Letters from London (26 page)

As Barry Craddock discovered (“They didn’t like doves”), tampering with the nation’s iconography can be a tricky business. The design for the new ten-pound stamp was sent to the Queen for official approval (as all stamps must be), and duly received it on October 7; around the same time, in another part of Buckingham Palace a small storm in a silver-gilt epergne was brewing. Whereas with postage stamps the royal presence is lightly felt and only at the very end of the process, there is much closer involvement when it comes to coins of the realm. Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria and a zealot for the collaboration between Art and Industry, always took a close interest in coin design. In 1922 the Royal Mint Advisory Committee on the Design of Coins, Medals, Seals and Decorations was set up, and its president since 1952 has been His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, KG, KT, OM, GBE. The other committee members, a dozen or more, are drawn from numismatists, heralds, artists, designers, calligraphers, ornithologists, botanists, and word-smiths, all bringing their cumulative expertise to bear on the complex, bureaucratic, delicate, and agreeable task of recommending to the Queen what the British circulating coinage should look like. Needless to say, they are not paid, though they do receive proof copies of the Maundy money—a set of tiny coins, no bigger than a child’s fingernail, that are minted annually for distribution to an equally tiny section of the deserving poor on Maundy Thursday.

Most of the committee’s members are men, with a good splatter of knights and professors among them, but there have occasionally been women, including the sculptor Elizabeth Frink and, currently, the Marchioness of Anglesey. Until recently, there was also the novelist and cultural historian Marina Warner. When I asked how she came to be appointed, she said, “Well, it was that very English thing. I was placed next to someone at dinner, and we started talking about the American dollar bill and its Masonic symbolism. He turned out to be John Porteous, the numismatist, and I told him about my book
Monuments and Maidens
, and he put me up for the committee.” The
appointment couldn’t have appeared a more natural one: Ms. Warner, a woman of incandescent intelligence and Apulian beauty, is one of the country’s most scholarly and perceptive writers on the significance and interpretation of cultural symbols. However, even before her appointment—to succeed the late Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman as “words representative”—it became clear to her that sitting among the numismatic great and good was not going to be a matter, or at least not
just
a matter, of discussing what should be couchant and what should be rampant. The committee lies at one of the many intersections of royalty and politics: while the Mint is naturally Royal, its official master is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. At the time of Warner’s appointment in 1985, the Chancellor under Mrs. Thatcher was Nigel Lawson. Ms. Warner recalls, “I was rung up and asked, ‘What have you been up to in your past? There’s some trouble getting you on.’ It turned out that Nigel Lawson didn’t want me. He only let me go through with the protection of three Thatcherite sympathizers.” And what had she done in her past? “I expect Lawson thought me a leftie.” Since Ms. Warner is an impeccable liberal, he probably did. Perhaps she was rendered just capable of legitimacy in the eyes of the Tory establishment by the fact that her grandfather was P. F. “Plum” Warner, distinguished prewar captain of the England cricket team.

Asked about her numismatic preferences, Ms. Warner immediately cites the famous Greek coin minted in Syracuse which shows Arethusa as a girl with flowing locks and dolphins leaping round her head. “I wish we could go back to that. There doesn’t have to be heavy nationalistic meaning—a coin can be something that gives
pleasure,”
she says emphatically. “Pleasure” is not, however, a word that crops up too frequently in the deliberations of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee. More often than not, members will be discussing heraldic solecisms, symbolic minutiae, the fussiness of lettering, or the insoluble problem of Northern Ireland. It’s a tiny reflection of the intractability of the Irish situation that it infects even these scholarly and largely dispassionate discussions in a wing of Buckingham Palace. The difficulty lies in the fact that, while each of the three other parts
of the United Kingdom has a fair choice of uncontentious ancient emblems for public iconic use, Northern Ireland does not. How to represent the province on a coin? The Red Hand of Ulster would lie uneasily in a Catholic pocket, while the Protestant thumb might snag on a harp or a shamrock. The ancient crown of St. Edward is deemed acceptable, but crosses can stir trouble: the cross of St. Patrick, already familiar from flags and arms, is allowable, but the Celtic cross, which might be taken by some Protestants as an offensive religious symbol, is disbarred. One recent solution has been found in the torca ceremonial collar, often in heavy chiseled gold, worn by the old chieftains in Hibernia. Other safe options come from hedgerow and field: flax, the yellow pimpernel, the rowan. There was an attempt not long ago to put forward the elk as a symbol of the province: little did the wretched designer in question realize that it is heraldically questionable to place an elk upon a shield. This sort of impasse drives artists to ever greater ingenuity: one recent submission represented Northern Ireland as an adolescent girl innocently playing a tin flute while striding the Giant’s Causeway.

