Angela explained, "I don’t normally get involved with the counting. In the olden days volunteers would have counted the coins, which is a time consuming job, especially around Christmas when the volume of donations in cash is high. These days we have a machine that does the counting for us. It is not unusual to get foreign coins with the donations: people go on holiday, forget that they have foreign currency in their wallet and put it in a charity donation box.

"All foreign and old coins at SRSB are kept in a drawer and this had not been sorted for quite some time, so I decided to work on it recently. Most of the coins tend to be Euros, but we do get the odd French Franc or Spanish Peseta. We find the occasional old 50p coin as well as the odd shilling or half penny and it was amongst these old coins that one caught my eye, so I did a little research and took it for a first valuation: a pretty 1902 Edward VII 22 carat gold half sovereign worth around £200!

"This has made me realised how vital our collections are and how important the work of our fundraising volunteers is. We are not sure when the half sovereign was donated or where it came from, what is sure is that people are generous, some with their money some with their time and SRSB could not operate without people’s generosity."

If you are interested in volunteering a couple of hours for one of the store collections maybe your bucket will bring us the next treasure, or if you want a home collection box for those pesky coppers or 5p coins please get in touch with us.