In the mid 1920s the Royal Mint began to seek new designs for United Kingdom silver coins, the feeling being that the existing ones had little artistic merit and technically were less than ideal. Amongst a number of other artists Eric Gill was approached and in 1924 he produced a series of drawings that were very much grounded in numismatic tradition.

The simple ideas were derived from his own study of coins and for the most part the strong influence of crosses and pellets taken from Anglo-Saxon pennies was evident in the series he prepared. The drawings were well received at the time, indeed so much so that uniface pattern pieces were struck of his shilling, sixpence and threepence designs. Ultimately a decision was made in favour of the heraldic work of Kruger Gray but in his Annual Report for 1927 the Deputy Master Robert Johnson regretted that it had not been possible to use designs by Eric Gill and he paid tribute to 'the skill and indeed the genius, of so fine an artist and so definitely outstanding a craftsman'.