THE ROYAL MINT:

Its Working, Conduct, and Operations, Fully and Practically Explained;

WITH SUGGESTIONS FOR ITS BETTER SCIENTIFIC AND OFFICIAL MANAGEMENT. RE-WRITTEN, ENLARGED, AND REVISED TO THE PRESENT TIME. TO WHICH IS ADDED, AS AN APPENDIX,

A LETTER ADDRESSED TO THE RIGHT HON. LORD KINNAIRD, K.T.

By GEORGE FREDERICK ANSELL,

ANALYTICAL CHEMIST. LATE OF THE ROYAL MINT, FORMERLY OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF CHEMISTRY.

ILLUSTRATED WITH ENGRAVINGS.

“To have a thing is little if you’re not allowed to show it; And to know a thing is nothing unless others know you know it.”

Lord Neaves.

THIRD EDITION.

LONDON: EFFINGHAM WILSON, ROYAL EXCHANGE. 1871.

Entered at Stationers’ Hall.] [All rights reserved.

Ipswich, March 1st, 1871.

Dear Mr. Ansell,

I have no objection to your appending to the third edition of your book your letter to me in regard to your case, and my correspondence with Mr. Gladstone and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but if you add in addition to this correspondence the report of the debate on my motion for a committee to inquire into the management of the Mint, I should wish to make some few remarks on the subject in question; but before doing so I must take the opportunity of thanking you for letting me see Mr. Fremantle’s letter in answer to your offer, made at my suggestion, to meet Mr. Fremantle with a view to rendering him some assistance (which from your great experience you are well able to do) in the management of the Mint, which I have reason to know both he and Mr. Lowe find somewhat difficult.

The answer is evidently dictated by Mr. Lowe. After his letter⁠[1] to me of the 29th April, 1869, I might have known that he was not likely to do anything which might appear as if he owned himself in the wrong. This letter, indeed, showed how annoyed Mr. Lowe was at my having seen that most malicious report to the Treasury by Dr. Graham, which has been the cause of your having been so unjustly dealt with, to the ruin, in a great measure, of your prospects in life. Dr. Lyon Playfair at the time threatened that if I moved to inquire into the management of the Mint, he would move that that report be laid on the table of the House. This would not have deterred me, as the report itself would have been the best refutation of the insinuation it contained that you were dismissed because you were guilty of the Mint practice of purloining gold (whereas the note⁠[2] relieving you from further attendance stated that the short work at the Mint was the cause). Dr. Graham did not, he said, believe the insinuation, and to show that he did not believe it, although he had sent in the report to the Treasury, he authorised me to offer you the situation (at an increased salary) filled by Mr. Goodwin, who was to be retired, which of course you refused as being far inferior to the one you held; and in further proof he wrote you that handsome testimonial⁠[3] which I read to the House of Lords.

The report, however, had served its purpose in preventing you from being appointed to an office in the Mint.

I am sure Dr. Graham regretted that he had been induced by his brother, whose animus against you was known throughout the Mint, to send in such a report to the Treasury. Dr. Lyon Playfair’s threat, as I have said, would not have deterred me from moving for a committee to inquire into the malpractices of the Mint, but I confess that I had great scruples in regard to Dr. Graham himself. I shall never forget the expression of his face, and the fearful agitation the mention of my intention always caused.

I confess I did hesitate to place a man of Dr. Graham’s great scientific attainments in such a position as an inquiry would have done, seeing also that his brother was just dead, and that I knew individually Dr. Graham was in no way implicated in the malpractices which formerly prevailed in the Mint; for, as you know, Dr. Graham had soon after his appointment set to work to clear out that “Augean stable,” which, with your assistance, he had almost accomplished till in an evil moment he appointed his brother, to whose intemperate habits I referred in the House of Lords,⁠[4] to a responsible office in the Mint.

Dr. Graham’s death following so soon after that of his brother, I was greatly rejoiced at having delayed bringing the subject of the Mint before Parliament, because I should have felt that I had been to some extent instrumental in hastening that event by drawing attention to the state of that Department.

On the occasion of the reading to me, by Dr. Lyon Playfair, of that wicked report to the Treasury (to which I have previously alluded), in the presence of Dr. Graham and of Mr. C. W. Fremantle, I urged, as Dr. Graham exculpated you from all blame insinuated by the report, that in common justice you should be reinstated in some office in the Mint, you having, with my advice, refused the position offered by Dr. Graham through me, when Mr. Fremantle remarked as a reason against your being appointed that “you were so unpopular with the officials;” such unpopularity being in my opinion the natural result of the work you had done at the request of Dr. Graham, and in the service of the Mint. I say the work you had done, and use the expression on the authority of Dr. Graham, copies of whose letters to the Treasury are now in my possession, and in which he distinctly states that to you mostly were due the reforms. There is no doubt, therefore, but that you were exceedingly unpopular just in the sense that a detective would be amongst the “light-fingered gentry,” and had I obtained the committee for which I moved I could have shown the true grounds of your unpopularity. I have collected some further valuable information showing the necessity for a rigid and full inquiry into the affairs of the Mint, which will show that the officials of a public department are not justified in putting into the hands of a young and rising member of the House of Lords statements which are not only erroneous, but absolutely false, so that Lord Lansdowne was obliged to declare that “he had on a previous occasion overstated the amount in regard to the profit on silver;”⁠[5] but again was he grossly misled by the Mint officials when he stated “that there was a gain of £5,000 per annum on the silver coinage”⁠[6] (a considerable reduction on the former statement) while the return showed a positive and very great loss. It would appear that the Mint officials mystify him, and that he, not I, confuse two things.

I alluded in the House to a job by Mr. Lowe in appointing Mr. Roberts, and Lord Lansdowne in reply stated that Mr. Roberts was a very eminent chemist who had proved his capability by “devising a system for depriving brittle gold of the obnoxious properties on which I recently commented.” Have you heard that the plan has been tried and found to be a complete failure!!! I am also informed that Mr. Roberts did not devise the process in question, but that it was invented by a really eminent chemist, who did not make the inquiry with a view to its application under the circumstances which arise in the Mint, where operations are conducted on so large a scale. The process is described in the British Association Reports for 1848, and more fully in the Philosophical Magazine for 1850.

I have just received the Report of the Deputy-Master of the Mint, on European Mints, which I have only had time to glance over. The report is evidently framed with a view of meeting the allegations I made on the appointment of the commission. It would appear, moreover, that Mr. Fremantle and his colleagues have made a very careful study of your book!!! which might have been done without the pleasant trip. For the general public the reports are interesting as showing how foreign mints are worked, but as far as the management of the English Mint is concerned, and how a department which is a serious expense to the country, and from which no one but the Bank of England and the employés derive any profit, can be made, as it ought to be, a source of revenue, the report does not show. I see it is proposed to build new offices, “so constructed as to diminish facilities for peculation!!” I think the real question is, would it not be better TO COIN BY CONTRACT—this might be tried, at all events for a time, before the new offices are commenced.

I almost fear this Mint question will not be taken up in the House of Commons, as members are afraid to “tackle” Mr. Lowe, and in these fearfully excited times the subject is too dry for members to interest themselves in; but I cannot understand how a Government bent on economy and reforming abuses in the several Departments can allow such wasteful extravagance and useless losses to go on, unless indeed Mr. Lowe is dreaded as much at the Council Board as in the House of Commons.

Believe me, Dear Mr. Ansell, Yours faithfully, (Signed)KINNAIRD.

To G. F. Ansell, Esq., 27, Bernard Street, Russell Square, London, W.C.