Composer's centenary is marked with a 50p coin inlaid with Tennyson's line that Britten set to music
The centenary of the birth of composer and conductor Benjamin Britten will be marked tomorrow by the issue of a new 50p coin, the first of Britain's decimalised currency to feature a line of poetry.
Instead of an image of Britten himself, the designer of the new coin, artist Tom Phillips, has taken a line from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls, which was set to music by Britten in his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. "Blow Bugle Blow, set the wild echoes flying" is written around Britten's name. Phillips joked that he wanted to preserve the nation's ability to toss a coin and cry "heads or tails".
"We couldn't have two heads – the Queen's being on the other side – on a coin. How on earth would the country start its cricket matches with such a thing?" said Phillips, who previously designed a £5 Royal Jubilee coin and a souvenir Olympics coin, which weighed a kilogram. In 2005 he produced another 50p, struck to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's dictionary. That, too, featured words rather than an image.
"Who wants to look at a dull picture of an uninteresting old man, even if they are wonderful composers or talents?" said Phillips. "What I like about this design is the very modern fact that you can read the lines on the coin and then go and look them up. If you do, you can go straight away to hear a recording of Peter Pears [Britten's partner in both his personal and professional lives] singing those very words in a scratchy old recording on YouTube. I thought that was a new approach to a coin in a world like today's."
There's not just the one new coin on the block tomorrow, with two new versions of the 50p coming into circulation. The second commemorates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Christopher Ironside, one of the earlier designers of the first British decimal coins.
That coin will feature Ironside's own design, a royal crest, which lost out in 1969 to the more popular image of Britannia, which was chosen amid much public interest by the Royal Mint Advisory Committee after being labelled "sexy" by the Sun.
Phillips thinks our currency and the Royal Mint are both a little staid and stuffy. "But as an artist you are used to perhaps producing a few prints and being delighted if they sell, so when 18 million bits of your work go out there, you have to be quite pleased.
"I don't know who approved my design this time round – it used to be a committee with the Duke of Edinburgh in charge. I rather liked that. He had two responses. One was 'bloody awful' and the other 'jolly good'. Luckily I got a 'jolly good' for the Samuel Johnson."
It was in 1969 when the first 50p coin appeared, the world's first coin to be struck in the shape of an equilateral curve heptagon. By 1997 it had shrunk to its present size.
The new coins will be struck for collector's editions in gold and in silver and for everyday use in cupro-nickel.
British coins have traditionally been heraldic in theme and for 1,000 years have been produced by the Royal Mint in London. There were estimated to be 28.9bn UK coins in circulation on 31 March 2013, with a total face value of £3.9bn. In total, 1.4bn UK coins were issued during 2012-13.
The Royal Mint also makes currency for other countries. It serves more than 100 issuing authorities around the world and meets around 15% of global demand, making the UK the world's biggest coin maker.
Tom Phillips's latest show opens this week at the Flowers Gallery , Cork Street, London
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