East India Company, Bombay Presidency, Later Uniform coinages, 1830-5, Bombay dies, copper Proof Half-Anna, 1832/1246h, arms and supporters, east india company above, date below, rev. scales, half anna above, adil [Justice] between pans, date below, edge plain, 10.89g/6h (Prid. 204 [Sale, lot 495]; Stevens 5.15; KM. 250). Extremely fine and toned, extremely rare [certified by NGC as a Pattern, graded PF 61 BN]
£2,000-£2,600

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Puddester Collection.

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Collection

P. Snartt (Bristol, UK) Collection
SNC (London) May 1980 (3843), ticket.

Owner’s ticket.

The building of a new mint at Bombay commenced with the laying of the foundation stone on 1 February 1825. But as far back as 1820 the Company had been engaged with Boulton, Watt & Co for the necessary minting machinery, with its emissary, Capt (later Major) John Hawkins, Bombay Engineers, making several visits to Soho, but work did not start until February 1823 and the presses, along with the sub-contractors to operate them and Hawkins himself, did not leave England until the autumn of the following year. Numerous local setbacks ensured that the first trial pieces, thought to be the ‘lion and palm’ coppers struck at the end of 1828 and described in a letter from Hawkins to Boulton in February 1829 (see Lot 562), met with a mixed reception. The Court of Directors ordered the new machine-struck coinage, of half-, quarter- and twelfth-annas, be made to a lighter weight standard, which caused concern, but manufacture of quarter-annas began on 22 November 1830 and twelfth-annas early in 1831. The old Bombay mint was closed in April 1831 and staff transferred to the new facility, but the increasingly-ill Hawkins had died two months earlier. A small number of half-annas dated 1832 were struck and a few appear to have escaped into circulation; 12 proofs were sent to London for approval by the Court of Directors, but the Bombay die-sinker, a Mr Clarke, had resigned in an apparent fit of pique, causing the mint engineer, Capt Frederick McGillivray (†1838), Royal Engineers, to request a complete set of new matrices from the mint at Calcutta