Any One Know What This Is?

These Victorian model pennies and half pennies were minted 1844-1860 and made of copper with white metal centre, 22.5 mm diameter, struck in Birmingham, rarity R9 (7000-12,000 believed in existence) according to Michael Freeman's Bronze Coinage of Britain (1970), pg. 141. Yours is a nice example, looks VF-30. None were made with silver centres, they have either brass or white metal centres with copper rings. The Obv. legend reads "Victoria Reg:", or Victoria Regina (queen). This makes it a "godless queen" coin since it omits "D.G." (Dei Gratia) in the legend, making it an unpopular coin in its day. D.G.R. would have been better accepted.

I paid AU$10 for mine, from a dealer here in Oz back in 2001.

Joseph Moore was a badge-maker in Birmingham, who had the idea to reduce the size of the large and cumbersome British penny while still giving people a penny's worth of metal, by making bimetallic coins with a small silver plug in the centre.

To demonstrate his idea, he had his company knock up a few "model coins". He also made pattern crowns (5 shilling coins) which would have been small and silver with a small gold core. In the end the mint never adopted his proposals, instead making the copper penny smaller, thinner and bronze.

The mintages for the various varieties produced by Mr Moore are estimated to be in the thousands. They were being encountered so frequently by a curious public that the Mint actually had to put out a press release about these coins, reminding people that they were not in fact official issues.

Circulating bimetallic coins would remain a theoretical concept until finally introduced by Italy in 1982. The first British bimetallic coin was the £2 of 1997, over 150 years after Moore first proposed the idea.

Thanks I appreciate the help.