The British government is planning to abandon its custom of having the current monarch’s head on English coins and replace it with English landscapes and other less-directly monarchical scenes.
I remember English coins. There was of course Queen Elizabeth II herself, looking like a young woman even while she was actually deep into middle age. There were also loads of coins showing the head of George VI, a clean-cut young man who would kill himself with cigarettes.There were even some coins showing George V in profile, his moustache and small beard attached.
In my boyhood, there was an illegal game played in Omagh alley-ways and elsewhere, called Pitch and Toss, which involved tossing into the air coins with the monarch’s head on them. I think someone told me these games were illegal because they showed lack of respect for the monarch’s face.
Meanwhile, there were lots of Free State coins circulating, but I don’t think Pitch and Toss with these was illegal, because they featured no monarch or any other human being.
On the Irish farthing (ask your granny) there was a woodcock, on the halfpenny there was a pig with her piglets, on the penny a hen with her chicks, on the thruppenny bit there was a hare, on the sixpence an Irish wolfhound, on the shilling there was a bull, on the florin there was a salmon, and on the half-crown there was a horse.
Nowadays, I’m told, these depictions of animals are much admired by those who know about beauty. I never thought much of them, and I remember an old history teacher talking contemptuously about the Free State’s willingness to put any oul’ animal on its coins, instead of showing us the heads of the Easter Proclamation signatories.
Hard cash is an endangered species today and I’m happy to glide my phone over the little black box thing in shops and elsewhere, to pay for my milk or whatever. As Buddy Holly, who would have been astonished at a contactless payment – as Buddy said, it really doesn’t matter any more.
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