A rare penny piece goes on sale this month for 20 million times its face value – quite the mark up.
But it’s the backstory to the coin’s creation that is arguably the most interesting aspect of the sale – because of the insight it gives into the frosty relationship between George VI and Edward, whose sudden abdication put his brother on the throne.
The story begins in 1936 with a dispute over the small matter of a hairstyle. While plunging the government towards a constitutional crisis through his relationship with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, the notoriously vain Edward was also concerned about how he might look as loose change.
And his concerns became clear in a number of discussions that autumn with the Royal Mint around the artwork for the new penny piece that would bear his profile.
Tradition dictated that each new monarch’s image on coins should face the opposite way to their predecessor.
