50 Pence - Elizabeth II Benjamin Britten, Silver Piedfort

The Britten 50p was issued to mark the centenary of the composer's birth on 22 November 1913. Britten remains the only British composer to have appeared on a circulating 50p, though this piedfort is strictly a collector issue — struck at double the standard flan thickness in .925 silver, a format the Royal Mint has used since the early 1980s to differentiate premium collector strikes from standard proofs.

Britten's relationship with officialdom was complicated enough that a state commemoration of this kind would have seemed unlikely during his lifetime. His homosexuality, then criminal, and his conscientious objection during the Second World War made him a persistent outsider to the establishment he was eventually, somewhat ironically, ennobled into as Baron Britten in 1976.