Sir Charles William Fremantle (12 August 1834 – 8 October 1914) was a British governmental official who served 26 years as deputy master of the Royal Mint. As the chancellor of the exchequer was ex officio master of the Royal Mint beginning in 1870, Fremantle was its executive head for almost a quarter century.
Educated at Eton College, Fremantle entered the Treasury in 1853 as a clerk. He served as private secretary to several officials, lastly Benjamin Disraeli, both while Disraeli was chancellor of the exchequer, and then in 1868 while he was prime minister. Disraeli's appointment of Fremantle as deputy master of the Royal Mint excited some controversy but was supported by his political rival William Gladstone.
Fremantle began as deputy master to Thomas Graham, the master of the Mint. Graham died in September 1869, and the Treasury decided the mastership should go to the chancellor of the day, with the deputy master the administrative head of the Royal Mint. Fremantle began work to modernise the antiquated Royal Mint. Much of the work had to wait until the Royal Mint was reconstructed at its premises at Tower Hill in 1882. Fremantle sought to beautify the coinage and, believing the Mint's engraver, Leonard Charles Wyon, not up to the task, sought to do so by resurrecting classic coin designs, like Benedetto Pistrucci's depiction of St George and the dragon for the sovereign.
In 1894, at the age of sixty, Fremantle retired from the Royal Mint and thereafter spent time as a corporate director and as a magistrate. He died in 1914, just under two months after his eightieth birthday.
Early life and career Charles William Fremantle was born on 12 August 1834, the third son of Sir Thomas Fremantle, Bt (later Baron Cottesloe) and his wife, the former Louisa Nugent. He was educated at Eton and then entered the Treasury as a clerk in April 1853. While there, he acted as a private secretary to several officials, successively Sir William Hayter, Sir William Hylton Jolliffe and The Honourable Sir Henry Brand, later speaker of the House of Commons.
When Benjamin Disraeli was appointed chancellor of the exchequer in 1866, Fremantle served as his private secretary. Fremantle was recommended to Disraeli by Brand, who had served as parliamentary secretary to the Treasury. In 1867, Fremantle was made secretary to the boundary commission under the Representation of the People Act. When Disraeli became prime minister in early 1868, Fremantle was one of his private secretaries, along with Montague Corry, keeping that position until appointed deputy master of the Royal Mint in December of that year.
Deputy master Appointment
In 1868, the deputy mastership of the Royal Mint fell vacant with the death of William Barton, and the appointment was in the gift of the prime minister, Disraeli, who appointed Fremantle. Disraeli felt that the Mint had been run by its master, the chemist Thomas Graham, with little energy or administrative skill, and would benefit from an infusion of new blood. The long-time senior clerk, Robert Mushet, desired the position, with the support of Graham and the former master, Sir John Herschel, and the appointment was questioned in parliament. Disraeli defended the appointment, denying that Fremantle was his political follower, and stating that Fremantle was chosen for his youth and experience at the Treasury. Disraeli's political rival, William Gladstone, himself a former master of the Mint, agreed with his rival Disraeli that the Royal Mint needed someone from outside who had worked in one of the great departments of state. According to the numismatic historians, G. P. Dyer and P. P. Gaspar, in The New History of the Royal Mint, "with the great men thus in agreement, the House was content to let the matter rest."
Disraeli also stated that Graham supported the appointment, though Dyer and Gaspar found it significant he was not advised in advance. According to Sir John Craig in his history of the Royal Mint, "Graham's general administration caused some unease" and Fremantle was appointed "to pull the place together".
1870 reforms Following a royal commission in 1848, the Royal Mint was reorganised in 1851, with the Company of Moneyers, the guild with whom the government had long indentured for production of coinage, given three months' notice, as provided for in the indenture. By the time of Fremantle's appointment, Graham (who was appointed in 1855) had gone from attempts at reform to being the target of accusations of corruption and nepotism.
Graham died on 16 September 1869. With a vacancy in the mastership, reform could be considered more readily, and Fremantle worked with Charles Rivers Wilson, a former colleague at the Treasury, on a report, submitted on 6 November. They recommended that the Royal Mint consolidate to a smaller site, either at its current premises at Tower Hill or somewhere closer to the City of London. Herschel and Graham were noteworthy scientists, but the Fremantle-Wilson report deemed this unnecessary to run the Mint. What was needed was "active and intelligent control and the application of well-trained experience in matters of business".
In a supplemental report on 17 November, Fremantle and Wilson recommended reductions of staff and salaries, proposing that Fremantle's post of deputy master be eliminated as unnecessary. Fremantle may have expected to be given Graham's title. The Treasury accepted most recommendations with a minute dated 7 January 1870, but instead of the position of deputy master being abolished, the mastership was to be held by the chancellor of the exchequer ex officio and without salary, with the Mint to be run by the deputy master. This was formalised in the Coinage Act 1870, which consolidated the laws relating to the Royal Mint to a single document, another of the recommendations. Fremantle did not initially receive the master's salary of , but this followed within a few years.
