The proposal of a new £1 coin sends Christopher Gray on a trip down memory lane

Recent publicity about the plan to get rid of the easily forged £1 coin in favour of a multi-sided replacement looking like the old threepenny bit reminded me that somewhere about the house I had one of these ‘joeys’, as The Times told us they were called (or was this the earlier silver version?).

At the back of a cupboard I found what I was loooking for in a tin that also contained many reminders of four decades of foreign travel and other pre-decimal coins that I must have put away in February 1971. Application of a spot of Brasso (now why had I bought that? I wonder) restored the threepenny bit to something of its former glory and also brought up a shine on my halfpenny, sixpence and shilling.

It could not do much, though, for the penny in my collection, but this is much older, dating back (as you can probably just make out in the picture above) to 1863. It is a ‘bun penny’, so called, the name derived from the hairstyle shown off by the young Queen Victoria on the other side of the coin.

This was found during work on my house on Osney Island. As the coin dates from about the time of the property’s construction, I imagine it might have been placed there by the builders. You would have needed two of these, incidentally, to buy The Oxford Times, which first appeared the previous year.