Well, I couldn’t resist, and bought myself an Edward VII quarter anna from ebay
Much as you would expect, except that instead of wearing a crown, Edward VII is shown bare headed, making the resemblance to the British half penny even more marked
The only obvious difference being the longer Latin motto on the British coin, as opposed to the quarter anna which says in English Edward VII King and Emperor.
Why they reused the same head as that used in the British coinage is a bit of a mystery. All the rest of the imperial coinage in India shows the monarch with a crowned head.
And it’s not as if they didn’t use a crowned head on other imperial coinage. For example, the Ceylon 5c coin uses a crowned head
(The Ceylon Rupee separated from the Indian Rupee in 1870 and became a decimal currency. The original Queen Victoria 5 cent coin was a large copper coin similar to an English penny. During Edward VII’s reign it was replaced with a small square cupro nickel coin.
In Edward VII’s time the 5c coin was worth roughly ¾d, or about one and a half times the value of an Indian quarter anna.
After independence the new government continued to issue 5c coins to the same design, with the monarch’s head replaced by the Sri Lankan coat of arms, until some time in the 1990s when inflation had rendered the 5c coin worthless, by which time it was being struck in aluminium.
The British half penny and Ceylon 5c coin images have been sourced from public domain websites)
Things move, things warp, you find strange things have been done by previous owners, etc, etc…
This winter past, our roof began to leak. It had done so before, and we’d had it repaired, but this time was quite dramatic, the rain came straight through, eroded a hole in the plaster and deposited a couple of litres of dirty rainwater in the bucket I’d placed under the leak.
Fortunately it missed the electric cables and didn’t damage anything else.
The roof, like the roof on most old wooden houses, is made of corrugated iron, and with the expansion and contraction of the metal work, bolts slacken and move, and sooner or later something opens up and you have a problem.
So, we’ve had the roof repaired and the builders are now repairing the damaged plaster in the ceiling.
When they pulled down the old plasterboard they found the remains of the original 1880’s painted plank ceiling still in place
Remains of the old hardwood plank ceiling
Not totally surprising. When we had the main bathroom renovated in 2018 we found that the original ceiling was still mostly in place, but had been so badly chopped about it couldn’t be restored, so we left it where it was and put a replica plank ceiling made of modern softwood timber over it to give it the colonial look.
This time, as the builders only need to replace part of the hall ceiling, I’m afraid it’s going to be modern plaster board.
And it’s true, the small paperback that would fit into a coat pocket has almost disappeared, to be replaced with the larger trade paperback format, and yes, they are quite expensive.
It’s not that long ago that you could go into any decent sized bookshop and there would be shelves and shelves of cheap paperbacks, and your local newsagent would have a shelf or so of action and romance novels somewhere next to the school stationery display.
But no longer.
Outside of the city decent bookshops are hard to find, and while Kmart and BigW still carry a selection of bodice rippers, it’s a very limited range.
To some extent, ebooks have taken the place of the mass market paperback, Amazon has built a retail empire on the back of the Kindle.
But not everything is available on the Kindle, and not everything has been digitised.
Sure, you can get a lot of out of copyright novels for free through Gutenberg, but getting them onto a kindle or a generic ereader needs access to a computer and a little bit of technical skill.
More importantly, with all ebooks, you kind of need to know in advance what you want to buy. There’s no happenstance, no picking up a book at random, and thinking ‘I would like to read that’, but then with the disappearance of bookshops happenstance is disappearing as well – limited selection and consequently fairly constrained browsing.
And, while there are still second hand bookshops, they too are disappearing.
The more specialist second hand bookshops, like those that concentrate on science fiction and fantasy seem to hang on, but the more generic ones seem to struggle, and the cost of property rents and other overheads mean that they are not as cheap as they once were, such that the big online overseas book barns with their low prices and cheap postage can end up cheaper than your local second hand shop.
And with them, what disappears is happenstance, and happenstance stokes curiosity.
As I’ve said before, when I was a poor student, what is now fifty years ago, I used to play the second hand bookshop game.
At the end of the week I would look at what money I had left, and if possible put three or four dollars aside – a dollar was actually worth something then – and that would be my recreational reading budget.
I’d tour round various second hand bookshops – they were more common then, cramped cold dusty places piled with books, and see what I could find.
And while my tastes have never been particularly literary, the game introduced me to nineteenth century sensation novelists, golden age mystery novels, nineteen fifties classic science fiction, Victorian travel diaries, and the rest.
