The Springbok crown

The five-shilling piece — a crown, a quarter of a pound, and the biggest silver coin the Union ever made — arrived in 1947 and ran to 1960. It is a heavyweight: 28.28 grams of silver, wider than a US silver dollar, and for most of its life it carried Coert Steynberg’s springbok in full stride. To a modern eye the resemblance to a silver Krugerrand is uncanny. That is no accident: this is where the Krugerrand’s springbok was born.

A crown for the Union

The series opened in 1947 to mark the visit of the British Royal family to South Africa — the first reigning monarch to tour the Union. The obverse of those early coins carries Thomas Humphrey Paget’s bare-head portrait of King George VI (his initials, HP, below the truncation); the reverse, Steynberg’s springbok, signed CLS at lower right. When Elizabeth II succeeded in 1952, her portrait took the obverse from 1953 onward. The coins were legal tender at five shillings — a crown — within the South African pound, which ran at par with sterling.

Reading the coin

The springbok reverse is the constant: a single buck mid-bound, the legend SOUTH AFRICA · SUID-AFRIKA around it and 5 SHILLINGS below. The obverse changes with the monarch. The earliest George VI coins read GEORGIVS SEXTVS REX IMPERATOR; after India’s independence the title Imperator was dropped, and the 1948–1950 coins read simply GEORGIVS SEXTVS REX — a small legend change that quietly dates the end of empire. The coins were struck at the Pretoria Mint, reeded edge, in medal alignment, at roughly 38.6 mm across.

Mintages vary widely year to year. The .800 silver George VI strikes alone run from over three-quarters of a million in 1948 down to about 83,000 in 1950 — 1948 at 770,872, 1949 at 535,021, 1950 at 82,754 (Hern S313–S315) — which is why some dates are pocket-common and others genuinely hard to find in high grade.

The silver change of 1951

For its first four years the crown was struck in .800 silver (80% silver, 20% copper) — about 0.727 oz of fine silver per coin. From 1951 the standard was reduced to .500 silver, halving the fine-silver content to roughly 0.455 oz while the coin kept its 28.28 g weight and crown size. It is the single most important specification fact about the series: a 1950 crown and a 1955 crown look alike but are not the same coin by metal, and the bullion floor under each is different.

The two interruptions

Only two years break the springbok. In 1952, the crown was given over to the tercentenary of Jan van Riebeeck’s landing — 300 years of Cape Town — and its reverse shows not a springbok but the old sailing ship of the founding fleet. In 1960, the final year, the coin marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Union itself: the springbok stepped aside and the Union Buildings in Pretoria took the obverse. Every other year from 1947 to 1959 is springbok. Those two commemorative dates are the series’ punctuation marks — the only times the running buck gave up its place.

Proofs, prooflikes and the run to 1964

Alongside the circulation strikes the Mint produced small numbers of proofs and prooflikes — the latter known as SS, or Specially Select, and often hard to tell from true proofs except for faint brush-marks in the fields. These were struck in the low hundreds to low thousands per year. Although the circulating crown ended in 1960, proof five-shilling pieces continued to be struck until 1964, three years after the coin had ceased to be money: South Africa decimalised in 1961, replacing the pound with the rand, and the crown was demonetised on 31 March 1961, its place taken by the fifty-cent piece.

The design that became the Krugerrand

Steynberg’s springbok did not retire with the crown. The same design ran on the gold ten-shilling and £1 pieces struck from 1952 to 1960, then carried into the first decimal series on the silver 50c and gold R1 and R2 (1961–1964). And in 1967 it was chosen for the reverse of the first Krugerrand — the coin that would become the most-traded gold bullion piece on earth. The springbok’s numismatic life had begun even earlier, on a 1906 medallion struck for the Springbok rugby tour of Britain and France; in 2007 the SA Mint issued a five-coin gold Natura set marking the design’s seventy years on South African coinage, 1947 to 2017. The crown is where that long run starts in the coinage proper.