Have you ever tried to get into the mind of a suffragette? British Museum curator Tom Hockenhull has... and not in the way you might expect from a numismatist.

An ordinary British penny of Edward VII was made extraordinary by a simple act of vandalism, writes Tom Hockenhull, Curator of Modern Money at the British Museum Stamped in crude lettering across the head of the king is the phrase ‘VOTES FOR WOMEN’, the slogan of the suffragette movement.

The deliberate targeting of the king, as constitutional monarch and head of the Church of England, could be likened to iconoclasm, a direct assault on the male authority figures that were perceived to be upholding the laws of the country. As Neil MacGregor wrote in A History of the World in 100 objects, ‘this coin stands for all those who fought for the right to vote’.

The British Museum’s was minted in 1903 and circulated for ten years before was defaced, in either late-1913 or early 1914. It was said at the time that the suffragettes had copied the practice from anarchists, who were defacing similar coins with the phrase ‘Vive l’Anarchie’. Precisely how many were defaced is unknown but several other examples are known to exist besides the British Museum’s ‘Votes for Women’ coin.

Recent research suggests that it was probably carried out by a single person using just one set of individual alphabet stamps, a process that would have been repetitive and time-consuming. The perpetrator has never been traced, and no direct connection has ever been established between the coins and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), or other suffragette organisations.

The First World War is commonly perceived as a watershed moment, when the sun finally set on the Victorian golden age: ‘never such innocence, never before or since’, to use the oft-quoted words of Larkin. Yet this is a romanticised and superficial view of pre-war Britain that conceals a more disturbing image, of a country beset by domestic crises and civil disorder. These included anarchist violence and the beginnings of the Troubles in Ireland, and chief among them was the campaign for women’s suffrage.

Cast: Tom Hockenhull (Curator)