1 Puffin - Martin Coles Harman

Martin Coles Harman purchased Lundy in 1925 and almost immediately provoked a constitutional confrontation by issuing coins denominated in Puffins and Half Puffins — a direct challenge to the Crown's monopoly on coinage. He was prosecuted under the Coinage Act 1870 and fined £5 in 1931. The original issues were struck in his lifetime; this later series was reissued by his descendants after his death in 1954, produced as a commercial token for the island's small tourist economy rather than out of any renewed legal defiance.