What I most remember about my father designing the decimal coins in 1962 was the secrecy surrounding it all.

As an artist – he was a painter and taught life-drawing at the Royal College of Art – he’d been chosen as one of many designers to submit designs to a Royal Mint Committee, but decimalisation had not been announced and it was essential that no one knew anything about it.

And when his designs were finally chosen, we lived a kind of cloak-and-dagger life. The coins were first designed on paper, and then worked in reverse into large deep circles of plaster.

They would then be cast back to positive and my father would work on them, and then cast them back to negative and so on. Read Full Article