Who actually delineated this tin-flute option would not have been known to the committee; the members would merely have been examining “Submission i(d) from Designer No. 1 of Item 3: Regional Designs for £1 Coin.” The anonymity of artists is scrupulously guarded, although over the years personal styles inevitably become recognizable. Sometimes—as with the commemorative crown piece to be issued later this year to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Queen’s coronation—there is an open competition. More often, specific artists are invited to submit ideas. Such was the case with the new regional designs for the reverse of the one-pound coin. The coin itself was introduced in 1983, and it has been the practice to change the reverse design every year. In the first year of issue, there was a Royal Arms reverse, then a four-year cycle celebrating each of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, then the Royal Arms again in 1988, followed by a different regional cycle. After the current buffer year, the next regional cycle will begin in 1994. A dozen artists were therefore asked to send in preliminary drawings to the Royal Mint by
December 31, 1991. They were requested to provide designs connected by a common theme or otherwise unified in style; they were reminded of the Irish problem, and told of their reward. Those who submitted one set of four drawings would be paid £250; those shortlisted and asked to supply plaster models of their designs (no larger than seven inches in diameter) would be paid £500 per model; and the winner would receive £2, 500 for each of the four models given the final royal approval, in return for which he or she would assign full copyright to the Crown.

Nine of the twelve submitted work, and the Advisory Committee met for its first appraisal on February 11, 1992, in the Chinese Dining Room of Buckingham Palace. Committee members enter the building by the Privy Purse Door on the right-hand side of the palace facade, where they are met by military equerries. Here the men’s coats are removed and, instead of being hung up, are folded in neat military fashion into fat cubes, which are placed on a table. (Fortunately, they don’t try this with the women’s coats.) Then members go up to the first floor, passing, until recently, an admonitory Landseer, a sort of Victorian circus version of Daniel in the Lions’ Den; they glimpse an endless red-carpeted corridor lined with busts and urns, before being ushered into the committee room. This is early-nineteenth-century scarlet and gold chinoiserie—“the mantelpiece astir with a thousand dragons spitting at you,” Marina Warner recalls. All remain standing and examine the designs to be discussed until the formal arrival of the president, Prince Philip; then they take their places at a long table. Asked to describe the meetings, Ms. Warner replies, “Well, it’s rather like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Everyone is a bit falling asleep. There’s a sense of pomp, and a feeling of being lulled by ceremony. It’s the culture of deference—an atmosphere which does tend to tie people’s tongues.” At its first meeting, tongue-tied or not, the committee reduced the field for the one-pound coin reverse to a couple of finalists: Designer 8, who had submitted a series of ploddingly traditional heraldic schemes, and Designer 9, whose elegant drawings, in positive danger of producing pleasure, featured wild birds—the avocet for England, osprey for Scotland, red kite for Wales, and roseate tern
for Northern Ireland. The thematic link among these four birds is that each had been close to extinction earlier in the century but had made a successful breeding return.

By the next meeting, on May 26, it was clear that both designs had their disadvantages. The heraldic series was criticized by both the Scottish and Welsh offices. The Scottish Office, having consulted Lord Lyon, King of Arms, pronounced the Scottish design in Series A of Designer 8 a confusing and incorrect marriage of emblems, while the Welsh Office pointed out the shocking heraldic solecism of imposing a Welsh dragon upon what looked to their eyes like the cross of St. George. The birds, meanwhile, were also running into trouble. Both the Scottish and Welsh offices, while finding them attractive, wondered if people would recognize the species as properly representative of their countries. The Duke of Edinburgh had an objection to the presence of vegetation: the avocet grasps an oak twig, the osprey a thistle, and so on. The design for Wales showed the red kite grasping a leek, rather as if it had swooped down on a greengrocer’s stall and carried off the vegetable to feed its young. An ornithologically inclined member of the committee pointed out that red kites are not as yet known to eat leeks.

