Benjamin Britten: National Treasury

The first British currency to feature a composer – a £20 note emblazoned with Edward Elgar – is now compost. Elgar was shredded and put out to grass, numismatically speaking, in 2010. Tomorrow Benjamin Britten, who wrote nothing so popular as Land of Hope and Glory yet has been lionised extraordinarily in his centenary year, becomes the second to be honoured by the Royal Mint. 

He will hit our pockets in harder, jinglier fashion by way of a commemorative 50 pence piece.
The coin's heptagon shape and metal composition may better suit this less easily compostable composer. A phrase from his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943) appears on the new coin: "Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying". You only have to see those clarion lines of Tennyson which Britten set so brilliantly to hear it, leaping in your mind's ear, sung by the composer's life-long partner, Peter Pears. (Is gay love also making its first appearance on a British coin?)...

Fiona Maddocks in The Observer.

The coin will not go into general circulation until later this year.
Salutations to the nation's favourite pederast.