Union key dates — the 1931 rarities

Every great series has its key dates, and the Union of South Africa has one year that towers over all the rest: 1931. To complete a Union date set you must, sooner or later, confront it — and for the threepence, the 1931 is one of the genuinely legendary coins of the entire British Commonwealth, not merely of South Africa.

The minor coinage

The Union’s “minors” are the everyday coins below the crown: the silver threepence (tickey), sixpence, shilling, florin (2/-) and half-crown (2/6), and the bronze penny, halfpenny and farthing. The silver pieces were struck in .800 fine from 1923, reduced to .500 fine from 1951, and ran the length of the Union to 1960. Most dates are common. A handful are not — and the reason they are scarce is almost always economic, not deliberate.

1931 — the Depression year

The early 1930s were the trough of the Great Depression, and South Africa, still on the gold standard, felt it acutely. With trade collapsed and coin in no demand, the Mint in 1931 struck only a token quantity of each silver denomination — in some cases a few hundred pieces, in one case a few dozen. For several denominations the proof-set examples are a meaningful fraction of everything that exists. These were never hoarded as rarities at the time; they simply were never made in numbers. That is what makes 1931 the key.

The 1931 mintages

The figures below are the corrected quantities established by Dr Alec Kaplan and set out in detail by the Western Cape Numismatic Society — 62 proofs of each denomination, plus the small business strikes:

The bronze coins of 1931 — penny, halfpenny and farthing — are scarce in their own right, the farthing especially prized; figures for these vary between catalogues and are best confirmed against a current reference before relying on them.

The tickey, above all

The 1931 threepence is the crown jewel. With roughly 128 pieces in existence across both business and proof strikes, it is the coin that defines a serious Union collection. The tickey already carried a kind of folk fame in South Africa — its very name is woven into the language — and the 1931 issue lifted it to international standing. When one of these appears at auction, it is an event; most collections that “complete” the Union do so with everything except the 1931 tickey, which remains the missing piece for a lifetime.

Why 1931, when other dates look low?

It is the question collectors ask most often: surely there are Union years with smaller catalogue numbers than the 1931 tickey — 1926, 1936, 1939? Almost always, no — and where it seems so, two different things are being confused. The first is the gap between how many were struck and how many survive. The 1931 tickey’s 66 business strikes went into circulation in the Depression unrecognised, and were spent, worn and lost like any other coin; a year with a “low” mintage of a few hundred thousand still left tens of thousands in collectors’ hands. Mintage is the ceiling on survival, not a measure of it.

The second is a mix-up between denominations and proof-only years. The dates most often quoted as “lower than 1931” turn out, on inspection, to be ordinary multi-million threepences — or proof-only strikings of a different coin. Set the real threepence figures beside the 1931 and the gap is not close:

So the 1926 and 1936 tickeys — both well over a million — are common coins; the 1931, at 128, is on the order of ten thousand times scarcer. And where a date such as 1939 is remembered as rare, it is the 1939 shilling — struck in proof only — not the 1939 threepence, which is an everyday multi-million issue. Proof-only pieces were made for collectors and preserved; the 1931 tickey was made for change and lost. That is the whole difference: rarity is about what survives and who wants it, not the largest number printed in a catalogue.

Beyond 1931

1931 dominates, but it is not the only difficulty. The florin has a cluster of scarce early dates — 1925, 1926 and 1927 — that frustrate set-builders almost as much. Several denominations were struck in proof only in particular years (the shilling, for instance, in 1925, 1939 and 1949), so a “business strike” for those dates simply does not exist. And as the wider Union silver shows, a low mintage does not always mean a coin is hard to find in high grade — some scarce dates survive disproportionately in mint state because the few struck were saved. The lesson for the collector is the same throughout: read the date, not just the denomination.

Approaching the key dates

Coins this scarce and this valuable attract forgeries, altered dates and “improved” surfaces. For any 1931, and for the proof-only dates, independent grading and a clear provenance are not luxuries — they are the difference between an heirloom and an expensive mistake. The rarer the date, the more the certificate matters.