Gold Standard and the Great Depression

I know that geological points of departure usually go in the Alien Space Bats forum but I decided to put it here as it's seemingly not very heavily visited and I wanted ask more about the economic side of it. Now as I understand it the gold standard was basically when a national currency was back by a commodity, in this case gold, by offering to sell a set weight of it at a certain price e.g. with the British sterling you could buy 400 troy ounce bars of gold at a set price in pounds. This was done to keep the currency strong as it was backed by gold and smooth exchange rates but had the side-effect of limiting the amount of money the Bank of England could issue to the amount of gold they could get to cover it.

So what happens if the British Government were to come into a large supply of gold a couple of years before the Great Depression hit? Say for example some British citizen in South Africa finds a rather large gold deposit on land he owns and as any decent English gentleman would since he's getting on in years and has no family he leaves the land to the British government in his will or sells it for a peppercorn price. So what does this do to how the UK handles the Great Depression? If they have a new supply of gold which they don't have to pay for this means that as well as just selling it they can now increase the amount of money in circulation. This does seem like a bonus to begin with but there's an argument that coming off of the gold standard first was one of the factors that led to their recovering being faster than others. So those with a bit more economics knowledge, what say you? :)
 
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