1950 George VI proof set. Warning-lots of images.....

canadacolornut · March 12, 2011 7:05AM

If you're familiar with the 1950 British proof sets you know that some nitwit at the mint came up with the "bright"
idea of placing a black ribbon under the cutout for each coin in the set. He was since encased in a straight jacket
and denied all things sharp, electronic or mint related for screwing up practically all the proof sets for that year.

I've seen several dozen, bought a few of them and in nearly all cases, the black ribbon left a "duh" stripe across the
side of the coin, the obverse, which rested against it for several decades.

In the vast majority of those cases the stripe was mostly black and ugly, pretty much destroying any eye appeal
that the obverse might otherwise have had.

I'm posting one here that fared a little better. In this instance the set was kept in it's original box, wrapped in brown
paper and stored in a basement for almost sixty years. The chemical reaction could have been verry verry bad, as
most I've seen, or-in this instance-not so bad.

The effects of the toning under the stripe are evident, but in most of the coins in the set, the toning was simply
a color change rather than a crusty black abomination that destroyed any eye appeal at all.

Some of these coins are as near perfect as I think might exist unless the coins were taken out of the set early
on and stored in some inert material.

Anyway, thought I'd share some of them to get other opinions.

The photography isn't very good since I had to tilt the coin to get the full brightness of the color contrast and parts are
slightly out of focus for that reason.

Thanks for any comments, observations.....

Gazza · March 12, 2011 6:04PM

That's interesting I'd never seen that effect before, learnt something new. If my memory serves me correctly I go my set still in their cellothene rappers, so no streaks.