Under the distinguished patronage of Alderman Geordin Hill-Lewis, Mayor of the City of Cape Town
The Cartwheel Penny at the Cape
Pierre H. Nortje (July 2026)
World Coin News magazine reported in May 2009 that by the late 1780s, two-thirds of the coins in circulation in Britain were counterfeit. It seems that the Royal Mint was helpless and shut down production. In actual fact, it last struck copper coins in the early 1770s, and would only start minting them again 40 years later in the 1820s.
In 1797, a person by the name of Matthew Bolton, a British industrialist, was awarded a contract by the British government to mint copper coins on its behalf. Using a revolutionary steam-powered press, minting began in June 1797, with the first pennies appearing in July 1797 and 2-pences dated 1797 being released in January 1798. All the coins were delivered to the government by August 1799, all dated 1797.
Matthew Bolton (left) and on the right his factory in Soho in Birmingham. (Source: Getty Images).
The penny was a huge coin being 36 mm in diameter and weighing 28.35 grams with the 2 pence weighing double that. The coins had a thick border that was designed to reduce wear and soon earned them the title of ‘Cartwheel Penny’- their sheer size and broad rim likened by the public to that of a cartwheel. Bolton’s factory in Soho also produced halfpenny and farthing pattern pieces, struck in the 'cartwheel' style.
If there was a shortage of hard currency in Great Britain during the period, the situation in the colonies was even worse, with the Cape being no different from the others. When the coins were introduced at the Cape in 1800, the colonists welcomed them with open arms, but there was a problem: since they were struck in the late 1790s, the copper face value of the coins had risen considerably, resulting in the public's unwillingness to spend them. To counter this problem, the colonial government determined the penny to be worth double its face value (2 stivers).
In his book Money in South Africa (1987:22-23), C.L. Engelbrecht tells us that the cartwheel penny had various nicknames at the Cape. The Hollanders called them "Duiweltjies" or "Duiwelspennies" (Devil's pennies) because Britannica held a trident on the reverse of the coin. It reminded the locals of the devil, who was frequently depicted holding a three-pronged fork in his hand.
A word very similar to “Duiweltjie” that was also used for the penny was “Dubbeltjie” (or “Doppeltjie”), in reference to its doubled value. This was actually an “old” name for another coin at the Cape, as the Dutch silver 2-stuiver coin was also called by that name.
Source: Stephen Album Rare Coins
Another name the coin was known as was “Oulap” which was a combination of the Afrikaans words “ou” (old) and “lap” (cloth/rag) indicating its low value. According to Argaïese Afrikaanse Uitdrukkings, the word “Twalap” was used in the Boland and surrounding areas as an abbreviation of two Oulap coins (or possibly the double cartwheel penny?).
Engelbrecht tells us that around the beginning of the nineteenth century, an interesting ritual began to appear at the Cape which soon became custom “i.e. placing pennies on the eyes of the recently deceased to keep the eyelids down”. (Historians actually believe the practice has a much older origin that can be traced back to ancient times).
In May 2003, developers preparing to build a residential block on Prestwich Street in Green Point, Cape Town, accidentally uncovered a massive, unmarked colonial-era burial ground. The Archaeology Contracts Office based at the University of Cape Town (UCT) was brought in to investigate and conduct exhumations under national heritage laws. The site contained the remains of an estimated 2 500 to 3 000 individuals. It represented Cape Town's 17th and 18th-century underclass, including enslaved people, indigenous inhabitants, shipwreck victims, and the local poor.
Six burials had cartwheel pennies associated with them. Two of the adult burials had only one cartwheel penny each and two cartwheel pennies were recovered in each of the other four burials. According to a master’s thesis done by Erin. R. Finnegan in 2006 (Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town) two of the burials still had the pennies in place in the eye sockets.
The first British occupation of the Cape ended in March 1803. The colony was handed back to the Dutch (under the Batavian Republic) following the Treaty of Amiens. When Commissioner-General Jacob Abraham de Mist arrived at the Cape, the only coins that were fairly plentiful locally were the British Cartwheel pennies. De Mist conceived the idea of recalling all the pennies and having them stamped with the initials B.R. (Batavian Republic). Dies were made by a local Englishman, but upon second thoughts, De Mist dropped his idea.
