The 'mystery benefactor' who's left gold coins worth £100,000 in English churches is a biking Hells Angel named James. DAVID JONES follows his trail and reveals where MORE treasure may be waiting to be found…

By DAVID JONES, CHIEF FOREIGN WRITER Published: 01:00, 26 July 2026 | Updated: 01:08, 26 July 2026 Unexpected visitors are something of a rarity at the tiny primary school in Quernmore, a remote village folded into the sweeping moorlands of North Lancashire. The only building near the school is St Peter’s church, with which it shares its staunch Christian values and a drystone boundary wall. In July 2022, however, shortly before its 100 pupils broke up for the summer holiday, teacher Rachel Stevenson heard a motorcycle crunch to a halt in the driveway and found herself confronted by a strange man wearing black leather biker’s gear. Any concern his arrival might have stirred in 55-year-old Ms Stevenson would have been quickly allayed. For the passing rider, who appeared to be of late-middle age, was not some rough-hewn Hells Angel with mischief in mind. Handing her a bag filled with ten 1oz Gold Britannia coins, which were then worth £1,000 each, he turned out to be a guardian angel. A devout Christian, he was on a charitable crusade – to disburse his wealth to the beautiful but dilapidated ancient churches, and their associated schools, that he passed while touring North Lancashire and Cumbria. In July 2022, teacher Rachel Stevenson heard a motorcycle crunch to a halt in the driveway and found herself confronted by a strange man wearing black leather biker’s gear (picture posed by model) A devout Christian, he was on a charitable crusade – to disburse his wealth to the beautiful but dilapidated ancient churches, and their associated schools, that he passed while touring North Lancashire and Cumbria Sue Hunter found gold and silver coins when she was churchwarden at St John the Baptist Church, Tunstall, Lancashire Though the mysterious biking benefactor, who also left three gold coins under the door of the adjacent church, appears to have made all or most of his donations in a short space of time four summers ago, for reasons I will explain they have only just come to light. He is now known to have handed 53 coins – mostly gold ones whose value had soared to £3,400 each this week – to at least eight small churches and two schools in the same area. However, as some recipients are reluctant to publicise their windfalls, it is believed that other places of worship and education may also have benefited. Since the nature and size of his donations was so unusual, most recipients quietly stashed them away in church safes, and some have only recently been cashed in with Chards, the renowned Blackpool bullion dealership where the anonymous biker bought them. In total they have fetched about £100,000 – funds unimaginable to country vicars who pass the Sunday collection plate around among congregations that can often be counted on two hands. Dwindling attendances and soaring maintenance costs have caused around 3500 churches to close over the last decade. The biker’s altruism will repair leaking roofs and stained-glass windows; and in the case of Quernmore school, whose coins were sold for £15,000, it was used to replace a rickety projector with interactive whiteboards. Yet the most grateful beneficiary might be St Wilfrid’s, a stunning 14th-century church in the village of Melling where Ann Fenwick, who heroically emancipated England’s Roman Catholics in the 1700s, is buried in the nave. With a regular congregation of barely a dozen, it had no hope of raising the £750,000 needed to replace slates and carry out other urgent work, and parishioners feared the Diocese of Blackburn might lose its fight to save it from closure. Churchwarden Tom Rothwell on the roof of the tower of St Margaret's Church, Hornby, Lancashire, where five gold coins were left in a donation box by a mystery donor Churchwarden Nick Gillibrand in St John the Baptist Church, where seven silver coins and one gold Britannia coin were left in a plastic bag by a mystery donor However, the nine Britannias that vicar Jane Lee found in a box inside a plastic bag, while cleaning beneath the church’s altar last Easter, have brought fresh hope. For although the £30,000 the coins recently fetched is a long way short of the full amount required, the guardian angel’s generosity has prompted locals to stage fund-raising events. As this modern-day parable went global and viral this week, parishioners are also hoping an even wealthier donor might stump up the rest of the repair bill. The biker’s generosity is matched by his modesty. He is so determined to retain his anonymity that he has seldom handed the coins over in person, preferring to leave them where he hopes they will be found – near altars and collection boxes. Only a handful of people have met him, and the story only came to light, days ago, by chance. The son of a St Wilfrid’s parishioner is a London accountant with Press contacts, and after hearing about it, he passed it on. In this timeless corner of England, it has sparked a flurry of excitement, as volunteers rummage for coins that may have been secreted in their churches. Sadly, but inevitably, given that opportunist thieves already target these isolated and often empty buildings, there is also a fear that criminals might attempt to profit from the biker’s kindness. Ironically, Tom Rothwell, the churchwarden at St Margaret’s, in Hornby, says the three gold coins quietly slipped into the collection box in 2022 have paid to mend damage caused by crooks. The ‘scumbags’ had stripped lead from the roof causing rainwater to pour on to the organ, but the coins fetched £8,000, a sum doubled by matching funds from the National Churches Trust. Among the most out-of-the-way sites visited by the holy biker is St John the Baptist, a wonderfully castellated edifice surrounded by wheat fields in Tunstall, near Carnforth, attended in the early 1800s by the Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Some time during the summer of 2022, retired teacher Sue Hunter, 69, then a warden, found one of the gold Britannias in a Chards bag, with seven silver coins, while cleaning up after a wedding. Again, the motorcyclist had placed them on the altar. After checking they hadn’t been left as a marriage gift, Mrs Hunter handed them in for safekeeping, then ‘forgot all about them,’ she tells me. For