Great Britain 1918 George V half crown Royal Mint London - sterling silver - KM 818.1 Sp 4011 gVF

Great Britain, half crown, 1918, struck at the Royal Mint in London under King George V.

Obverse: uncrowned portrait of George V facing left, legend around: GEORGIVS V DEI GRA: BRITT: OMN: REX, in full Georgius V Dei Gratia Britanniarum Omnium Rex, meaning George the Fifth by the Grace of God King of all the Britains. Engraver: Edgar Bertram MacKennal.

Reverse: crowned quartered shield of arms inside the band of the Garter, around it · FID: DEF: IND: IMP: ·, in full Fidei Defensor Indiae Imperator, Defender of the Faith and Emperor of India. Across the field HALF · 19 18 · CROWN, with the date split by the shield. On the Garter band the motto HONI SOIT· QVI MAL· Y PENSE·, shame on him who thinks evil of it. Engraver: George William de Saulles.

References: KM# 818.1, Spink 4011, Numista N# 3156.

The half crown was worth two shillings and sixpence, so eight of them made one pound. In the British system it ranked above the shilling of one shilling and the florin of two shillings. This piece belongs to the first George V type, struck from 1911 to 1919 in sterling silver of .925 fineness, the standard the British had kept since 1582. The war years pushed the numbers up sharply. Where the Royal Mint struck under three million half crowns in 1911, the issue of 1918 came to 29,079,500 pieces. That is the year of this coin, the last full year of the First World War. From 1920 the fineness of British silver coins was cut to .500, and the sources point to the shortage and the high price of silver after the war as the reason. A half crown of 1918 is therefore one of the last with the old sterling standard. The denomination itself stayed in people's pockets until the end of 1969 and then disappeared ahead of decimalisation.

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Coins have been part of my life for almost thirty years. It started with the things I found in the ground as a boy, and it never stopped. First the searching, then the reading and figuring out, and the collecting. Dealing came much later, and even though it is how I make my living now, I still enjoy looking at every piece the way a collector does.

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vanzandwijkmunten: Because one coin is never enough

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