17mm diameter.  10 THOUSANDS OF £ STERLING  R. SILVERED BRONZE — · — KING EDWARD – VII –  — · —  1907.  Rogers 915.  Partial uneven dark toning, otherwise EF

Ex David Rogers collection.

David Rogers wrote:  The campaign to introduce a decimal system of coinage continued after the 1840s. The florin was introduced as a tenth of a pound in 1848. These pieces were made for Thomas Parker, 1853 to 1915. He was a business man in Wolverhampton and actively campaigned for a decimal coinage. He distributed 'patterns' for several denominations based on a unit of a thousandths of a pound sterling. These would have replaced the farthing, halfpenny, penny, threepence and sixpenny coins with the unit, three, five, ten and twenty-five thousandths coins. Like the earlier 1844 model penny by Joseph Moore, these 'patterns' were sent to Members of Parliament. The surviving specimens include: 1, 2, 3, and 5 in aluminium; two types of 3 in copper; 10 and 25 thousandths in silvered bronze. So far none are known made of nickel, which may have been used as well. C W Hill, a relative by marriage of Tom Parker, has published some details in Coin Monthly [Sept. 1973 and Jan. 1979]  An incomplete and mixed set was sold in the Norweb collection, June 1987, lot 1862 Spink's coin auction no 59. [None of these decimal patterns were listed by Hocking, Peck or Freeman.]