I wrote a while back about BBC Radio 4′s A History of the World in 100 Objects. The post was about ‘flying money‘ – the first Chinese paper money. As good as the series was when it began, as it hurtled into the 21st century it just kept on getting better and better. One of the last editions covered the story of a – and this is the official title – ‘Suffragette-defaced Edward VII penny (defaced in early twentieth century), from Great Britain’.
The beauty of the series is that it takes what at face value (in this case a penny coin), are pretty run of the mill, mundane, day to day objects. By giving them their context and relating them to the events surrounding them and their role in those events, each object helps clearly illuminate life at that time. This particular programme used the coin to take a close look at the suffragette movement and the fight for the universal right to vote.
The coin, a British penny with King Edward VII in elegant profile and struck in 1903, the year of the formation of the Women’s Social and Political Union, represents both a deft act of civil disobedience and in some ways also perhaps the first form of ‘viral marketing’. Forget Twitter, Facebook and Youtube when you’ve got a meme as explosive as this then you’re in real business. Big enough to carry easily legible lettering, the coins were too numerous and too low in value to make it practical for the banks to recall them. The message on the coin was pretty well guaranteed to circulate widely and indefinitely.
Artist Felicity Powell, says on the program: “The idea is incredibly clever because it uses the potential that coinage has – a bit like the internet today – to be incredibly widely circulated. And so to be able to get the message out, subversively, into the public realm, to those who would be consoled by this message as well as those who would be shocked by it, is a brilliant idea. Wish I’d thought of it . . . “
What’s the big deal? Not just that that a criminal act has been committed (you could actually go to prison for defacing a coin of the realm) but also the pure subversion of stamping “VOTES FOR WOMEN” in crude capitals, all over the King’s image. Powerful stuff.
