The coin collector’s legacy
Discover the extraordinary story of Carl Subak, whose passion for numismatics and spirit of generosity is helping to ensure a vibrant future for the study and safeguarding of coins in Oxford.
Last year the Ashmolean Museum’s Heberden Coin Room received a legacy gift of $5 million from Carl Subak, an American coin dealer whose collaboration with the coin room spanned many decades. Carl died at the age of 103 in Chicago, his adopted home after fleeing Nazi persecution in Austria as a teenager.
Professor Frédérique Duyrat and Professor Chris Howgego from the museum tell us about the man whose love of coins continued into his tenth decade and share the lasting impact his donation will make on the world of numismatics.
Childhood finds on the banks of the Danube
If you haven’t already fallen for the magic of coins, then you might be wondering what it is that people find so captivating about them. ‘You can tell any kind of story with coins,’ says Professor Frédérique Duyrat, Director of Collections and Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room, one of the world’s leading coin cabinets. ‘Stories about history, religion, archaeology, landscapes… it’s fantastically exciting.’
It’s an excitement that was shared by avid coin collector and dealer Carl. He was just five years old when he came into possession of his first coin, discovered on the land his family managed just northeast of Vienna, Austria.
The location has a rich history: between the 1st and 4th century AD it was home to Carnuntum, a significant metropolis on the border of the Roman Empire. Coins and other artefacts from the city’s heyday were revealed to its 20th-century inhabitants during the spring ploughing, and when Carl was good, his reward was to choose from the treasures that had been uncovered.
Flight from danger
Carl was a precocious coin collector and by his teens was already attending some of the great pre-war auctions in Vienna. His passion did occasionally outstrip his means, however: he became so excited during one visit to a London dealer that he chose many more coins than he could afford to buy. Happily, he was allowed to take them all away and pay later — a kindness he never forgot.
In 1938, when Carl was 19, Nazi Germany annexed Austria. He fled the country and, after waiting many months in Latvia, had the good fortune to receive a visa to the United States. His US backers were a family from Boston who he had met by chance while at a holiday camp in England.
Carl worked in Boston as a plumber’s assistant, chauffeur and bookstore clerk, before being recruited into a special programme at Camp Ritchie that trained native German speakers to return to Europe and take part in various missions. As one of the ‘Ritchie Boys’, Carl worked as an interpreter for a US army colonel and was stationed for many months in the American zone in Berlin. While overseas, he finished his undergraduate degree at Harvard University in Geography.
At the close of the war, Carl joined his sister who had moved to Seattle from Boston after escaping from Vienna via Italy. He began an import-export business with his brother-in-law, which eventually became a stamp wholesale enterprise and coin dealership. In 1949 he relocated to Chicago, where he and his wife Eileen built one of the region’s most successful coin and stamp shops.
The beginning of something special
Carl travelled the world for his work and it was a chance meeting at a train station in England in the 1960s that sparked a decades-long relationship with the Ashmolean Museum.
The man Carl had bumped into was Michael Metcalf, then Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room. Professor Chris Howgego, who later held the same role, also came to know Carl well, describing him as incredibly intelligent and savvy, yet modest. ‘He didn’t have a big ego; he wouldn’t impose his own ideas but was instead interested in how things would actually work,’ Chris says.
Carl was a generous supporter of the coin room during his lifetime, helping with the acquisition of several major hoards, including the Watlington Hoard and the Chalgrove Hoard — the latter of which turned out to be extraordinary for its inclusion of a coin revealing the ‘lost emperor’ Domitianus.
He also funded the publication of a number of books and, after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a studentship for numismatists from countries belonging to the former Eastern bloc. ‘These were people on the whole who either hadn’t the money or perhaps even the permission to travel before,’ says Chris, now Research Keeper at the Heberden Coin Room. ‘Carl saw it as a moment of freedom and an opportunity to get people out and to come and meet us. It was an inspirational piece of help and I believe he was thinking about his own experience of fleeing Austria before the war.’
Despite growing older, Carl continued to travel and kept incredibly fit, hiking in the mountains well into his 80s. He used to leave pairs of walking boots at friends’ houses so that he could strike out whenever the mood took hold. Carl was also a great storyteller and towards the end of his life began to reminisce, says Chris. ‘He had a perspective that very few people did.’
The gift of flexibility
Carl passed away in 2022, leaving $5 million to the Heberden Coin Room in his will. The gift, which has been divided between research and acquisitions, promises to be transformational. ‘For me it’s priceless,’ says current Keeper Frédérique. ‘It puts us in a much safer place and gives us the sort of agility that we have almost completely lost with the grant system that we have now.
‘His generosity was such that it will allow us to decide freely which research we would like to support, and it will give us the flexibility and opportunity to develop research along several axes,’ she explains. As well as supporting existing projects, such as Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire, Frédérique plans to use the gift to fund work in emerging fields and ‘encourage new thinking and new paths.’
As for the acquisitions portion of Carl’s donation, the hope is that it will allow the museum to acquire important coins that have been unable to find homes in other public collections. ‘We have a fantastic opportunity to make sure that these items don’t go back to commerce, but stay in the museum with us,’ Frédérique says.
A future-facing centenarian
The Heberden Coin Room celebrated its centenary in 2022. Despite its grand age, it is an institution firmly looking to the future.
Current projects include employing Chat GPT to develop abbreviated legends on provincial coins (‘a nightmare if you’re not a specialist,’ says Chris), and using subatomic particles to investigate the elemental composition of the gold coins of Rome and its African and Asian neighbours. The Ashmolean will also open a major exhibition later this year called Money Talks: Art, Society and Power, which will explore the place of money in our world through different artistic lenses.
Donors like Carl are playing a crucial role in helping the coin room to thrive in the 21st century. Reflecting on his motivation for giving, Chris describes Carl as a collector who could see beyond coins. ‘He knew perfectly well that there were bigger things in the world that he could give money to. He felt he was wealthy but not wealthy enough that he could shift the dial on global poverty, but that by giving money to something he cared about, he could make a difference.’
That difference will be keenly felt in Oxford, and in the wider world of numismatics, for many years to come.
Leaving a legacy to Oxford
Legacies provide an important source of funding for the University, enabling it to safeguard, research and showcase the collections in its care. If you would like to discuss leaving a gift to Oxford in your will, please contact our legacies team at legacies@devoff.ox.ac.uk or on 01865 611520.
