About this coin

Face value: one penny.
Collector value: errr...about a penny.

So you've nicked a bit of my worthless coin collection. Good for you.

This coin has been cleaned and polished, a thing you must absolutely never ever do to a coin of any value. Collectors hate it. How are they going to find out a coin's been brushed up a little? X-ray vision? Wonder Woman's Golden Lasso of Truth? Never mind. They say it's quite easy for them to tell by looking, and you'd better believe it — because a cleaned coin loses, like, 90% of its value.

Your coin, however, wasn't worth much to begin with. Hurrah! That means you can rub it with your thumb, or skip it across a pond, or walk around with it in your shoe, or do whatever you like with it and you don't have to feel guilty. A coin collector would still call it vandalism, but nuts to them, really. I certainly don't care what you do with it.

There's plenty more where this came from. Fifty million George VI pennies were minted in the year 1948. If you stacked all of them on top of each other, it would make a giant column over forty-seven miles tall. Except, it would probably fall over when you got to about three feet.

This nice old penny should bring plenty of Weasel's Luck. I'd enjoy hearing from it in its new life, especially if it finds work or meets a celebrity or has adventures or rolls down a crack in the floorboards never to be seen again. I might even put your name or letter on this page (unless you ask me not to). Address correspondence to: coins@FieldNotebook.com.

History: bought (in a lot of 36 assorted coins) from a dealer in Florida. Left at...ohmygosh...I can't remember where I left this one!

Inscription:

GEORGIVS.VI.D:G:BR:OMN:REX F:IND:IMP

Which, when translated out of British coin-speak short-hand Latin, means "George VI by the Grace of God, King of all the Britons and Emperor of India."

That's a very neat trick. Using this clever system, we could say the Pledge of Allegiance like: PLG:FLG:USA RPB:ONE:GD:IND OMN:LIB:JST:YAY!

And the National Anthem would fit on the head of a pin! SEE FLAG? NOT ME!

Work this one out yourself: X.FST:BLT X.PWR:LOCO 1:JMP:BLDG LOOK!SPRMN

About George VI:

Albert Frederick Arthur George Windsor (1895 - 1952) was the second son of George V and so wasn't expected to be king. As a result, he was allowed to serve in the Navy during WWI and had a little more leeway in taking a wife. Leeway, if not success — his choice, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, turned him down and had to be...leaned on a little by his mother, the formidable Queen Mary.

Albert was a serious, shy man with a terrible stutter. He was horrified to find himself on the throne when his brother stepped down in 1936. It's said that he cried when he heard the news. And who can blame him? He was destined to spend the rest of his life making speeches.

He was crowned George VI (his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, had asked that no English king take the throne with the name Albert). Most of his reign was absorbed with WWII and its aftermath.

The slow, measured way of speaking that George painfully learned from his speech therapist was actually just the right tone for the somber days of the war, and he was well regarded for radio broadcasts during this time, though he never learned to be comfortable giving speeches. He and his family stayed in London during the blitz (in the daytime, anyhow) and often personally inspected fresh sites of bomb damage. All of this went far to boost morale during the difficult days of the war.

He died in 1952 and was succeeded by his eldest daughter, Elizabeth.

In case you haven't worked it out for yourself, his wife was the Queen Mum, the beloved old grey crowned head who died in 2002, at the age of 101.