Sherlock Holmes arrived too late to solve one of Britain’s most curious criminal enterprises – a scandal that centered around Queen Victoria herself.
But to be fair, it wasn’t his fault.
You see, the Great Detective made his debut in A Study in Scarlet in December 1887. Just six months earlier, the British Empire was shaken by a coinage blunder that led to one of the most widespread counterfeiting crime waves in British history.
To celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, the mint marked the occasion with a new portrait of the 68-year-old monarch for the nation’s silver and gold coinage. They also took the opportunity to introduce elegant new heraldic reverse designs for some of the silver coins.
For the sixpence, this was to cause a national scandal and lead to a costly and embarrassing recall.
For much of Queen Victoria’s reign, the reverse designs of her three smallest silver coins bore the denomination to assist with their identification. Each design followed a similar pattern, comprising a crown at the top, laurel branches at the sides, and the denomination clearly displayed at the centre.
The threepence had the numeral ‘3’, the sixpence the words ‘SIX PENCE’ and the shilling ‘ONE SHILLING’. Whilst not particularly imaginative, the designs helped the public tell the coins apart.
To accompany the Queen’s new Jubilee coin portrait, the mint decided to change the reverse designs on the silver coins (with the exception of the threepence which retained its numeral). Instead of expressing the denomination in words, the sixpence received an elegant heraldic design depicting the crowned Royal Arms on a shield.
Unfortunately, no one at the mint noticed that the new sixpence design now closely resembled the crowned Royal Arms that appeared on the gold half-sovereign.
The fact that both coins were almost exactly the same size and roughly the same weight did not go unnoticed by enterprising criminals across the country. They wasted no time in purchasing tins of gold-coloured paint in which to dip the new sixpences before passing them off as gold half sovereigns worth twenty-times more!
This meant that large numbers of fake half sovereigns quickly entered circulation, as well as an almost endless supply of sixpences which could be cheaply disguised and passed off as the more expensive gold coin.
What had begun as a thoughtful and delightful way to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the monarch quickly spiralled into a national crisis which threatened to erode confidence in British coinage.
As the golden deception grew, the government was forced to withdraw all 1887 dated shield sixpences from circulation. These were melted down and restruck with their original reverse design which once again bore the words ‘SIX PENCE’, thereby ensuring that they couldn’t be so easily disguised as gold half sovereigns in the future.
This makes the 1887 shield sixpence one of Britain’s shortest-lived and most infamous coins, and any surviving examples are rare.