The game would be impossible now. Fewer bookshops, fewer cheap second hand bookshops, And of course there’s the curse of Amazon’s ‘if you liked this, you might like this‘ algorithm.
With the disappearance of the mass market paperback publishers save money. Shorter print runs, higher prices and less warehousing.
But with the disappearance of the cheap paperback we’ve lost the joy of browsing and the surprise that comes with happenstance when you find a battered book you like that opens the door to a new author or a new genre…
When I posted about my journey down a colonial Indian coinage rabbit hole, the image I posted of a Queen Victoria quarter anna was of a pretty worn example.
Since then I’ve acquired a slightly less worn example
Still pretty worn, but clear enough to show the crowned profile and the legend Victoria Empress. It’s worth noting that same image was used from 1858 until her death in 1901, unlike her image on British coinage which was changed to an older veiled head in 1894.
The only major change was that in 1876 when she became Empress of India, the legend changed from Victoria Queen to Victoria Empress.
At the same time I also acquired a George V quarter anna. equally worn but clear enough to show the legend George V King Emperor and the profile of the crowned image used
As there were so many of these in circulation and they stayed in circulation for years, almost all pre independence quarter anna coins for sale are pretty worn.
The Queen Victoria and George V coins are quite easy to tell apart – Victoria has a little bun under crown, George V does not, and the legend on George V coins is longer and more tightly spaced. The reverse sides showing the value are identical except for the date.
These two I bought as reference pieces to aid identification, I find when trying to identify an old and worn coin, having an actual example is sometimes more help than a photograph, which may have been tweaked a little. I admit I did tweak the head side of the George V coin, but it’s my tweaking to show what I wanted to show!
I’ve been down a rabbit hole. It all started when I noticed that the Indian colonial quarter anna coin was almost, but not quite, the same size and weight as the old British half penny.
So what was a quarter anna?
The pre decimal Indian Rupee was divided into 64 pais or 16 annas.
For some reason, rather than issuing 1 pais coins, the East India Company denominated them as quarter anna coins, with the company crest on one side and the value in English on the other, enclosed in a wreath surrounded by the company name.
In 1858, after the Indian Rebellion, the British government took over the administration of India, and continued to issue quarter anna coins of a similar design, with a crowned Queen Victoria on one side, and the value, again in English, in a rather more elaborate wreath on the other.
Before 1876, the coins bore the inscription ‘Victoria, Queen’ and after 1876, when she became Empress of India as part of Disraeli’s schmoozing, the inscription changed to ‘Victoria, Empress’.
As can be seen, some are very worn. The British kept on minting the same design until 1947, only changing to a bald headed Edward VII after Victoria’s death, and then to the same portrait of George V in imperial robes and a crown as used on Australian coins, and then to a portrait of George VI, again with a crown.
There were squillions of them minted, and because of their similarity in size and weight to the British half penny there was some leakage whereby quarter annas leaked into both British and Australian circulating currencies as pseudo half pennies, and are sometimes turned up by metal detectorists on old homestead sites and even in people’s back yards.
So what was a quarter anna worth?
Not very much. Before the first world war the Indian rupee was fixed at one shilling and six pence (sometimes written as 1s6d, at other times 1/6), or eighteen British pennies, meaning an anna was a little more than a penny (1⅛d to be exact) meaning that to all intents and purposes a quarter anna was worth the same as a farthing (¼d).
And this is where I went down the rabbit hole.
Given that detectorists sometimes find them, I wondered if there was a problem with leakage into the circulating currencies.
So I searched Trove, the Times digital archive, Welsh Newspapers Online and Gale Newsvault for mentions of the quarter anna coin, half expecting to find letters to the editor complaining about the coins being passed off as half pennies.
Well no. Not a one.
No one was sufficiently exercised by the quarter anna’s resemblance to the half penny to complain about it.
So the next question was what could you buy for a half penny in 1897, the high point of the British Empire?
The Bank of England’s inflation calculator gives the value of a rupee, 1s6d, as being around £8 today, or roughly A$16, meaning that an anna or a British penny was worth around a dollar.
However, what a penny would buy was different to what a dollar would buy today.
In the 1890s, a penny would buy you a copy of The Age or the SMH, and in Britain, a copy of the Manchester Guardian, or the Yorkshire Post, the Irish Times, the Daily Telegraph or the Scotsman. The Times of London in contrast snootily priced itself at 3d.
In the 1890s, 2d could buy you a pint of beer in London, or a one way ticket on the Tube, so basically a halfpenny would not actually buy that much.
