I agree that it is much easier to teach numismatics if you have ‘the real thing’ at your disposal – I am no research numismatist but I try my best in conveying at least some basics to the students. During my year in London I was lucky enough to be able to take the students to the coin cabinet in the BM where Andrew Meadows, who was there back in 2000, absolutely dazzled the students with numismatics, and in Oxford, also some years ago now, the numismatics lectures were so overbooked that Chris Howgego and Henry Kim had to read the same lectures twice a week to fit everybdoy in – yes, the lectures came with coin handling sessions, but what the students praised was that the subject was really shown to be relevant to history in so many different ways.

I don’t expect these institutions to cater for all other departments in the country (even those who could travel there), but I wonder whether in these days of ‘impact’ and ‘outreach’ local museums might be prevailed upon to dig in their stores and see whether they have a collection gathering dust somewhere! Given how common such coin collections used to be, I wouldn’t be surprised if bequests would lead to a situation where even more unlikely institutions may have such collections!

Who knows (and I am speculating now, based on a situation I saw as undergraduate in Austria), museums might not actually know exactly what’s there, and what to do with it, so at least the few expert numismatists might find somebody in their area who might exchange some expertise in merely identifying the material for some carefully controlled access?