1 Rial Sir Winston Churchill

Issued the same year Churchill died, this was one of several commemorative rials produced by the Yemen Arab Republic during a period when the country was barely functional as a state — a civil war between royalists and republicans, backed respectively by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, had been grinding since 1962. The choice of Churchill as subject had nothing to do with any Yemeni connection; these pieces were minted explicitly for the international collector market, a revenue strategy that small and conflict-affected states had begun exploiting aggressively in the 1960s.