Long to reign over us THIS month sees the official celebrations for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. The actual jubilee date was more properly in February this year, the month when the young Princess Elizabeth learned, in 1952, that her father George VI had passed away and that she was now Queen of the United Kingdom and, of course, a number of other countries too. The celebrations this June actually coincide with the Coronation date of June 2, 1953, at least that’s the official reason for marking the Jubilee then, but one suspects its really down to the simple fact that more people are likely to feel in a celebratory mood in the summer than in a cold and miserable February. The fact that we are celebrating at all is an achievement, as even though Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother lived to be over 100 few of us, perhaps, thought that her daughter would still be going strong at 96 and when we had the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012 (an event that coincided with the London Olympics in the same year and thus we very much felt on a “high” in the UK) many people felt that that would be Her Majesty’s last hurrah and that by 2022 it would be a king on the throne. There’s no doubt that this year will be different to 2012. 96 is very different from 86 and now Her Majesty’s “rock”, Prince Philip, will no longer be by her side, but celebrations there will be and we’re doing our bit here at COIN NEWS too. One of the features of the Queen’s 70 year-reign, longer than any other British monarch, has been her coinage; there have been literally thousands of designs issued with her portrait on the obverse these past seven decades, not only in the UK but across the globe, with huge countries like Canada and Australia, smaller countries like Belize and Tuvalu and overseas territories like Tristan da Cunha and the Falkland Islands all using her image on their coins. Over the years many members of the Commonwealth have started using their own imagery on coins rather than a portrait of Her Majesty (for example places like Jamaica who still have Her Majesty as their head of state but use their coat of arms on their coinage, and Fiji which is now officially a republic but is still part of the Commonwealth) but at some point during her reign the Queen has actually appeared on 33 different currencies! In celebration of this amazing fact and to mark the Platinum Jubilee we are asking our readers to let us know what their favourite coin of Elizabeth II is—it doesn’t have to be a British coin, doesn’t even have to be a circulating coin, it just has to be legal tender (i.e. not a medallion, so it has to have a monetary value and be backed up by an issuing authority) and it has to have Her Majesty’s portrait on the obverse. We aren’t asking for your favourite portrait of the Queen (although that may be part of it) we are asking for your favourite coin design—there are thousands to choose from, but be honest, we all have our favourites don’t we? Perhaps you want to go simplistic and choose the elegant grace of the Maundy money with the Mary Gillick head, or perhaps the equestrian portrait on the 1977 Jubilee Crown is the one you like. Maybe you want to go “commemorative” and choose one of the hundreds of issues created for the collector market— that’s fine, we don’t mind, we just want to know what you like. Just tell us what your favourite is (send in a picture if you would prefer but you don’t have to, we’ll find the coin you mean), we’ll collate all of the responses and in September or October, we will let you know which were the most popular—and the names of every single one of you who send in an “entry” will go into the Token Publishing hat with one drawn at random and that person will win the latest Queen Elizabeth coin—the 2022 bullion Jubilee sovereign featuring the Royal Arms! Good luck and we look forward to hearing from you—see page 60 for further details.