four years they remained locked in a safe, and they might have stayed there if she hadn’t switched on the TV news the other day. They have now been sold, the gold coin for £3,000 and the silver ones for £500: money that will help preserve the church’s magnificent Flemish stained-glass windows. So, to the question causing ripples of intrigue all along the freewheeling philanthropist’s missionary biking route, which stretches northwards for 30 miles along the A6 and A683, from St Thomas’s church, in the market town of Garstang, to St Mary’s, in twee and touristy Kirkby Lonsdale. Who is the man behind the helmet and what drove him to pave the roads linking these ancient churches with gold? After following his trail this week and piecing together the clues he left in his wake, I have come tantalisingly close to providing the answers. We can be pretty sure his real Christian name is James, for that is how he styled himself when, in an isolated moment of self-revelation, he left an entry in the visitor’s book at St Wilfrid’s, Melling. Dated June 11, 2022, and timed at 11am, he wrote: ‘What a beautiful and peaceful church. Melling should be justifiably proud of their heritage’. Written in an elegant hand, he signed his entry ‘James, Servant of the Living Lord.’ A note that he scrawled on a Salvation Army leaflet issued in 2022, which he left with the nine gold coins stating that he wished to donate them to the church, carried the same signature. He also appears to live, or have lived, within a short riding distance of Blackpool. To comply with money laundering regulations, Chards kept his details on record. And although she couldn’t betray his confidence, Rochelle Garrad, the bullion dealer’s head of operations, said he was ‘local to the area’, and in his 60s or 70s. As a ‘long-term customer interested in gold for many years’, she said, he would sometimes visit the showroom, just behind the Golden Mile, and stop to chat to staff. He spoke about his religious beliefs, and Ms Garrad vaguely recalls his giving them a book he had written about Christianity. When churches began contacting Chards, saying they wanted to cash in coins found in bags bearing the firm’s logo, these encounters helped them ‘piece together’ his identity. However, Ms Garrad added, ‘James’ has not been in contact with Chards since 2023, and when the company tried to get in touch with him on my behalf this week (with the strict undertaking that I wouldn’t identify him) he didn’t respond, leaving us to wonder whether he is still alive. Certainly, he seemed in good health on that unforgettable July day when he handed the coins to Rachel Stevenson – one of the few people to whom he revealed himself – at Quernmore. Describing him as ‘very shy and unassuming’, and not outwardly wealthy in his biking leathers, she says they engaged in a ‘lovely talk about life and God’. Explaining that he was impressed by the way the school and church nestled beside one another in the valley, he gave her the bag of coins (which he said then were worth about £1,000 each) stressing that he didn’t wish to be thanked or identified. Ms Stevenson, who has recently retired from teaching, saw him off with a joyous hug and was ‘on a high for weeks afterwards’. ‘He came across as a really lovely, gentle, good-hearted person who’d had a bit of a rethink in life and just wanted to do good with the money he had,’ she told me this week. Studying the biker’s route, it is likely he pinpointed the churches on a map before setting off, for several are way off the beaten track. It is even possible that he stuffed his bike’s saddlebag with dozens of gold coins and stopped off at all the places where he left them during one bountiful ride. For it was also in July 2022 that Rev Michael Hutchinson, the vicar of St Thomas’s in Garstang, saw the man walk in during a service and place three coins in the hand of an elderly female congregant. ‘God has blessed me and I want to bless you’, he told her. At the time, the church’s flock froze in winter because the heating system was clapped-out, but the £4,293 fetched by the coins has helped buy new radiators. However, the exponential rise in the price of gold in recent years has meant that those churches which clung on to their coins for the longest time have reaped the greatest reward. When 22 carat, 1oz Gold Britannia coins were first issued by the Royal Mint, in 1987, their face value was £100. Yet by the time ‘James’ distributed them, in 2022, they were trading at £1,400. In the ensuing four years, the demand for secure investments has seen their price soar by about 140 per cent. Therefore when, earlier this year, the two northernmost churches alighted on by the guardian angel paired up to sell their six coins as a job-lot, they returned almost £20,000. For Holy Trinity, in Casterton, their £10,000 share amounted to more than their annual income. The enormous boost to their finances and morale that has resulted from the mystery rider’s altruism was spelled out this week by the Bishop of Blackburn, the Right Rev Philip North. He described the gifts’ symbolic value as ‘absolutely massive’, saying they had reminded parishioners in these small rural communities that they had support and they were not alone in loving their churches. ‘The very heartbeat of the Christian life is an act of generosity,’ he said. ‘It’s Jesus going to the cross and giving his life. And Jesus says, in his teaching in St Matthew’s gospel: “Let your giving be done in secret”. There is something very beautiful about this completely gratuitous anonymous donation. ‘I have no idea who [the giver] is, and I want to stay in the dark – unless he wants to come and see me, in which case he will be incredibly welcome, and we’ll get the best cake we can find!’ The bishop is calling for state support for the upkeep of sparsely attended country churches. For them to remain viable, he suggests that they should double-up as post offices, cafes, and community centres, as they did in bygone years. Jokingly, he added that the possibility that the Christian biker has left more coins which are yet to be found was ‘a very good incentive for in-depth church cleaning’ in rural Lancashire. It certainly is. Meanwhile, assuming that the guardian Hells Angel is still hot in the saddle, custodians of crumbling churches throughout the North-West of England will be praying for him to resume his golden crusade. Additional reporting by Tim Stewart