The one thing a halfpenny would buy was a copy of the Daily Mail.
Launched in 1896, advertising itself as ‘a penny paper for a halfpenny’ and pro imperialist and right wing from the start it appealed to lower middle classes of England. Advances in printing technology had meant it was possible to print the paper cheaply and in bulk and it was soon selling an unheard of million copies a a day.
It was a phenomenon, and also innovative, with competitions to maintain interest and boost circulation, sponsoring aviation competitions in the early days of flight, and employing the first female war correspondent during the second Boer war.
In the Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie mentions that Dr Sheppard (along with his sister Caroline), reads the Daily Mail, when one might have expected a doctor to read the Telegraph or the Times. Was this a snobbish hint by Christie that there was something not quite right about Dr Sheppard?
In short, while we might deride it for its jingoistic attitudes, the Daily Mail changed newspaper publishing by proving that a mass market paper could succeed.
Strange where a battered colonial coin can take you.
Now and again, people ask me about old coins and such like they’ve found digging in their gardens. Mostly they’re low value coins, pennies and half pennies.
Covered in dirt, and perhaps a little corroded, they can seem difficult to identify at first, but it’s easier than you think.
Pennies are around the size of a modern 20c coin, though a bit thinner, halfpennies are a little bigger than a 10c coin and farthings (1/4d – quarter of a penny) a bit smaller.
In the 1880s, a penny had perhaps the approximate purchasing power of a dollar today, but that’s not the same as its actual value – a housemaid might make £15 a year, plus her bed and board (call it $3000 in today’s money), while a skilled agricultural worker such as a ploughman might make three or four times that, and also be provided with a house and a patch of land to grow potatoes and vegetables to feed his family as well as keeping a few chickens, and perhaps shooting the occasional kangaroo or wallaby for the pot.
People were poor, but when assessing value, it’s important to remember that they probably didn’t pay tax and in the country might well live rent free. A solidly middle class person such as a bank clerk might be paid between £100-150 a year but would pay rent.
In the nineteenth century Australia used British coins, only starting to issue its own in 1910. If you’re old like me you might remember the pre-decimal pennies with a kangaroo on the back and either George VI or Elizabeth II on the front. If you find one they’re usually in good condition and instantly recognisable.
The first Australian pennies looked quite different
With an image of George V wearing a crown on one side and a very plain design on the other. Half pennies looked the same, except of course they said ‘half penny’ rather than ‘one penny’.
British pennies looked different to Australian pennies, George V did not wear a crown and they had an image of Brittania on the rear
Until 1931, the British and Australian pounds were worth the same and British coins circulated alongside Australian coins, especially as New Zealand didn’t mint its own coins until 1933 and continued happily using British coins.
George V was preceded by Edward VII.
While the coins look similar, especially when worn, with a bearded bald guy on one side and Britannia on the other side, they are easy enough to tell apart, Edward faces right, George faces left.
Victoria is slightly more complicated.
Before 1860, pennies were bigger and heavier than the later ones and were made of copper, not bronze, and wore badly
The design was a little bit different as well, with a simpler inscription and the date underneath the queen’s head
The rear was different as well
With an inscription round the image of Britannia and the three weeds (The Irish Shamrock, the English Rose, and the Scottish thistle) under Britannia.
Pre 1860 coins were withdrawn and melted down, meaning that the post 1860 design coins are bit more likely to turn up, simply because there were more of them and were in circulation longer
The post 1860 coins are a little different, with a slightly older portrait of Queen Victoria and the date moves to the back of the coin, and there is a longer inscription on the front of the coin
They kept on producing this design until the 1890’s, and some can be very worn
But the easiest way to tell them apart from any pre-1860 pennies is that Queen Victoria has a little rat-tail and on the rear you can usually see a date rather than the three weeds under Britannia.
This relatively unworn 1886 half penny shows the design rather more clearly, showing that her apparent rat tail is in fact a ribbon from the wreath on her head
But, as we all do, Queen Victoria aged, and in 1894 the design changed to show an older, veiled Queen Victoria
Coins from earlier monarchs are rare. In the time of George III, George IV and William IV, Australia at most consisted of the settled area around Sydney and of course Tasmania. Other than a few squatter settlements around Port Fairy, there was no Victoria, Queensland consisted of the Moreton Bay penal settlement and a few free squatters, and Adelaide and Perth simply did not exist.
It was the discovery of gold in the early 1850s that triggered the expansion of the population and hence the area of European settlement…
The Marseille Ventimiglia railway has quite a storied history.
