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Description: | Thomas Coats (1809-1883) was born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, and spent most of his life there working in the thread industry. The Coats family firm was one of the leading manufacturers of thread in Paisley and under his management became the world leader with extensive business in the United States. Coats was also a great philanthropist being responsible for the building of Paisley Observatory in 1882. Medals were struck depicting the Observatory and also his residence, Ferguslie House, both with a bust of Coats on the obverse.
Thomas Coats was also a great coin collector. His cabinet was assembled between 1871 and 1882 partly with the help of Edward Burns, one of the leading Scottish numismatists of the 19th century. Burns' standard work, The Coinage of Scotland,
is based mainly on the Coats collection of Scottish coins. This consisted of about 2,000 coins struck in Scotland between 1136 and 1707. These are now preserved in the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh.
However, the Coats Coin Cabinet had contained some 9,500 specimens and the great majority of these, the 7,500 non-Scottish coins are now part of the Hunterian numismatic collections. They were carefully selected and are mostly in superb condition with little duplication. They are mainly ancient Greek and Roman as well medieval and modern British. This part of the collection was generously offered to the University of Glasgow by the Coats family in 1921 and was deposited in the Hunterian Museum in 1924.
Over half are Greek representing the cities and monarchs of the ancient Greek world from the 6th century BC until the rise of Rome in the 1st century BC. Apart from a small number of issues of the Roman Republic there are over 1,000 Roman Imperial coins from the first emperor Augustus until the 5th century AD along with a few Byzantine specimens. In addition Coats possessed 2,000 coins from the British Isles including Iron Age, Anglo-Saxon, Post-Conquest to 1603, and modern from 1603 to 1874, as well as some Hanoverian, colonial and European coins, trade and communion tokens, historical medals, badges, war medals and decorations.
The original cabinets, made for Coats in Glasgow in the 1870s, still house his collection. | Subjects: | Numismatics | Source: | Hunterian Museum | Address: | University of Glasgow,
University Avenue,
G12 8QQ | Creator: | J.D. Bateson | Contributor: | Thomas Coats | Identifier: | C-0070 |
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