Anguilla's gold issues of 1969–1970 were struck under deeply unusual circumstances: the island had unilaterally seceded from the newly formed Associated State of Saint Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla in 1967, expelling the Saint Kitts police force and establishing a de facto independent administration that no sovereign government formally recognized. These coins were issued by that breakaway administration as an assertion of independent statehood, not by any British authority — making them a product of one of the Caribbean's stranger political episodes.
The British eventually sent paratroopers and Metropolitan Police constables in 1969, an intervention so lightly resisted it was widely mocked in the press as a comic-opera invasion.
Anguilla's gold issues of 1969–1970 were struck under deeply unusual circumstances: the island had unilaterally seceded from the newly formed Associated State of Saint Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla in 1967, expelling the Saint Kitts police force and establishing a de facto independent administration that no sovereign government formally recognized. These coins were issued by that breakaway administration as an assertion of independent statehood, not by any British authority — making them a product of one of the Caribbean's stranger political episodes.
The British eventually sent paratroopers and Metropolitan Police constables in 1969, an intervention so lightly resisted it was widely mocked in the press as a comic-opera invasion.