When it opened in the early 1870s it provided a link, in fact the only railway link between Italy and France, and remained so until the lines across the Alps via Switzerland were constructed later in the nineteenth century.
Part of the PLM – the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranée railway – as well as providing an important freight and communication link, it ferried the late Victorian and Edwardian upper classes to the Riviera to spend the winter there and escape the cold, the damp, and the perpetual coal smoke of England.
As well as Menton on the French side, there was a large English community on the Italian side, both in San Remo itself and in the hills behind the town. Italy was a little cheaper, which meant that those living on army or colonial service pensions could live a little better.
So popular was the Riviera, the Compagnie International des Wagons-Lits began to run a special train, Le Train Bleu, from Calais to Menton – first class only of course – that ran overnight and avoided the need to change trains (and stations) in Paris.
Queen Victoria loved Menton and loved the journey, visiting Menton for a winter holiday several times from 1882 onwards, and her son, Prince Leopold, possibly the most normal of her children, died in Cannes in 1884 from heamophilia, having gone there to winter in a warmer climate.
On her first visit she was accompanied by John Brown, who apparently insisted on wearing a solar topee with his kilt – something that must have amused the locals.
Suspended during world war one, Le Train Bleu resumed in 1920 and continued to run until the start of world war two. The service again resumed in 1949, but with the growth of air travel, it became less popular, and formally ceased to run in 2003, although a barebones overnight service with couchettes and standard carriages continued to run until 2017.
However, post-Covid, a barebones couchette and sit up overnight service has resumed. While lacking in the glamour of the old train, rattling down to the Mediterranean overnight still will carry a little magic…
Le Train Bleu serves as background to Agatha Christie’s early novel The Mystery of the Blue Train, but the story is not really about the Train Bleu, like many of her novels it’s a locked room mystery and really about some rather awful English people in a villa outside of Menton.
But it was not all about taking the upper and upper middle classes of Victorian England for a pleasant holiday.
When the Suez canal opened, the Marseilles Ventimiglia line provided a direct link to both Genoa and Livorno, allowing Italian shipping lines to compete with British shipping lines on the routes to Mumbai (then Bombay) and Galle in Sri Lanka for onward connections to East and South East Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand.
Going with an Italian shipping line offered a slightly quicker journey, and allowed passengers to avoid the storm tossed Bay of Biscay, especially in winter.
This was not just a journey for the well off – the Edwardian travel writer Beth Ellis, who was not a particularly wealthy woman, took the route from Italy by train on her return from Burma (now Myanmar).
And if you look carefully, ghosts of the old PLM are still visible.
In 2023, when dragging our cases across the tramway on the way to Nice-Ville station I glanced to my right at the old iron railway bridge, and you could still see the old PLM crest on the ironwork.
(I didn’t photograph it at the time – when we visited there were rough sleepers and junkies under the bridge and 0630 was not the time to start photographing, and anyway, we had a train to catch, in fact two trains, the local TER to the border, and then an Italian Intercity train, and we had been warned that the morning TER services often ran late… )
I’ve been spending my pennies again, this time on another example of a Too Late postmark on a postcard from April 1883 sent to a hotel in San Remo in Italy
International pre paid postcard to Italy 1883Postcard reverse side
The reverse shows an acknowledgement from Pitt and Scott, Shipping agents, of them being notified about two packages in transit from Menton in France.
Pitt and Scott were well known art shippers and packers in the nineteenth century, and I’m guessing that the addressee, a Mr J Gratton, was either a minor artist or an English art dealer working in the south of France in the 1880s.
Unfortunately I’ve been so far unable to trace Mr Gratton.
There are two other interesting points to note about the postcard.
Despite Mr Gratton having a contact address in San Remo in Italy, the postcard acknowledges receipt of packages sent from Mentone (today Menton) in France. San Remo’s a short train ride from Menton.
Even today it only takes about forty minutes on local trains with a change at Ventimiglia on the border between an Italian local train and a French TER local train heading along the coast.
The Italian Postal Service has never had much of a reputation for efficiency, and perhaps Mr Gratton felt that it would be quicker to send his packages from France via La Poste, or perhaps some specialist shipper.
In Italian the French coastal town of Menton is known as Mentone.
Menton only, along with the rest of the mostly Italian speaking County of Nice, became part of France in 1860 after Italian reunification. For reasons too complex to explain succinctly, Monaco was left behind as a principality ruled by the Dukes of Savoy, the former ruling family of the county of Nice.
