Richard James Plant (1928-2020)


about coins which arose from a life-long quest to make them accessible to collectors who lacked his own classical education. His articles and books, typically illustrated by his own meticulous hand-drawn illustrations, aimed at making clear features difficult to discern on even the best photographs, brought coins to life. Neither as a collector or as a writer was he much interested in a coin’s monetary value; instead he focused on making connections to the history, myths, places, objects and people on them.


T Plant was born in Wandsworth, London, on 6 July


1928, the son of a Scottish-Australian father and Welsh mother. His father, a civil engineer who had returned to London to join up in 1917 after several rejections by the Australian army because of his poor eyesight, went blind when Richard was very young. Richard won a scholarship to Emmanuel School in Clapham and was evacuated to Petersfield during the War. His first coin, acquired at the age of six, was a 1916 zinc issue from the German


occupation of Belgium; he subsequently explored the Caledonian (Tower Bridge) and Portobello Road markets for coins. A keen student of Latin and Greek, he built his collection up by identifying coins for dealers on the Portobello road in London in exchange for a few coins. During National Service in 1946-8 with the Middle East Land Forces he was stationed in an anti-aircraft battery in what is now Libya, and once found a bronze of Valens in the sand by a latrine.


Following demobilization Plant read


classics at Jesus College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1952 (image at right), then trained for the Methodist ministry in Cambridge, where he added Hebrew and Semitic languages to his box of tricks. He subsequently served in a number of towns and cities around the UK.


His writing career began in 1965, with


an article for Seaby’s Coin & Medal Bulletin on the coat of arms of Lorraine. But it was in 1973, with Arabic Coins and How to Read Them, that he really broke through. Encouraged by Peter Seaby, he wrote in spare moments during the working day and even sourced a printer in Manchester to typeset the volume; the writer of this obituary recalls holding a torch for him to draw by in the evenings during the three-day week of 1973. ‘Reading Arabic is fun,” the book starts. “Persevere long enough and a whole new world will open up.” For Plant it did: the book won him the Royal Numismatic Society’s Lhotka Memorial Prize in 1975. This was followed in 1979 by Greek Semitic Asiatic Coins and How to Read Them (reissued in 2013). Father always regarded this as his magnum opus, though he was perhaps unfortunate in his choice of publisher (Scorpion, run by the late Bruce Braun and


he Reverend Richard J. Plant, who died peacefully at his home in Bawtry, South Yorkshire, on 2 August 2020, had a distinctive approach to writing


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