One of the world’s greatest coin collections lay buried in cigar boxes for 50 years after its owner took fright at a pending Nazi invasion and died shortly after Hitler’s troops arrived.
The hoard, dubbed the “Traveller collection”, was retrieved only when the collector’s much younger wife began to fear her own death and that “the hiding place might be lost for ever”.
Her son-in-law and another relative retrieved the treasures, which had been put in envelopes within cigar boxes and metal boxes, placed them in a bank vault and began the inventory and valuation process.
The collection, spanning centuries and continents, has been valued at £75 million and described as the “most important collection of world coins ever to be offered at public auction”.
It is due to be sold over the next three years. The first sale this month in Zurich will focus on the British coins.
Among the rarities are a pattern five-guinea piece of George III dated 1777. No large gold coins were struck during his reign and this prototype is one of only seven known to exist. It is valued at more than £260,000.
The British coins also include a “Una and the Lion type” pattern five-pound piece, among the first of Victoria’s reign but never issued for circulation, and valued above £200,000.
Designed by William Wyon, it is considered one of the most beautiful ever made.
“It is like a dream: a lost collection resurfacing, a biblical treasure in a field,” David Guest, a consultant on the British coins being sold, said. “These pieces were known but nobody knew what had happened to them.”
Coins from other territories in the collection include a 100 ducat coin minted for Ferdinand III of Habsburg in 1629, valued at over £1 million, and one of the earliest Australian coins, a 1 ounce Port Philip featuring a kangaroo and valued at £218,000.
The collector, whose descendants asked not to be identified, began buying gold coins after the 1929 Wall Street crash, according to Arturo Russo, director of Numismatica Arts, which is selling the collection.
Having sold his father’s company, the collector “travelled tirelessly alongside his young wife who accompanied him on a honeymoon which lasted several years”. Upon the birth of his only daughter, the collector settled down in Europe.
With a Nazi invasion imminent, according to Russo, he buried his gold coins in a field on his property, with other tranches of his collection on three continents.
Shortly after the Nazis invaded, he “had a stroke and died”. The coins remained underground for five decades until his wife, “the sole remaining witness to the coins’ burial”, divulged the secret location.
Russo said: “Dealers have been saying to us that there were certain coins that we were all wondering where they were.
“And if the Nazis had got their hands on them would have been melted down.”