On January 8, 1806, the Cape was reoccupied by Great Britain. The lack of hard currency persisted, and the situation was only partly relieved by the so-called "Great Recoinage" of 1816, which was an attempt by the British government to restabilize its currency after the economic difficulties brought about by the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. However, no copper coins were struck during the Great Recoinage, and the public had to make do with the issues struck by the private Soho Mint.
Twenty years after the second occupation of the Cape, the British government decided to put the currency of all its colonies on a sterling basis, and on 1 January 1826, British coinage was introduced as the official currency of the Cape Colony, consisting of the ¼d, ½d, 1d, 6d, 1/-, 2/6, 5/-, 10/-, and £1.
The first penny to be struck by the British government during the 19th century was the issue of King George IV produced in 1825.
Source: Heritage Auctions
Incidentally, when the "Nuwe Kerk", a church building of the Dutch Reformed Church in Cape Town, was demolished in 1967, a small coin hoard was discovered under the foundation stone of the church, built in 1833. The coins supposedly represented the coins then in circulation at the Cape. Both a 1797 cartwheel penny and a penny of 1826 were included.
It would seem that the cartwheel penny was still seen locally in circulation up to the 1840s. In his paper on the coins of the Voortrekkers (available on the website of the Western Cape Numismatic Society), the author gives two examples of these pennies, the first being a mention by Erasmus Smit in his diary. Smit states that on Tuesday, 31 July 1838, a person by the name of Barend de Lange came with two wagons from Port Natal and brought with him a barrel of vinegar at a rixdollar a bottle and some very small salted grey mullet at an old two-penny coin per piece. (This could only refer to the cartwheel penny).
The second example is actually pictured. In a monograph of the National Cultural History and Open Air Museum entitled Op Trek - Die daaglikse lewe tydens die Groot Trek under the editorship of J. Celestine Pretorius, a picture is shown of a money bag with coins that the Trekkers took with them. It belonged to Margaretha Louisa Joubert, a sister of the Voortrekker leader, Piet Retief. The cartwheel penny is clearly visible.
Cartwheel pennies are fairly frequently found in the Cape by metal detectorists. At the turn of the century, the author was detecting with friends at Macassar Beach near the Strand, where he found a much-worn piece - see the picture below. Cartwheels were also found at various other sites in the Cape, like Fish Hoek and Blouberg Strand. However, the author has never heard, with one exception, of anyone finding the huge 2-pence pieces locally. They were probably not seen much in circulation and were unpopular due to their size and weight for convenient daily use.
In an article entitled "A Foundation Member Looks Back," originally published in the South African Numismatic Journal (Number 8) in March 1974, Victor des Vages mentions both the penny and 2-pence cartwheels. He states that while digging a trench outside the Tramway Office, workmen came across a cartwheel penny in good condition. He notes that these coins, as well as the larger two-penny pieces, used to be found in Government Avenue and elsewhere in Cape Town. Some were also discovered on the Sonneblom hillside when workers were digging trenches or foundations for houses.
(The Sonneblom hillside that Des Vages was referring to was probably the area known today as Zonnebloem. It was a farming estate until the early 19th century, when it became a suburb of Cape Town as the population and city boundaries grew).
As a last thought: In the early 1800s, when the Cape colonial government imported cartwheel pennies to pay the troops, the salary of an ordinary British foot soldier was about 10 to 12 pence a day. With a penny, a person could then buy small daily items like a short length of chewing tobacco, a few seasonal fresh vegetables, or a single portion of dried fish. With the cartwheel penny circulating at twice its value at the Cape, where the soldiers' salaries halved, or were they able to have twice as much money to spend as their counterparts in England? If the latter, the Cape must have been a preferred destination for soldiers and lowly paid government officials of the period.
A panoramic view of Cape Town by Captain Walter Stanhope Sherwill in the mid-19th century. By this time, the cartwheel penny as a circulating coin at the Cape was probably in its last vestiges.