The coastal TER commuter train runs through Monaco on its way from Ventimiglia in Italy on its way to Nice and points west, and offers a spectacular view of the coast, especially at sunrise and sunset.
Take it early in the morning, as we did a few years ago, it is busy with the maids, cleaners, and everyone else who works keeping Monaco running commuting from France as only the super rich can affor an apartment in Monaco.
Menton itself became very popular as a tourist resort for the upper classes of Europe in the nineteenth century due to its pleasant winter climate. Even though it changed hands in 1860, the Victorians continued to refer to it as Mentone. In fact the use of the name Mentone in English only really drops out of use with the second world war as seen in this Google Ngram search for Mentone
And of course, the popularity of both San Remo and Mentone as Mediterranean resorts is why we have both a San Remo and a Mentone in Victoria…
Now my choice of Golden Age reading has been driven by happenstance.
If, in the course of cataloguing the Athenaeum’s Historic Book collection, I come across an interesting looking Golden Age mystery, I make a note of it, and then look to see if it’s available as a public domain download, or available cheaply second hand from somewhere, and then read them as part of my bedtime reading.
Nothing extraordinary there.
But the thing which struck me was that in both Dorothy L Sayer’s novel and Christopher St John Sprigg’s novel, the plots, however improbable, revolve around cocaine smuggling, and there’s even a sub-plot around cocaine abuse in the Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Now, crime novels usually reflect the stresses of a society and its concerns.
Obviously cocaine abuse and smuggling was a serious concern in 1920’s and 1930’s Britain.
But how did we get there?
Like many things, its a consequence of world war one.
In 1916, the war was not going well for Britain.
Locked in an endless war of attrition on the western front, losses were mounting. Men were increasingly reluctant to volunteer, so much so that conscription had to be introduced in January 1916.
In Ireland, Easter 1916 saw the Rising, when a few nationalists took over the General Post Office building. The British, incompetent as ever, massively over reacted making a bad thing worse, and to quote Yeats, a terrible beauty was born.
(I’ve often wondered, without any evidence whatsoever if George V’s apparent reluctance to save the Russian imperial family after the Revolutions of 1917, was influenced by having seen how quickly the situation in Ireland span out of control after Easter 1916.)
And on the western front itself the continual stress and fear had begun to affect the army, and discipline could do only so much.
Increasingly officers began to self medicate to cope with the stress, and increasingly they turned to cocaine, for the spurious feeling of alertness it provided, so much so that in May 1916 an emergency order was made under the Defence of the Realm act forbidding the supply of cocaine to any member of the armed forces, except when prescribed by a doctor.
The ban on cocaine was formalised by the Dangerous Drugs Act in 1920
Previously there had been no restrictions on the supply and consumption of cocaine, or indeed other drugs subsequently banned.
Asthma cigarettes, which basically contained stramonium, a herb whose smoke when inhaled dilated the passages in the lungs and helped the smoker breathe more easily – counterintuitive I know – would sometimes contain a little herbal cannabis as a relaxant. Not after 1920.
And increasingly, cocaine became the drug of choice in the night clubs of London, as documented by Marek Kohn in his book Dope Girls. (Incidentally, in 1919, David Garnett, Constance Black’s son, published a novel, Dope Darling under the pseudonym Leda Burke, which told the story of an affair between a young medical student and a cocaine addicted nightclub singer during the first world war.)
In short, cocaine rapidly became the drug of choice among what came to be termed ‘The Bright Young Things’, the sons and daughters of the British upper classes, after world war one, and this caused a moral panic. The fact that many of the principal dealers were either black or Chinese further excaberated the moral panic, pandering to the latent racism of 1920s Britain
Cocaine was seen as a problem, a real problem, and hence its appearance in the crime novels of the time, even though, after a police clampdown in the mid 1920s, its use seems to have been confined to a relatively small group of upper class socialites.
Whatever the reality, the tabloids of the time would however have it that London was awash with cocaine and devilish orientals were conspiring to despoil the flower of English womenhood, while reducing the young men of England to a vacuous state of dependence, and the crime novels of the time reflected the moral panic, not the reality…
There was no real road, simply a hard packed track over the desert, along which the buses (and various trucks) would thunder.
Well I was looking on wikimedia commons for a picture of a Renault 4 GTL similar to the one I owned in the 1980s, and came across this picture from 1970 of an early model Renault 4 dicing with death driving the track in among a group of trucks.
And unlke some of the dirt roads you see in the outback which have been graded and levelled, and where people (mostly) stick to the correct side of the road, this is truly a track, where everyone picks their own line…