Updating the Royal Mint In 1870, Fremantle undertook a tour of European mints in company with the newly appointed chemist of the Mint, William Chandler Roberts, and an engineer, James M. Napier. The Treasury allocated for expenses on this tour, which took place from May to July of that year. Their published report stated that the Royal Mint had fallen behind European mints in scientific research and in the application of the sciences to the Mint's work. Fremantle later stated that since the Royal Mint's current equipment had been installed in 1816, every Continental mint had updated its equipment, even that in Constantinople, making the Royal Mint the least efficient in Europe.
In the 1870 act, parliament required the deputy master to submit an annual report. These contained detailed information and statistics regarding the Mint's activities. With the first report, published in 1871, Fremantle began a series that Dyer and Gaspar described as "long and extremely helpful", and that would continue for over a century. These were published as parliamentary papers and contained lengthy appendices by Roberts and others.
Royal Mint workers were paid mostly through piece-rates, which were pooled and shared. This could work harshly in slack times. In 1870, Fremantle decreased the piece-rates while increasing weekly wages, reducing the reliance on piece payments. Piece-rates at the Royal Mint were not entirely abolished in favour of weekly wages until 1923, long after Fremantle's departure. Also in 1870, Fremantle recruited a section of mechanics to deal with machinery repair and fabricate items needed in the works; until then, all but the most minor mechanical repairs were contracted out. From 1880, the Royal Mint built automatic weighing machines to weigh newly-struck coins, with improvements by the Mint mechanics.
To Fremantle's frustration, rebuilding the Royal Mint with up-to-date equipment proved a difficult process to even begin, with the question of whether to rebuild on the existing site at Tower Hill or find new premises elsewhere in London tied up in Treasury and parliamentary red tape. These delays led to a shutdown of nearly five months in 1876 when antiquated equipment broke. So long as removal of the Royal Mint was a possibility, according to Craig, Fremantle "grumbled in vain through twelve years' search for a new site".
Negotiations for the government to acquire land at Whitefriars from the corporation of London began in 1878 but three years of discussions produced no result, and a committee of the House of Commons decided upon a reconstruction at Tower Hill. Fremantle was opposed because this would require a complete shutdown of coinage, but agreed once it appeared that the Bank of England had an abnormally large stock of gold coins, bronze coinage could be contracted from Ralph Heaton & Sons of Birmingham, and a stock of silver coins could be built up before the commencement of work on 1 February 1882. The work ran for ten months, during which time, among other accomplishments, the old beam engines were replaced by modern gear, the Mint's first electrical generation station was installed, and most of the old coinage presses were sold (and replaced with new ones), except for some retained for striking medals. There was no change in the land area occupied by the Royal Mint; the next time a move was considered, in 1922, it was because the Mint was short of space. When the work was done, Fremantle stated that the facilities compared favourably to those of any other mint.
Coinage redesign and other activities
Fremantle, described by Dyer and Gaspar as a "gentleman of cultivated taste", sought to improve the appearance of Britain's coinage, generally through the re-issuance of classic designs. In 1871, he restored Benedetto Pistrucci's design depicting Saint George and the dragon to the sovereign for the first time in almost half a century. Stated Fremantle, "it is hardly possible to over-rate the advantages accruing to a coinage from an artistic and well-executed design". Nevertheless, he considered the Royal Mint's engraver through most of his time there, Leonard Charles Wyon, competent but not outstanding in a field that might not produce a genius in every generation, and wrote in 1880 "I am sorry to say there is, in my opinion no really good English Engraver now living. Our Mint 'Modeller & Engraver', Mr Leonard C. Wyon ... is certainly the best." According to Dyer and Gaspar, Fremantle meant, "the best in a poor field".
Another engraver that Fremantle was able to recommend, in 1876, was George T. Morgan of Birmingham. This was in response to a request by the director of the United States Mint, Henry R. Linderman, who was seeking a good British engraver. Linderman hired Morgan, who emigrated to the United States, as a special assistant. Morgan went on to design the Morgan silver dollar, struck beginning in 1878.
Fremantle's next opportunity for coinage redesign at the Royal Mint came with the Jubilee coinage of 1887, which saw new designs for several denominations. This coinage was delayed by slow progress on the portrait of Queen Victoria which was to appear on them, by Joseph Boehm; on 15 January 1886, Fremantle wrote to a Treasury official to secure payment of to Boehm, which Fremantle described as a moderate fee for the work of seven years. When the new coins were issued, Fremantle wrote an article for the June number of Murray's Magazine, entitled, "Our New Coins and Their Pedigree", in which he criticised the coins of the earlier part of the Victorian era, calling them "commonplace". Fremantle, though, had praise for Pistrucci's "beautiful design of St George", which was expanded to the crown, double sovereign, and five pound piece.