There were other criticisms, too: that the heraldic designs were heavy and dreary; that the Scottish lion should be made larger; that the birds be shown in flight rather than crouching; that the raven replace the avocet as the English symbol. A more menacing threat to the birds was voiced by the Deputy Master of the Mint and chairman of the committee, Mr. A. D. Garrett, who said that, since the pound was the premier circulating coin, the question of its design could not be approached with “complete flexibility.” Also at this meeting was the Economic Secretary, Mr. Anthony Nelson, MP, representing the Chancellor of the Exchequer. His presence was a novelty: in the seven years of Ms. Warner’s attendance, this was only the second time a Treasury Minister had turned up. Traditionally, the committee had done its work and reported to the Mint, which in turn reported to the Treasury. Now there was a minder sitting in. Mr. Nelson expressed the view that the adoption of the bird series might be seen as
demoting coins to the status of mere stamps. Perhaps he was forgetting that one of the most popular British coins of the century, the now defunct farthing, featured a wren on its reverse side. It was a neat conjunction of image and value: the smallest British bird on the smallest circulating coin.

Still, it was agreed that both series should be “progressed.” Designer 8 was to have all four designs redrawn by the College of Heralds to make them heraldically kosher, while Designer 9 was to amend the birds, first by showing them in flight, and, second, by adding the crowns of the four regions as extra identifying badges (though in truth the percentage of the British population likely to be able to tell one regional crown from another is wren-sized). The committee then met on November 3 to decide upon its final recommendation to the Mint. It first approved the minutes of the previous meeting and discussed the new two-pound coin to be minted for the tercentenary of the Bank of England in 1994. Then came “Item 3—New Series of Regional Designs for the Reverse of the £1 Coin” Scarcely had the topic been raised, however, than the Deputy Master of the Mint instructed the committee that it was not even to consider the bird designs. For an obedient while, members argued the pros and cons of the revamped heraldic series, which still had many faults and to some eyes had even been made worse, until Ms. Warner stirred up the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party by demanding to know why they were not allowed to discuss the birds. “When we asked why,” she recalls, “there was all this flanneling and red-faced puffing from this senior civil servant”—the Deputy Master. The reason, apparently, was that the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, had decided to preempt the decision. The birds, held to lack the gravitas the coinage demanded, had been shot from the sky, whatever the Royal Mint Advisory Committee on the Design of Coins, Medals, Seals and Decorations happened to think.

Of course, the committee is only advisory: in 1991 it had recommended a design for a Gulf War medal—coincidentally, by the same artist who drew the birds—only to have it rejected by the Queen and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (This must have led to some interesting
pillow talk at Buckingham Palace. “What did you do today, dear?” “Turned down your lousy medal, darling”) Still, for the Queen to interfere was one thing: annoying, but constitutional. To have the final decision-making process simply squelched from the agenda seemed positively irregular. Ms. Warner made her own inquiries and discovered “that Lamont had decided he wanted the heraldic series. The Economic Secretary was also heard to say, quite casually, ‘It’s just that the Chancellor doesn’t like the birds.’”

Marina Warner waited until the next meeting, on February 10, 1993, to see if there was any chance of recycling the birds on a lower-denomination coin, and also to see how the whole kerfuffle had been minuted; then she resigned. “I really saw no point in turning up just to rubber-stamp Norman Lamont’s taste in art,” she crisply concludes. Then she passes me one of Charles Addams’s last drawings, torn from
The New Yorker
. A medieval king is leaning from his castle battlements and addressing the assembled peasantry: “And now, as an experiment in democracy, I’m decreeing free elections to choose the national bird.”