3 Pence Sammy Marks Tickey, Gold Pattern

Sammy Marks — Lithuanian-born entrepreneur, brandy distiller, and personal friend of Paul Kruger — proposed minting a threepenny piece at his Hatherley Distillery outside Pretoria, making it the only privately facilitated coinage pattern in ZAR history. The arrangement was commercially motivated: Marks wanted small-denomination coins to ease wage payments to his workers. The Pretoria Mint struck a handful of gold examples as presentation or proof-of-concept pieces.

The bronze circulation version was eventually approved in limited quantities, but the gold pattern never progressed beyond a tiny handful of known survivors. The Anglo-Boer War intervened within a year.