1/2 Penny Warwickshire – Birmingham / Coining and Copper Co.

The Birmingham Coining and Copper Company occupied a peculiar position in the 1790s provincial token trade: it was simultaneously a manufacturer of tokens for other issuers and an issuer in its own right. This self-referential piece — a token-maker advertising its own services on its own token — circulated during the acute small-change shortage that followed the Royal Mint's near-total neglect of copper coinage after 1775. Parliament had authorized no new regal copper for nearly two decades, leaving merchants and manufacturers to flood the country with private issues.

Dalton & Hamer 75 is among the more readily encountered of the firm's own issues, suggesting it saw genuine commercial distribution rather than serving purely as a trade specimen.