Great Britain, George V, Crown 1935, Art Deco, UNC

History

By the spring of 1935, Britain needed something to celebrate.

The Depression had bitten deep. Unemployment had peaked at nearly three million. The hunger marches had come and gone. In Europe, Hitler had just announced German rearmament in open defiance of the Versailles Treaty, Mussolini was preparing to invade Ethiopia, and the fragile architecture of the post-war peace was visibly crumbling. Against this backdrop, the Silver Jubilee of George V – twenty-five years on the throne – arrived like a deliberate act of national reassurance. The celebrations in May 1935 were genuinely, unexpectedly joyful. The crowds that lined the processional routes to St Paul’s Cathedral were enormous. The King himself was astonished. He had never thought himself particularly beloved, and the outpouring shook him deeply. That night he wrote in his diary that he could not understand it – he had done nothing to deserve it.

He was wrong, of course. Twenty-five years of quiet, unglamorous dedication in the face of extraordinary events is its own form of greatness. He had steered the monarchy through the First World War, renouncing the family’s German name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and replacing it with Windsor when German ancestry became a liability in 1917. He had broadcast to the nation by radio, bringing the monarchy directly into the living rooms of ordinary people for the first time. He had reigned without vanity and served without complaint through upheavals that had toppled most of the crowned heads of Europe.

The crown struck for the Jubilee was unlike anything the Royal Mint had produced before. The reverse, designed by sculptor Percy Metcalfe, showed St George slaying the dragon in a boldly stylized Art Deco manner – angular, geometric, modern – a deliberate departure from the romantic imagery that had adorned British crowns for centuries. The horse, rearing dramatically over its fallen prey, bore so little resemblance to a real animal that the coin acquired an immediate nickname: the Rocking Horse Crown. George V himself reportedly disliked the design. It did not matter. The coin entered history anyway, and it marked something genuinely significant – it was the first commemorative coin ever issued by the British Royal Mint for a royal jubilee, the beginning of a tradition that continues to this day.

The edge carried the ancient inscription DECUS ET TUTAMEN – an ornament and a safeguard – followed by ANNO REGNI XXV: the twenty-fifth year of the reign. A small, silver accounting of time.

George V died seven months after the celebrations, in January 1936. He had lasted long enough to see himself celebrated, but not long enough to see what the following years would bring – the abdication crisis, the approach of another war, the slow contraction of the empire his Jubilee crowds had cheered. The crown of 1935 is therefore something rare: a commemorative coin that genuinely marks a turning point, struck in the last months of a reign that had held something together, just before it all became considerably more complicated.