50 Cents - Elizabeth II 3rd Portrait - Edward 'Weary' Dunlop

Issued the year after Dunlop's death in 1993 — the delay owing to the mint's standard production calendar — this coin honours a man whose wartime reputation rested not on command decisions but on defiance of them. As a POW surgeon on the Burma-Thailand Railway, Dunlop repeatedly placed himself between Japanese guards and his patients, absorbing beatings rather than allowing sick men to be forced onto work details. His diaries, kept secretly throughout captivity, became a primary historical record of conditions on the railway.