The Puddester Collection (Part I)

East India Company, Bombay Presidency, Later coinages: Local minting, copper Half-Anna, 1828, Rahimatpur (?), balemark, retrograde date 8281 below, rev. scales, date below, 13.97g/9h (Prid. 328 [Sale, lot 554]; Stevens 6.151, this coin illustrated; Stevens website image 1031, this coin; KM. 229). About very fine, extremely rare, only one specimen (Pridmore’s) in Snartt survey [certified and graded NGC VF 20 BN] £400-£500

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

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Collection

D. Fore Collection, Part III, Baldwin Auction 84 (London), 25-6 September 2013, lot 1950, Spink ticket apparently relating.

Owner’s ticket and envelope.

Literature:
Illustrated in Paul Stevens, The Coins of the English East India Company, Presidency Series: A Catalogue and Pricelist, p.303
Illustrated in Paul Stevens, The Coinage of the Bombay Presidency, p.302.

The provenance of this coin presents something of an enigma as, at the time of the Fore sale, it was sold with a modern (post-1995) Spink ticket hinting that it had been obtained by Fred Pridmore in Madura, an island off the coat of Java, in 1948. Moreover, the Fore cataloguer provenanced the coin to lot 128 of the Sir John Wheeler collection, apparently in error, although in the present cataloguer’s opinion he correctly questioned the assertation by the writer of the Spink ticket that the coin was ‘struck over [a] Dutch one Stiver Dump’. The only example of this coin known for certain to have been in the Pridmore collection was included within lot 554 of his 1982 sale, when it was acquired by Paul Stevens, and subsequently sold by Stevens in 2016 (Stephen Album Auction 26, lot 2097).

Stevens (2019, pp.302-3), quoting the Bombay Consultations of 1830, suggests that these 1828-9 pieces, struck somewhat in imitation of the 1820-1 issues from Bankot, were circulating in large quantities in Rahimatpur, central India, and were not official issues of the Southern Concan, despite the lack of any Devanagari legend on them