Jersey 20 pence 1983 - Corbière Lighthouse

The coin's story

In 1983, Jersey renewed its coins with a series whose reverses show monuments of the island. On the 20 pence coin, Robert Lowe engraved the Corbière lighthouse, at the south-western tip of the island. Designed by the engineer Sir John Coode and first lit on 24 April 1874, it is considered the first concrete lighthouse in the British Isles. It stands on a rock linked to the shore by a causeway passable only at low tide. Near this causeway, a plaque commemorates the assistant keeper Peter Edwin Larbalestier, who drowned in 1946 trying to rescue a visitor caught by the tide. The obverse bears Arnold Machin's portrait of Elizabeth II. In 1983, the first year of the type, the Royal Mint struck 400,000 pieces.