Owner Comments:
S-3852D, Marsh 44x
Acquired from: St James's, London
Means: Auction 69, Lot 138
Date: 17 November 2022
Critique: I purchased this coin as part of a group of five raw ungraded sovereigns. None of them were high grade, and none seemed particularly interesting to the cataloger, so they just got dumped together in one lot. However, there were two coins that did catch my eye. The most interesting was an 1853 that has some extreme re-punching of large letters over small ones in the obverse legend. The other was an ultra-rare (R5) 1855 with WW Raised (Marsh-38A). My plan was to keep the 1853 and sell off the other four coins, since I already have a very nice example of 1855 Raised. Since this package of raw coins seemed unremarkable, there was no real interest during the auction, and I was able to get it for about 20% over melt value. My hope was that I'd be able to sell four of the coins for what I paid for the lot of five, and thus come away with a free example of 1853 heavily re-punched.
Following my master plan, I sent the five coins in to NGC, and got very pleasantly surprised that one of them graded quite a bit higher than I estimated. So I've decided to add the 1871-S to my collection since I had a hole there. As I was looking at the remaining three newly encapsulated coins, I noticed something very unusual about this 1861 sov. The letter G in GRATIA seems to be punched far lower (further from the rim) than the rest of the letters. It's so low that it almost touches Her Majesty's hair (which only Prince Albert and John Brown were allowed to do). Curious to see if this might be some new minor variety, I started examining just a few auction archives, and thus far have not found a match. What I did notice during this search was that every other 1861 sovereign that I saw has a different style of hair under the letter G. In this case, there is a pronounced bump directly after the G, whereas in all other coins this area is flattened. It's well-documented that the Queen's hairstyle was altered from time to time, at the whim of the current engraver I assume. For example, in the catalog of Part 1 of the famous Bentley collection sale in 2012 there is quite a bit of discussion about the terminal hairs of her cute ponytail, of which there are at least three or four variations. But this seems to be a heretofore unreported hair style. Since it appears that this style is rare, I'm wondering if perhaps the mint workers doing the engraving complained that the extra bump in the hair was causing them some trouble with lining things up to punch the letter G, and therefore the portrait was quickly altered to smooth out the hair in this area and make more room. Perhaps original mint records from the time may mention that change.
To make this unusual coin even more exciting, close examination shows that the remaining letters RATIA of this last word of the obverse legend have been re-punched with large characters over small ones. I had originally noticed that on the 1853 coin, but had overlooked it on this one.
Since it now was apparent that I wanted to keep three of the five coins from this auction lot, I decided to also retain the 1855 Raised coin as a duplicate. Having two of a variety which Marsh estimates have a population of less than twenty still existing can't really be a bad thing. So, in the end, instead of keeping one coin and selling four, I've decided to keep four and just sell one! Sometimes things just don't work out as expected...