The Sammy Marks Tickey.

The legend: President Kruger granted Marks personal permission to use the Pretoria Mint for one day, in recognition of his services to the Republic. Marks instructed the officials to strike the most modest silver coin of the realm — the 3-pence "tickey" — but in gold instead of silver.

The legend has been complicated by the archives. As early as 1934, J. T. Becklake — the last Deputy Mint Master of the Royal Mint in Pretoria — wrote that an official record states the gold three-pences were minted on the verbal authority of State Secretary Francis William Reitz, not Kruger himself. Such authority was withdrawn shortly after — but the pieces had already been struck.

Article nine of the Mint Act permitted private gold coining. The exact source of the gold blanks remains unknown.

The legend: The coin is dated 1898, and so was struck in 1898.

The Pretoria Mint was closed from 1 January 1898 to 30 September 1899 due to unprofitability. It reopened on 1 October 1899 — less than two weeks before the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War. The 1898 date on the dies and the actual striking date cannot be reconciled with the records.

The answer is in the 12th report of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines for 1900 and 1901, which contains a wartime gold reconciliation. The report records 0.562 kg of gold used to strike 3-pence pieces during the war years — exactly the weight required to produce 215 gold tickeys. The coins were struck not in 1898, but during the Anglo-Boer War, between October 1899 and June 1900.

The legend: The coins were intended to be set into a coin-girdle for Marks's wife Bertha, but the idea was abandoned when they realised how heavy and impractical it would be.

This much, at least, is partly supported. Bertha Marks's 1934 will mentions a bracelet set with five of these coins — so some did become jewellery. But not 215.

Two further theories survive in the record. One holds that they were dinner-party gifts at the Carlton Hotel in Johannesburg — but the Carlton only opened in 1906, so this can only have applied to later distributions. The other, supported by family recollections, is that after Marks's death in 1920, his wife distributed the surviving coins as gifts to relatives, friends, and employees. James Potts, the carpenter at the Marks family farm Zwartkoppies, received tickeys for every member of his family.

The legend: "Only seven examples are known to exist." — South African press, repeated as recently as 2008.

This is wrong. The mintage of 215 is documented. NGC alone has graded 46 specimens. PCGS has straight-graded 7 in addition. Many others survive in private hands without ever being submitted to a third-party grader.

The Western Cape Numismatic Society's research, particularly the work of Pierre H. Nortje, has systematically dismantled the seven-example myth using archival records. The Sammy Marks Tickey is rare. It is not that rare. The myth survived because it served the romance of the coin, and because nobody had bothered to count.