GROATEST PRICE
Horace’s rare coin collection goes for a whopping £2.8m
THE family of a steeplejack who died in 1973 are absolutely minted after his collection of rare coins sold for £2.8million.
The 52 coins, including a gold Elizabeth I groat, were amassed by Horace Hird over 50 years.
It was thought he had sold all his collection before his death, but a relative recently found dozens of coins, untouched since the 1960s, wrapped in their paperwork.
One of them was the rare gold Elizabeth I groat from 1601 depicting a bust of the Tudor Queen.
It had been expected to fetch £10,000 but sold for £480,000, a new record for an Elizabethan coin.
Mr Hird, from Bradford, West Yorks, had bought the coin, one of only two examples in gold, in 1949 for £135, about £4,000 in today’s money.
Another coin that was fought over at the London auction was an Elizabethan “Ship Ryal” Rose Noble coin, struck in 1588, the year the Spanish Armada tried to invade England.
It features a rare portrait of Elizabeth I facing a Tudor galleon. Mr Hird, a former mayor of Bradford, bought it in the 1950s for £200 and it sold for more than £200,000.
Gregory Edmund, auctioneer and senior coin specialist at Londonbased Spink & Son, said: “We had a call from a descendant of Horace Hird earlier this year to look at the coins.
“To be able to present a forgotten parcel from his
astonishing cabinet represented a rare opportunity for people to acquire extraordinary pieces.”