1/4 'Penny' Griqua Town

The London Missionary Society had no business minting coins — and legally, it didn't. These pieces were struck as a practical solution to the near-total absence of small change in the Cape Colony's interior, where the Society's settlement at Griqua Town operated beyond the reach of colonial monetary infrastructure. The Dutch East India Company had left a chaotic currency legacy, and British authorities had yet to impose order on the frontier.

Struck in Birmingham almost certainly by Boulton & Watt's Soho Mint, the issue was explicitly missionary scrip — accepted within the settlement but carrying no official sanction from the Crown.