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Pre-decimalisation money

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the only prob i had with the old dosh.was having a lot of change in your pocket, you had to wear braces.so your trousers did not fall down:grinning:
 
I had a Saturday job in a shop selling groceries in the late 60's, we had an old fashioned till and an Olivetti hand adding machine but, unless it was a very large purchase, we used to add up in our heads.

The pre decimal money must sound very complicated to young people but when you were brought up with it we managed quite easily.
 
Dave89 said:
a) 7/6
b) £7/2/6
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Correct Dave!
Often these old problems weren't as hard as they seemed, using dozens for quantities fitted in nicely with having 12 pennies to the shilling, i.e. if one egg cost a penny farthing (one and a quarter pennies) then a dozen will cost one and a quarter shillings or 1 shilling 3 pence, 1/3d.

The smart child would realise that 5% is a twentieth so pounds can be directly converted into shillings (there being 20 shillings to the pound). Thus £7 10s is seven and a half pounds and 5% will be seven and a half shillings, i.e. 7/6d.

The 'calculator generation' don't need to know these tricks. That is how shops get away with pricing like one DIY store tried on, they sold one length of timber for £1.99 and a pack of ten for £19.99. Shop assistants aren't very good with the 'residuals', we 'older' customers ignore the 'penny off' and round up to the 'true' cost (1.99 is nearer 2 than 1!) and then subtract the pennies. It is quite painful watching them do 1.99 + 2.99 + 1.99 + 0.99 rather than 2 + 3 + 2 + 1 - 4p
 
I remember my pop calling 5 shilling a " Dollar " I suppose that came from a exchange rate after the second war, he found himself In Germany on a base with a bunch of Americans and they had all the money and whatever they wanted
My pop use to collect the Coke bottles for the deposit
 
Never thought about this till just now
I wonder if and how much the government saved not having to mint so many coins and not having a ten bob note.
 
just out of curiosity i checked what my first wage would be in todays money...i started work the year decimalisation came out...i earned £7.50 per week as an office junior..could not put in £7.50 so i put in £8 which in todays money came up as £106.35...take a bit off for the extra 50p i put in...pretty sure that even school leavers these days earn more than about £100 a week...mind you sums was never my strong subject

lyn
 
Just a quick enlightening joke. A tramp goes into a posh restaurant, enjoys his meal and asks for the bill. This comes to 10 shillings and six pence. The tramp says to the waiter " 10 and six are sixteen, sixteen pence is one and four, one and four is five, her's a tanner, keep the change. As an aside, even today when asked the weight of their new born baby 99% of folk give the answer in lbs and ozs.
 
When the price of a pint went up to2/11d and they ordered 6-7 pints try.ing to add it up with all the noise was a killer:worried: :worried:
 
Spargone said:
The 'calculator generation' don't need to know these tricks. That is how shops get away with pricing like one DIY store tried on, they sold one length of timber for £1.99 and a pack of ten for £19.99. Shop assistants aren't very good with the 'residuals', we 'older' customers ignore the 'penny off' and round up to the 'true' cost (1.99 is nearer 2 than 1!) and then subtract the pennies. It is quite painful watching them do 1.99 + 2.99 + 1.99 + 0.99 rather than 2 + 3 + 2 + 1 - 4p
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Believe it or not they are taught those tricks about calling £1.99 £2 and then taking off the extra.
 
pjmburns said:
Believe it or not they are taught those tricks about calling £1.99 £2 and then taking off the extra.
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I have heard rumours that the teaching of arithmetic has changed in recent years and the skill of estimation is being encouraged, however a) there must be at least one calculator generation that wasn't taught, and b) I am convinced that the majority of pupils learn enough to pass exams but totally fail to realise that some of it has application once they have left school!
It would frustrate me at work that I knew which bit of mathematics to use but had forgotten how to use it, whereas lots of others knew how to use it but it hadn't dawned on them that mathematics wasn't just for exams.

