The Roland Harris Collection : Signature Sales

Roland spent his working life as a farmer. He had an innovative approach to farming and constantly looked for ways to improve his farm. Roland enjoyed challenges and apart from increasing the land he farmed through renting further acres he had lots of ideas for projects that combined well with farming. These included a seed cleaning plant and Animal feed mill, which produced feed without artificial additives. He was one of the first people in the country to have Charolais sheep and went on to become President of the UK Charolais Sheep Society as well as having success with the sheep at shows. Roland went to America to look at and import larger tractors to give greater productivity and from this helped set up Farols, an Agricultural Engineering business that now has four outlets. Roland also invented a new seed drill for planting crops which he developed and saw into production with Bamfords.

Twenty years ago Roland bought a derelict Manor House with a three acre garden. He thoroughly enjoyed the challenged of renovating and modernising the house and creating a wonderful garden. He was idle and always had another project in mind! Roland’s other hobbies which he approached with his usual enthusiasm and energy were fly fishing and bridge.

Roland starting coin collecting relatively late in life after a brief sojourn into stamps, and has formed this impressive collection in about 10 years. However his lateness as more than compensated by the vigour with which he pursued his new hobby. His initial interest was for the entire English Milled series excluding gold but in recent years he narrowed this down to cover 1838 to recent times, Crowns down to Fractional Farthings. He became particularly attracted to bronze and their varieties and became sufficiently learned from time to time, correct our Freeman or Peck attributions. The twentieth century section contains duplication sometimes several times of entire series and offers a rare opportunity to obtain runs and entire groups of twentieth century material in high grades. The Victorian section as the listings soon reveal contains one of the finest selections of Victorian Bronze and Copper offered in recent times, and surely one of the finest groups ever assembled.