEORGE STAFFORD GALL
ON Tuesday the Queen in Council signed a Proclamation authorising the issue of the new coinage, which is likely to last for the first decade, at any rate, of her reign. The designs have been approved and the dies prepared. The, first patterns struck from them have now become, by virtue of the signature, proofs, and on January 1st these proofs will become coins, legal tender, fit for the repayment of debts. Where they differ from the old the new coins will look better than .the old, but forthose who hesitate to pay 8s. for 7s. qd. worth of-new coins and a cellophane container it will not be until next summer that the first of the coins marked "Elizabeth II" slide across the counter into their pockets.
The Royal Mint, meanwhile, has already started making them. There are at least three ways of making money. One is the way of millionaires and is lamentably obscure. Another is the way of the State, by enactments and Orders in Council; this is equally obscure, but it never seems to cost anyone any- thing, provokes only an academic envy, and with public pro- priety as it is today, can be counted harmless. The third way is the simplest and at the present, with no nonsense about The gold standard and with silver being cupro-nickel, the cheapest and most fool-proof. It is the literal, mechanical way of the Mint.
It is. true, as Bacon said, that "of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution; the rest is but conceit." The Mint takes some crude lumps of various metals, melts them down and pours out a stream of decorated discs. It needs a Government's decision to turn these into proper money, and to send forth the bright, glittering little objects into the banks and shops and the unsated and insatiable pockets of men. The Mint is not so conceited as to think it has created riches of any real use, but undeniably it has made money.
This being, or rather endeavouring among its other ambi- tions to be, a metaphysical age, you can go to the Mint and extract other conceits than Bacon had in mind. Such might be: How apt that behind the clean and formal front of the premises (neo-classic is it ? Certainly 1810) where records are kept and men and coins administered, should be this crude huddle of dingy factory buildings where money itself is made. The factory looks like a gasworks without its gasometers and wharves and retort-houses, or like railway workshops without lines and locomotives. Some such unmodernised and unashamed Industrial-Revolution brickwork, blackened and greasy; the same sooty and oily puddles on the floors; the same seemingly unattended piles of produce (not engines or coke, but this time francs for Indo-China); and in the corridors that institutional dark-green paintwork up to chest-height, and thereafter buff. It does not seem as if they made anything in particular at the Mint now, or had ever made anything well.
It cannot do you any good to see money made so easily, or stacked high in piles of wooden boxes. But it is probably good for you to see money made and handled like nuts and bolts or fancy buttons. It is bad to have your greed aroused, but look closer and those guineas are punctured pennies for British West Africa. You remember the piles of copper and nickel in the first shed, and virtue is comfortably restored. The Mint, you remind yourself, is only a factory turning out pretty little pieces of embossed metal. It must be something else, the Goternment or the Treasury or perhaps the imponderable broodings of the economic world, that makes wealth of the little pebbles. Except in the distribution there is no richness in them. And this the Mint very properly recognises. They will tell you there, unabashed, that the farthing is the only coin which costs more than it is worth to produce. The half-crown —most magnificent, in this impoverished and paper-infested time, of the Mint's standard bulk-productions for the home market—is worth a few coppers. They do not say what coppers are worth; perhaps they are secretly measured against a handful of grain or quarter of an ounce of cough-drops. At the Mint a half-crown is worth about threepence, exactly as much as two shilling pieces and a sixpence and exactly as much as the half of a crown. If you have a handful of silver adding up to the face-value of five shillings and sixpence, you have in your hand an ounce of cupro-nickel.
From 1300 to 1810 the Mint was in the Tower, between the outer and inner walls. It is now just outside the Tower and also the liberties of the City. "We are in Stepney and proud of it," said the Deputy Master. (The Master is the Chancellor of the Exchequer; there is a strong historical reason for this.) Before the Normans came there were about seventy mints in England. Making money has always been profitable, although before 1925 you could extract one bargain by obliging the Mint to turn any refined gold ingots (the "bar gold" of com- merce) you may have possessed into sovereigns without any charges for making-up. Kings have kept strict control over the Mint since the Kings of Northumbria and Mercia and Wessex. The Tudors and Stuarts delighted in the fiscal tricks that could be performed by the Mint's aid. The Treasury in recent years has been a fitting successor. The Mint has now a monopoly of British coins, but the Treasury takes the profit. For its foreign trade it competes with private mints here (I.C.I. have one) and a few public and private mints abroad. The business of making coins is not so laborious or skilled as it was when Offa and his Mercians conquered Kent. The coinage of Offa (including a new, silver penny) which the Canterbury mint then began to issue was perhaps the finest till the Tudors came. The time was roughly that of the Lindisfarne Gospels; Offa had stayed in the Romanist court of Charlemagne; and Arab inscriptions were being known and copied. Coins were then made singly, from the hot metal. In Paris in the sixteenth century and in London in the seventeenth cut bars of alloys were rolled into sheets, and then punched into discs which received their final impression from screw presses.
The manufacture of coins is still a craft, but one governed by machinery. Mrs. Mary Gillick is the designer of the Queen's uncrowned effigy which will be on all the new British coins. From her the Mint received a plaster-of-Paris cast, perhaps nine inches in diameter. An incused plaster cast is taken from it, and on to this a metal cast of copper-backed nickel is grown electrolytically. The metal cast has now reproduced Mrs. Gillick's original work. A mechanical reduc- ing machine, with a levered tracing arm scanning the cast and a cutting arm etching a smaller cast, in one or two stages pro- duces the final die to be used in making the coin. The alloys are prepared at the Mint, weighed amounts of metal being melted down and poured into moulds. After analysis, the slabs are then passed through rolling mills and annealing tanks until they become long flapping straps of metal. These are punched into discs, which then receive their impression from the obverse and reverse dies in a single fast motion. The coins are then examined, counted, packed and dispatched.
But such an account has missed the point. They have not been making nuts and bolts or fancy buttons. These wooden crates you see, in disconsolate piles, under tarpaulins, are full of bullion, marked for Bolivia, Peru, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Iraq, Libya, Burma. The strong-room here once had £3,000,000 of hard cash in it. You had seen two slender streams of yellow metal being poured into moulds. Might it not have been gold ? You had seen a long battery of stamp- ing-machines. Might it not have been silver that came tinkling out of them ? You had seen a vat churning thousands of discs around, whipping them like cream. Could they not have been sovereigns ? And, in a dark and secret yard, you had seen a consignment of coins, and the sacking had been partly torn and a box had been broken and there had been a pile of silverish coins. You had taken one and no one had seen you. But it was a franc, was it not, for Indo-China, and there had been policemen at the gates. And Bacon also said, "The ways to enrich are many, and most of them foul." So you put it back, and left the Mint to November, and the nickel to the people who know how to make money out of very little.
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