Evidence In Plain Sight - AF Bassett Hull and the Port Phillip Patterns

Evidence In Plain Sight - AF Bassett Hull and the Port Phillip Patterns

So much has been written about Australia's numismatic items that I often forget evidence can sit in plain sight for decades without being noticed or appreciated.

That reality smacked me in the face earlier this week when I was researching a few of the sixpence and shilling patterns from the Port Phillip Kangaroo Office. This kind of research generally involves me putting on some music (anything ranging from heavy metal to ambient house music to classical, depending on my levels of focus and energy) and hauling out a whole lot of auction catalogues to track auction appearances and provenance.

While doing a search on my laptop for the spreadsheet I store these records in, I came across a reference to a paper written by a collector named AF Bassett Hull, who was perhaps the first Australian numismatist to write about the Port Phillip pattern sixpence and shilling. A lot of this material is now being digitized, so I was able to re-read the paper via the State Library of NSW website.

Arthur Francis Basset Hull MBE (1862–1945) is described in his Wikipedia entry as "...an Australian public servant, naturalist and philatelist." No mention is made of him being a numismatist, but Basset Hull wrote a very comprehensive paper on Australian colonial numismatics in 1873, in partnership with Walter Roth. (We handled Roth's incredible Holey Dollar a few years ago). In the section covering the Port Phillip Kangaroo Office sixpence and shilling patterns, Basset Hull states:

“Very little is known concerning the following pieces; The engraver; W.J. Taylor is dead & the present heads of the firm have been unable to inform anything more definitely concerning the date & object of issue than that they were struck in gold, silver, & copper, somewhere about 1855. if not later. Since that time one or more re strikes have been issued but it is believed that the original sets were all milled (& these are certainly the rarer) The subsequent issues having but plain edges: There is also some reason for supposing the first pieces had their reverses upset, but of this we are not certain.”

He also states “in the early sixties the die of the Australian shillings Reverse was (indecipherable) with the observe dies of the two or three "Wiener" pattern English shillings, & copies taken both in silver & copper: a specimen of this last one together with copies of the pattern shilling & sixpence in all three metals, plain & milled, are in the Author’s Collection.”

I know this information will be as boring as hell to 90% of the people that read this, but for the 10% this is unequivocal confirmation that the pattern sixpence and shilling by Taylor are relics of a genuine attempt by WJ Taylor to strike Australia's first sixpences and shillings for circulation.

The reason this is important is that Taylor had a tendency to use his dies again and again, long after they should have been mothballed. The Taylor patterns (particularly those with the plain edge) are often dismissed as manufactured curiosities for the collector market, critics going to far as to say they are misrepresented as genuine numismatic items. Most of Taylor's re-strikes date to the late 1800's, specifically the 1880's and 1890's.

Basset Hull and Walter Roth are known to have written their paper in 1873, which means anything they refer to in it was struck before that date. Basset Hull dates the milled-edge patterns to 1855, which means they were struck before the Kangaroo Office was closed in 1857. He states the plain edge patterns were struck in 1860, which does mean they were struck after the Kangaroo Office closed, but still well before Taylor and / or his sons re-struck a whole lot of material several decades later.

Now, this "evidence" has been in print for some 152 years, so it is hardly "news"!

That said, even though it has been publicly available that entire time, I don't think I credited this section as being unequivocal evidence of the importance that the Port Phillip pattern sixpence and shilling have. I shall now keep it in my back pocket for the next time they are decried as being made solely to sell to gullible collectors.