On 25 Nov 2014, The Royal Mint has announced a special two-coin set which commemorates the life and marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Sir Winston Churchill. The Winston Churchill 2015 Brilliant Uncirculated £5 coin paired with an original Winston Churchill 1965 Memorial Crown in a special edition set, which has a limited edition of 5,000 and is priced at just £20.
Designer of the 2015 £5 coin, Mark Richards FRBS says: “I wanted to capture something of Winston Churchill’s intensity, to create an active portrait, a sense of the man that you may have come away with had you met him. I thought the portrait created for the memorial coin in 1965 by Oscar Nemon couldn't be bettered, so though I much admired it, I wanted to start afresh. I decided to create an image that is larger than the field of the coin – because this was a larger than life man, there was so much more to him than can ever be captured in one portrait”.
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| 1965 Winston Churchill Memorial Crown |
The designer of the 1965 Winston Churchill Memorial Crown, Oscar Nemon, was born in Croatia and moved to London in 1938. He worked from a studio outside Oxford, and sculpted many recognized figures including Her Majesty The Queen. His statue of Sir Winston Churchill stands in the Members Lobby of the House of Commons, its foot now burnished bright by many years of being touched ‘for luck’. Oscar Nemon created the crown struck in memory of the former Prime Minister in 1965.
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| 50th Anniversary of the Death of Sir Winston Churchill £5 coin |
Mark Richards FRBS, designer of the 2015 £5 coin, is a figure and portrait sculptor based in Shropshire. He read History of Art at Manchester University and trained in sculpture and drawing at The City and Guilds of London Art School. Mark worked for a number of sculpture companies before establishing himself as an independent sculptor in 1992. The designer created last year’s Queen Anne memorial coin and the £5 coin struck for the 90th birthday of the Duke of Edinburgh.
The anniversary of the birth of Sir Winston Churchill approaches (30th November 1874), he died on January 24, 1965. Sir Winston Churchill was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. As a writer Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was a Knight of the Garter, Companion to The Queen, and the first honorary citizen of the United States by Act of Congress.
Sir Winston Churchill is the only Britain’s statesman ever to be commemorated on two UK coins created in his honor. The portrait of Churchill is instantly recognizable on the new coin, a man who was larger than life, almost impossible to capture in the usual confines of coin design.
