This 2001 “quintuple-sovereign”—issued the year before Elizabeth’s own Golden Jubilee—marks the centennial of Queen Victoria’s death. Her portrait here is a stranger to British homeland coinage, but not to its postage stamps—the image (and partial denomination beneath it) are from the famous “One Penny Black,” the world’s first nationally-used adhesive postage stamp.
The large “V” for Victoria can’t help but bring to mind Churchill—a child of the Victorian Age—and the “V for Victory” sign he flashed so often during the wartime 1940s. I’m very sure a mind as fertile and as rooted in history as his at least once or twice thought of his upraised “V” as containing an element of tribute to the Queen and Empress of his youth.
Another British first is on prominent display on this 5-pound piece, and curiously, it too evokes the British penny. The iron framework is from the Crystal Palace of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, at which Britons encountered Britain’s first “public conveniences.” Encountered them 827,280 times, or so I have read, at a penny per visit.
By the time of Victoria’s Silver Jubilee, then, “spending a penny” had entered the English lexicon as a euphemism for…well, “going to the bathroom.” That is, visiting the WC.
v.