4 Pence - George VI

British Guiana's fourpence survived into the 1940s for one reason: Maundy-adjacent tradition. The coin was used as the annual "Maundy money" equivalent distributed to servants and laborers on the Thursday before Easter, a custom with deeper roots in the colony than in most other British territories. The wartime shift to .500 silver — down from the prewar sterling standard — reflected Britain's broader policy of diluting silver coinage across its colonies to conserve metal for the war effort, a directive applied unevenly and often at short notice to individual colonial mints.