Summary

Pattern 1 Pice, Prepared for Bengal, India, 1809
Minted by Soho Mint, Birmingham, England

Obverse Description

Arms of the Company with crest and supporters (no motton on ribbon); below, 1809

Reverse Description

The legend "one Pie Sikka' in Bengali, Persian and Hindi

Edge Description

Plain

Significance

The Soho Mint of Matthew Boulton and James Watt planned to supply significant numbers of copper coin to the East India Company at the beginning of the nineteenth century. However in 1809 a large shipment for the Madras Presidency was lost when the Admiral Gardner, which was transporting the most needed denomination, the 10-cash coins, sank. Then it was discovered that Soho had struck almost 2.4 million twenty-cash coins that had not been ordered but still expected the East India Company to take and pay for them. This pattern coin prepared by Soho for the Bengal Presidency was a victim of which developed out of the Madras problems. Doty wrote "To close this unhappy period, a projected coinage for Bengal (which might have been even larger than that just completed for Madras) dissolved into thin air, a victim of rising copper prices, ill-feeling, the illness of one designer (John Phillip) and consequent overwork of the other (Conrad Heinrich Kuchler), and the pedantry of Dr. Wilkins, the perfectionist to whom the creation of the three native languages spelling out the denomination had been entrusted. The mistake over the twenty-cash coinage was the final blow, from which the Bengal coinage never recovered." Dotty, Richard The Soho Mint, London, 1998, p.332.

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