World: Rule, Phillitannia

When the Bank of England issued a newly designed £5 note last week, tradition-minded Englishmen were horrified to find that the 1963 model Britannia looks more like Miss Blackpool than the dumpy dowager who has traditionally ruled the waves from the nation’s coins and bank notes. Stripped of her Roman helmet and a good deal of her heft, the pert new Britannia has a becoming shoulder-length hairdo to replace the sausage curls she has worn since Victorian times, even sports a toga that looks as if it had been designed by Emilio Pucci rather than the Emperor Hadrian. A spokesman for the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street groped for the right words to express the bank’s official comment, came up with, “She’s a glamour puss. We are really with it.”

Model for the new Britannia was Phillida Stone, an 18-year-old art student at Oxford whose father, Artist Reynolds Stone, was commissioned to design the new mauve, brown and blue fiver (worth $14). At a loss for a model, her father draped Phillida in a sheet, sat his daughter down with a stick in one hand to represent Britannia’s spear. Her traditional olive branch was sketched in later. Some found the new design an agreeable change from the buxom figure on most other money. Other Britons thought Phillitannia “clumsily designed,” “like Snow White” and “too much like a bathing beauty.” Even Phillida—who might have been expected to welcome her newfound fame—objected to her father’s drawing. “It’s not,” she pouted, “the real me.”