Being a bar-tender, I come across many notes and coins, every now and then I have to decline tender as it’s not always excepted in the UK (like some Northern Irish notes). But one day I came across a coin that I had never seen before; and believe me, I handle thousands a week, yet I had never seen this particular one before.
It was a commemorative £2 that marked the 200th anniversary of the abolishment of slavery, Britain leading the civilized world at the time by being the first country to do so.
When I saw it in the till at work, I knew I had handled it and accepted it as legal tender... so that small part of me was annoyed if I had accepted a coin that was not considered legal tender. Yet, when I examined it, everything checked out fine. A simple coin with broken chains of the flip side of the queen.
I guess you could say I wanted it. I exchange it for another two pounds that I had in my pocket and began searching for it online. But what dominated my phones screen was an ebay posting of a rare coin of exactly the same type and year, but with a misprint. Basically some writing on the side of the coin was facing the wrong way.
For some reason, I didn’t get to examine it properly until I got home... it just didn’t cross my mind as something that important, as we had yet another understaffed night at work. But when I did get to examine it, I was in for a shock...
... it had the exact misprint that that coin going for crazy money had! And one more error was that the ring encircling the Queen’s head was incomplete.
But how?
How was a regular two pound coin, used to buy a pint, actually worth nearer £2000?
When I took it to a specialist, he had a number of coins from that year... I examined every one of them and found only one like mine. He didn’t seem to know about this particular misprint, and tried to say it was just ebay hype... but why would it be written about in papers? And why out of all those coins in his collection, did he have only one with the "common" error?
I wouldn’t be surprised if he is trying to dish that coin out on ebay right now... perhaps still giving the same story of how its just ebay hype to anyone who might enquire... yet he could anyone blame him for selling a rare coin?
Have you guys ever found anything like this? Or are there any more coins I should be looking out for?