My mental arithmetic is pathetic but I used to calculate aproximate logs in my head when on the tube train. I have always used multiple aproximations for mental calculations, i.e. instead of multiplying by 11, multiply by 10 then allow for the 10% error. This sort of stuff is fine 'ball-park' engineering but the £sd children were being trained to balance to the farthing at the end of the day. Presumably supermarkets that factor in 'shrinkage' aren't so fussy now?
 
jimbo said:
Just a quick enlightening joke. A tramp goes into a posh restaurant, enjoys his meal and asks for the bill. This comes to 10 shillings and six pence. The tramp says to the waiter " 10 and six are sixteen, sixteen pence is one and four, one and four is five, her's a tanner, keep the change. As an aside, even today when asked the weight of their new born baby 99% of folk give the answer in lbs and ozs.
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A little off topic but my wife has been in the hospital a couple of times in the last week and they weighed her and gave the weight in kilo's
No one here in America knows a thing about the metric system I could go on
 
Janice,

A lot has been added to this thread since I turned a blind eye this morning - been busy! Oh I'm way out of date with the crazy UK education system where I believe it is now no longer possible to actually fail an exam - it would give the poor little darlings too much of a shock! :) But I'm sure you know what I was driving at.

While I can quite happily do the metric arithmetic, I still can't envisage what much of the metric stuff looks like. For instance, it is 13 km from my house to Istron where my friend lives. I still have no idea what 13 km looks like - I have to do a quick multiply by 5 over 8 to get it to miles to visualise that! :)

Maurice :cool:
 
Hi Bob,

And yet we never expressed the engine capacities of cars and motorbikes in cubic inches
before decimalisation - always in cubic centimetres. And now we are decimalised we still
use miles per hour and miles per gallon (British gallon of course - I believe yours are a bit
different)!

Kind regards
Dave
 
Maurice. Yes do understand where you were coming from. :)
Have to confess that although I taught the metric system all my career I too struggle to visualise most metric units. Can cope with cm and metres. I cook in lb and oz. Measure in ft and inches. Weigh myself in stones and pounds. We have never really gone over to metric. o_O
 
So may I recommend a book by Thomas J Glover here in the States it's about 10 bucks get the black cover
I have a copy now and have had since the early 90,s it is the be all and the end all for conversion tables it's one of those little pocket reference books that makes you look like a white haired scientist from Germany
 
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Off topic but.... for the Maths GCSE papers I mark working out must be shown for most of the questions. There are no tick boxes.
Years ago one paper out of the three was multiple choice but that stopped over 20 years ago.
 
Quite right, Eric, they wanted to make sure you hadn't cribbed the answer from the kid in the next desk! :) "Multiple guess" as we used to call those types of question papers! When you're given three possible answers and the pass mark is as low as 33%, you can't go wrong, can you?

Janice, I still don't know my weight in metric and I only guess it in stones and pounds. Mind you, being an old male, I guess I'm not alone in not having weighed myself for several years! Ladies are a lot more sensitive about their weight and dress sizes. We just slam on a bit of casual wear. So long as I can still easily fit into a 38 inch waist, I know there are not any serious weight problems :) Oi, pipe down at the back there! :p

Maurice :cool:
 
In post#42 I said I would get my laptop to do the calculation I did in my head shown in post#15
Two thoughts ...
I now think decimalisation was an excellent idea ... we should have done it sooner ...;)
Since I retired many years ago I've forgotten so much because of using apps and Google search etc.
My laptop at work below ... I did try it without converting to pennies but got lost ... and I dropped the ½d
calcs.jpg
:)
 
sospiri said:
While I can quite happily do the metric arithmetic, I still can't envisage what much of the metric stuff looks like. For instance, it is 13 km from my house to Istron where my friend lives. I still have no idea what 13 km looks like - I have to do a quick multiply by 5 over 8 to get it to miles to visualise that!
Click to expand...

