It was with great sadness that I read a card I received yesterday from George Clegg's girlfriend and long-time partner in
England, that George
had died suddenly at the end of February.
George was known on
ebay under the name of biggyg2 and I am sure a lot of you bought some of
his coins - they were never expensive but were usually in very nice condition, mostly
Roman imperials but some Greek and
provincial coins especially from
Thrace and
Moesia. In fact it was the files stored on my computer of George's coins that I
had sent to Dave Surber over the years, which greatly helped me to restore many of the images and files lost when Dave died in 2009 and the website destroyed by the evil creature who
had access to the old server. There are 897 of George's coins on
wildwinds.
I
had known George for about 18 years, he used to send me photos of coins to identify before he put them on
ebay. About 13 years ago he made a batch of 10 pure silver copies of the famous Athenian
dekadrachm which he thought was the most beautiful of
ancient coins, and sold 8 of them, clearly and expressedly described as copies. I
had sent him a small
bar of silver to make mine, and he kept one for himself.
Some of
his emails were so funny. If he wasn't sure about an ancient coin, he would give me a silly description of what he thought it could be, for example "the
head of a
man with a
chicken on
his head" (it was a
denarius with the figure wearing a floppy
Phrygian cap, if I remember correctly).
Having made the copies of the
dekadrachm, George converted
his garden shed into a forge, and sent me one of
his first efforts - a heavy iron knife as a letter-opener. For a change, the Swiss customs didn't charge me anything for "importing" it, probably because they weren't sure what exactly it was.
I will miss George and my sympathies go to
his girlfriend and
his twin brother "Bruv" Pete Clegg.
