The 1931 florins

Characteristics
Designation | F31M.2A
Mint | Melbourne
Mint mark | None
Mintage | 3,129,682

This is the second most common of the George V florins. Only the 1936 florin was minted in larger numbers.

John Dean lists two varieties of this florin, one with flat-base lettering on the reverse legend, the other with curved-base lettering. Robert Clarke offers a very terse description of a variety:

> "Short figures in date"

I believe these two descriptions refer to the same (variety) coin and that the "short date" was the result of the same sort of die/punch distortion that caused the fishtailed legend. There are three observations to be made from a study of 1931 florins:

- The vast majority of 1931 florins do not have fishtailed lettering,
- All the "short date" coins have fishtailed letters and conversely all the coins with fishtailed letters have short dates,
- The final 1 in the short date has a "normal" shape just like the 1s in a normal 1931 florin.

This leads me to the conjecture that the variety coin was made from a late derivative tool while the main production issue was made with dies remastered from the 1923 tools. That is definitely a subject for further investigation.

High-grade forgeries of the 1931 florin exist.

Reverses of 1931 florin
| F31M.2A.1 Normal date. See below for detail.
| F31M.2A.2 Short date, "curved-base letters". See below for detail.
| An example of a "Manders" forgery. See separate page for more information.

Close-up views of the date and fishtailed lettering
| F31M.2A.1 31 tilted strongly to the left with the 1 close to the 3. Final 1 aligned directly over a gap between rim beads.
| F31M.2A.2 3 upright, final 1 not so tilted and further from the 3. Date numerals are not so tall. Final 1 aligned (almost) directly over a rim bead.
| Heavy fishtailing on the legend of the "short date" florin. The short date is likely to have been produced by the same process that fishtailed the letters, i.e. distortion of a working punch or of the die from which it was derived.

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Most recent revision: 12th October 2002 - Added illustration of counterfeit coin
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