Yes, I am fully 'metricated' up to about 10 metres but beyond that I haven't a clue as I think in miles. Fuel consumption measures in this country are stupid, the choice is miles per gallon or litres per 100km, not only different units but one the dimensional inverse of the other (as one gets bigger the other gets smaller). BUT we buy fuel by the litre and use it by the mile, so neither measure is now easy to calculate!
 
Business and profession meant that I was forced into metrication; there was no option. So basics like sizes (linear and area) were in the frame. Often a reversal to older descriptions could be used as a safeguard against errors. I have often heard that in the earlier days of metric sizes in the UK many mistakes were made - some serious - and stores and warehouses were full of miss-measured timber, windows, carpets and much else besides. In assessing an area of fire in open land or woodland which was once described in acres but that became hectares. A rule of thumb for the bewildered was that a hectare was roughly the size of a football field. ;)
With regard to household shopping then once you got to know that 454g was basically the old 1 lb. some easily equated comparisons could also be made. However, it became the fact that you wanted the product or you didn't; irrespective of weight or size. I guess the most well known changes of shape and size, relative to cost, has been chocolate.
 
Robert Ensor (bob) said:
A little off topic but my wife has been in the hospital a couple of times in the last week and they weighed her and gave the weight in kilo's
No one here in America knows a thing about the metric system I could go on
Click to expand...
Bob, what is interesting as you know all of the cars built in the US are metric even the domestics are built to metric standards. The hospitals are now following in part because most of the pharmaceuticals are metric!
 
When you board an airliner ...

The pilot will set the altimeter in millibars or hectopascals but in North America and Japan they use inches of mercury.

The aircraft will measure altitude/flight levels in feet (even in France) except in Russia, China and North Korea who use metres. Russia, however, has recently changed to using feet for flight levels !

Distance across ground is measured in nautical miles in all countries.

Speed is measured in knots .. nautical miles per hour.

Wind speed is measured in knots except in Russia and China who use metres/sec.

And Air Traffic Control use all of the above ...

It all seems to work ... :)
 
We are getting our money's worth from this thread and most of us are drifting off topic ...:rolleyes:
There is another interesting thread ...

Measurements

I worked for Bryants in the 70's. They were constructing parts of Chelmsley Woods at the time. And on Area 13a they constructed a block of houses which were Metric - the rest being imperial. The first in the UK we who worked on the block were told. There was much pomp and ceremony. Chris Bryant...
birminghamhistory.co.uk birminghamhistory.co.uk
 
Since petrol pumps went metric I have always bought by the monetary value rather than the quantity. I have avoided trying to work out how much "a gallon" would be in the UK (£6+I believe). It is staggering when compared to the cost in the USA. Admittedly something like 50% is taxation in the UK.
When I had my fist car petrol was less than 5/- (25p) per gallon. Petrol varied in price dependant on how far it had to be delivered to the very many garages and filling stations that existed in pre supermarket forecourt days. I still have, somewhere, mt petrol coupons which were issued in 1973.

 
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My uncle gave me one of these for adding and subtracting £ s d and a set of Napiers bones he made from an old lino tile. They were a novelty and I much preferred to work things out in my head or on paper. In junior school we had a txt book called 10 a day Mental Arithmetic that blew the cobwebs away each afternoon. By the early 70s I rember becoming the proud owner of a casio calcultor.
Richarddye said:
When I was growing up I did not have any problems with the complexity of the old money. The most I had to deal with was a shilling, never had much more than that until I was 12 :)
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I found this article interesting and guess as school kids we must have been presented with the same problems with our maths.
chalkdustmagazine.com

Victorian maths tricks with old money - Chalkdust

Exploring mental arithmetic tricks in T. Martin's 1842 guide, 'Pounds, shillings and pence'
chalkdustmagazine.com chalkdustmagazine.com
 
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