The Children's Book of London

by G. E. Mitton

THE MINT, THE BANK, AND THE POST-OFFICE

Has it ever occurred to you that money must be made somewhere? We do not find it ready made in the earth or growing on trees; and if you think a little, that could not be, for every country has its own money with its own King's or President's head on the coins. Here in England we have the King's head on one side and various designs on the other, which are different according to the coins they adorn. It would be rather nice if money did grow on bushes. Supposing we could have a row of them in the garden. The penny ones might be like gooseberry bushes, rather low down and stumpy, and mother would say, 'Now, who will go and see if there are any ripe pennies for me to-day?' and we should see the great round brown pennies hanging ready to drop, and the little wee ones just beginning to grow, or perhaps having grown to the size of halfpennies; and we might ask, 'Shall we gather all we find, or leave the halfpennies for another day to grow into pennies?'

Then there would be silver trees, where shillings and half-crowns grew, and we should be told, 'You must not go near those, they are too valuable. You might drop some of the money and lose it in the mud;' and the gold, I think, would have to be reared in hothouses only, and kept locked up very carefully.

Well, of course, this is just imagination. Take out a shilling and look at it. It probably has the King's head on it, or it may have King Edward's, or Queen Victoria's head if it is a very old one. Anything further back than that would be valuable as a curiosity. All these shillings are the same value, and it makes no difference which one you use, and they have all been made at the Mint in London. It is not difficult for anyone to get leave to go to see over the Mint, and it is a very interesting thing to do. The building is near the Tower, and does not look at all grand; in fact, it is difficult to believe that such riches can come out of any building so poor looking. Here all the money for England is coined—gold, silver, and copper. If we are lucky, the day we go we shall find the workmen making gold sovereigns, and pouring them out so fast that it is like the old fairy story of Rumpelstiltskin.

In the first room there are great furnaces, with dirty-looking caldrons hanging over them, and in these caldrons there is not soup or anything to eat, but gold, pure gold. This gold has been found in far-away countries and brought to England, and the men who bring it get paid so much for it according to its weight, and then the Mint people turn it into coins. The gold is all liquid, seething and boiling. The man who stands by the caldron has a pair of thick leather gloves to protect his hands in case sparks fly out. Suddenly he seizes the caldron with a pair of pincers, and, dragging it from the fire, he tilts it up so that the molten gold runs out in a stream into a number of tubes like long straight jars joined together. The gold flows in, bubbles up, and that one is full to the top; and then the next is filled, and the next, and so on to the end. Then the gold is left to cool. The big caldron goes back on to the furnace to boil more gold. As the gold boils a tiny quantity of it gets into the sides of the caldron and sticks to them, and this is too valuable to lose, and so after the caldron has been used a certain number of times it is broken up and melted so as to recover this gold again, and not a grain is lost.

When the gold which has been poured into the jars has cooled it is solid again, and has taken the shape of the jars—that is to say, it is in bars of gold. You will be given one to handle and feel; it is a flat bar of gleaming gold weighing a great deal. The bars are then taken and put under a machine something like a mangle, and the machine squeezes and presses them with such terrific force that they are squeezed out thinner and thinner, and, of course, get longer and longer in the process. Just think what tremendous force must be used to press out a bar of gold! When at last they are ready these long thin slabs of gold are the thickness of a sovereign.

Now, each of these bars is passed through a machine, which cuts out of it a double row of holes just the size of sovereigns all the way down, and the little gold pieces thus neatly cut out drop down below into a box. Take one up and look at it; it is smooth and clean and round, the size of a sovereign, but it has as yet no King's head on it, and the edges are smooth, not rough as in a real sovereign. So each of these little round gold pieces is taken away to another room to be finished, and the remainder of the long thin strip out of which they were cut goes back to the caldron to be boiled up again and made into more sovereigns.

You will notice that every time we go through a door at the Mint it is unlocked for us to go through, and locked again behind us; this is because the gold is so valuable. No one is allowed to pass in and out without being watched, lest they should carry some away with them. Every night each one of these rooms is carefully swept out, and the sweepings boiled up to get any little particles of gold that are lying about, and a large amount of money is saved in this way. The men who work in each room are responsible for the gold in it; the gold is weighed on coming in and on going out, and any weight lacking has to be made up by the men out of their wages.

Now we have got the little round sovereigns, which are cleaned and polished and put into another machine; this machine has what is called a die in it—that is, a stamping instrument with the King's head on it ready to print on the coin. The little sovereign is put on to a tiny round place, with a little collar of metal all round, and this collar is rough, like the edge of a shilling or a sovereign. Down comes the die with enormous force, and stamps on the coin King George's head; the force is so great that the coin is a little flattened out and pressed against the rough collar, so the edges become rough, too. Thus are both sides done, and the sovereign is now a real sovereign, and could be used to buy things at a shop.

There are rows of these machines all hard at work, and we feel we are in a fairy tale when we see the little round clean bits of gold drop, drop, drop without stopping on to the tiny round table with the collar; and the machine goes up and down, up and down, never stopping, and every time it does its work, and a new sovereign drops away into a box below. Drip, drip, drip, sovereigns are raining down, dozens every minute, all newly made; it seems as if we could easily get rich if we were allowed to make money like this. But the sovereigns are not finished yet; they must go to be weighed, and all those that are not exactly the right weight, but either too heavy or too light, go back to the melting-pot to be made all over again; and only those that are exactly right are passed out new-minted to the Bank, from whence they go to all the people in Great Britain and Ireland. It is reckoned that so many as one in every three has to go back to the melting-pot, and be boiled and hammered and squeezed all over again; so it is a good thing gold cannot feel.