Dear Editor,
With the price of gold touching five thousand US dollars per ounce today, Guyana’s gold coins are now more valuable than ever. Each 1994 Guyana five hundred dollar gold coin contains 1.4 ounces of actual gold giving it a bullion value of seven thousand US dollars quite apart from its numismatic value. Only one hundred of these coins were made, minted at the Royal Mint in the UK, to mark the royal visit by Queen Elizabeth the Second to Guyana in 1994. One was presented to the Queen and that coin is in the Royal Collection. Three are in the Bank of Guyana and others were sold to the numismatic community. They are very hard to find. I have been diligently searching for them, and in the past three decades I have found just one in the rare coins market. I have tracked three of them to collections in Barbados and Jamaica.
The 1976 and 1977 Guyana gold coins of one hundred dollars in denomination are much smaller and while they are gorgeous, they are made of only fifty percent gold and contain just about one tenth of an ounce of gold, giving them a bullion value of five hundred US dollars each. They were made at the Franklin Mint in the US, primarily for collectors. They are easy to find at coin stores and EBay.
Those of us who were around in the 1950s will remember the British sterling coins, especially the highly prized gold sovereigns. I don’t think the sovereigns were “in circulation” as such but they were sought after as special gifts and prizes. In my community, many were converted into fine jewellery. My mother received a few of them from her father-in-law, my paternal grandfather, on her marriage to my father and then a few more each time she bore a child into the family. By the time she had her fourth child she had squirreled away enough of them to have the local goldsmith incorporate them into a beautiful tillarie or necklace. In the Canje and Lower Corentyne districts of my youth, weddings provided ample showcases for the women of our community to wear their tillaries and gold bangles and earrings. Those tillaries, depending on how many sovereigns were incorporated into their designs could be worth tens of thousands of US dollars.