Ralph Heaton II

On Monday 29 April 1850 the auctioneers moved into the silent workshops of the Soho Mint. For sixty years this had been the most famous coining works in the world, the place where Matthew Boulton’s steam presses struck the 1797 “cartwheel” penny. Now it was closed, and everything was for sale: lathes, dies, cutting-out presses, and the heavy screw presses that had made money for half the world.

Among the buyers was a Birmingham brassfounder and die-sinker from Bath Street called Ralph Heaton. He was in his mid-fifties, and he was about to change trades. Sixteen years later his son, writing the chapter on coinage for Samuel Timmins’s great survey of Birmingham industry, put it simply. When the Soho Mint was dismantled, “most of the working plant passed into the hands of Messrs. Ralph Heaton and Sons”.

Boulton’s presses had found a new home. Birmingham’s minting story was not over. It was about to get bigger.

A family of machine-makers

The Heatons were mechanics before they were coiners. Ralph Heaton I (1755–1832) set up as a brassfounder in Slaney Street in 1794 and made tools and machines for the town’s trades. Birmingham made buttons by the million, and every button needed a shank, the little loop on the back. Heaton built a machine to make them. The Victoria County History calls it “probably one of the earliest examples of a fully self-acting contrivance capable of performing a whole series of consecutive operations without re-setting”. In other words, an automatic machine, in the 1790s.

His son Ralph, the second of the name, was born in 1794, the year the foundry opened. He trained as a die-sinker, cutting the hardened steel dies that stamp patterns into metal. In 1817 his father handed him land and buildings at 71 Bath Street, round the corner from the family works in Shadwell Street, near St Chad’s. By 1828 the directory listed him as “brass founder and die sinker, 71 Bath St”.

For thirty years it was a solid, unremarkable Birmingham business. Then his sons came in. Ralph Heaton III joined in 1847 and the firm became Heaton & Son. His brother George followed in 1853, and it became Ralph Heaton & Sons. Keep the names straight: the father bought the Soho machinery and built the new mint; the sons ran it after him.

Buying Boulton’s machines

The Soho Mint had closed in 1849. Ralph Heaton saw an opening. According to the numismatist James Sweeny, who wrote the firm’s history, he came away from the sale with four steam-powered screw presses and six presses for cutting out blanks, the plain metal discs that become coins. He set them up in his Bath Street and Shadwell Street works.

A screw press works like a giant vice. A heavy screw, spun round by a weighted arm, drives the top die down onto a blank sitting on the bottom die, and the force squeezes the design into both faces at once. Boulton’s great idea had been to drive these presses by steam instead of by gangs of men, and to feed the blanks in automatically. Heaton had bought the machines that proved it could be done.

Coining was a strange trade. The Heatons explained in 1866 that a mint might work flat out for months and then stand idle for months more. That kept most people out. From 1850 until James Watt & Co. opened a new mint at Soho Foundry in 1860, the firm could claim, as Ralph Heaton III later wrote, that “our Mint was the only coinage establishment in England, with the exception of the Royal Mint in London.”

Coins for the world

The orders came quickly. In 1851 the firm struck copper coins for Chile. Coin collectors know them as the first to carry the small letter H, the Heaton mint mark. Soon the Royal Mint, short of capacity, was buying blanks from Birmingham, and in 1853 it gave the firm its first British contract, for about 500 tons of copper.

Then came France. Napoleon III’s new empire was replacing its old copper money with smaller coins of bronze, a harder alloy of copper. The Heatons sent men to Marseilles to run the French mint there. “A coinage of 750 tons struck in Marseilles”, the firm recorded in 1866. When Tuscany broke from its grand duke during the war of 1859, the provisional government’s copper coins came from Birmingham. When Tuscany became part of the new Kingdom of Italy, the Heatons struck 1,600 tons of bronze coin in Milan in 1861–62, with the blanks made in Birmingham and shipped out.

Ralph Heaton III’s 1866 tally of Birmingham coining since 1849 reads like a gazetteer: about 2,000 tons of copper and bronze for Britain, 1,490 tons for India, 700 tons for Tunis, and more than 1,000 tons for Turkey, Hong Kong, Haiti, Sarawak, Tuscany, Venezuela, Canada and Chile. Much of this was the small change of the British Empire, struck to order for colonial governments. Add France and Italy and it came, he reckoned, to about two and a half million pounds in face value.

Bronze for Britain

At home, the old copper pennies were huge, heavy and worn. In 1860 the government decided to replace them with bronze, following the French example. The new bronze penny, Heaton noted, weighed “exactly one-half” of the old copper one.

It was an enormous job. The numismatist Paul Holland calculates that some 285 million bronze coins were struck between 1860 and 1863, and the Royal Mint could not do it alone. It contracted much of the work out to two private mints: James Watt & Co. at Soho Foundry in Smethwick, the heirs of Boulton & Watt, and Ralph Heaton & Sons. Heaton recorded that for Britain’s new bronze coinage “more than 17,000 dies were used”. Both firms had bought machinery from Boulton’s old mint. Soho was helping to make Queen Victoria’s pennies.

Icknield Street

Bath Street was full. In the summer of 1860, as Heaton’s son put it, “we removed and enlarged our Mint”. The firm bought about an acre on Icknield Street, on the western edge of what is now the Jewellery Quarter, beside the Church of England cemetery at Warstone Lane, and put up a purpose-built works.

It still stands. The street front is a long, confident Italianate range in red brick with stone trim, three storeys high. Its ground floor is an arcade of round-headed windows, and in the centre a stone arch is crowned by a two-storey stone bow window. Behind it the works were laid out round a quadrangle, with casting shops, rolling mills, an engine house and a boiler house. The Illustrated Times published an engraving of the new building in May 1862.

Inside, steam drove the presses. By 1866 there were “eleven screw and twelve lever coinage presses”. Men packed the coin, boys fed the presses and girls sorted and wrapped the finished pieces. Heaton wrote that they were aged “from about eleven to eighteen or twenty”, and that because orders came and went they were “set on or cast off as necessity requires”. When J. E. White toured Birmingham factories in 1863 for the Children’s Employment Commission, he contrasted the cramped old workshops of the town centre with the new works on its edge. Heaton’s Mint, he found, was new, light and airy.

Ralph Heaton II did not see much of it. He died in 1862, and Ralph Heaton III took over a firm his father had turned from a brass foundry into an international mint in twelve years.

After Ralph

The sons built on what he started. From 1874 some British pennies carried the H below the date. In the 1860s the firm sent equipment and men to set up a royal mint at Mandalay in Burma, and in 1889 it supplied ninety presses for a new mint at Canton in China. The business became a public company, The Mint, Birmingham, Limited, in 1889, and was later known simply as the Birmingham Mint.

It lasted more than a century and a half. In 1991 the engineering group IMI bought it and moved its own mint at Witton, in north Birmingham, into Icknield Street. But it had long struggled against the Royal Mint for foreign orders, and in 2003 the Birmingham Mint went into administration and closed.