Some Sort Of Great Britain Penny? Help Please! | Love Token

If it's a love token I assume it was rather done for somebody with the initials "WCP". Or at least by a WSP's admirer.

It's my understanding that it usually worked the other way around.

Hypothetical scenario: WCP is a guy who meets and falls in love with a girl, but he's joined the Navy and is about to set sail for who knows how long. So he has the token made with his initials on it and gives it to her, to remind her of him. Perhaps a matched pair was made, and WCP kept one with her initials on it. In the age before photography, a love token was a cheap yet enduring way to be remembered.

A particular category of love token that's very popular with collectors here in Australia are convict love tokens, given by prisoners sentenced to transportation to Australia to their loved ones before they left. These usually are quite well made, and give details of the prisoner's sentencing or carry poignant pleas to not be forgotten while they languished in chains on the far side of the world. Apparently there were people that specialized in producing these items on behalf of sailors and convicts. Tokens that can be linked to specific convicts are most highly sought after.

As for the value of this piece, if you don't know who the original WCP was (and unless it was a family heirloom, you're not likely to know) then it has sadly become detached from it's context, it's story, a fate all too commonly seen with these pieces. It's not in particularly good condition, either; it would probably fetch a few dollars as a curiosity, perhaps more if a modern-day WCP saw it.

OK, Sap, thanks, interesting info.
Actually it doesn't surprise me. When I served in the army I encountered this phenomenon when big burly guys bursting with machismo and always ready to haze younger and "weaker" ones spend hours at night working on their "memory albums" adorning pages of their photographs with cheesy flowery designs and writing sappy rhymes about love.