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Pre-decimalisation money

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Kat,

Like most of the older ones on the Forum, I can remember the farthing, the halfpenny, the penny, the 12-sided threepenny bit, the little sixpence, the shilling, the florin (two bob), the half crown (2/6d), the crown (5 bob), the ten shilling note, the one pound nore, and the large white five pound note. Anything bigger and you could consider yourself rich! If I've missed anything out, put it down to my rapidly fading memory for those times. Preceding that there was also the groat, but not in general use in my young day, likewise the guinea and the half guinea.

Maurice :cool:
 
A ten shilling note (ten bob note) was my favourite when I was young and we were all familiar with the following terms.
ha'penny, tuppence, thruppence, a tanner, a bob, two bob, half a crown, ten bob note and in the 'posh' shops guineas.
We also had to be 'brainier' to deal with it ... try the following ...
Calculate how to it share out £17pounds, 11shillings, and six and half pennies between 3 people - long division in old money.
I could do it (without calculators) when I was young. :)

An old post below
oldMohawk said:
I was schooled in Imperial Units and Old Money so could cope with long division of pounds shillings and pence and was quite happy knowing my weight in stones and pounds, and my height in feet and inches.

In the 1970s the engineering company I worked for decided that we had to go metric within a timescale of two years. The change went surprisingly smoothly and we were soon working in millimetres and grams. The millimetres were a bit difficult at the start but the grams were much easier than the pounds and ounces we had used, and being engineers we still thought in 'thous' and had our unofficial units 'tads' and 'gnats'. I soon realised however that above a metre length I was still thinking in imperial units as I found out when I tried to use 'metric' for some DIY and my wallpaper lengths went 'haywire'.

I drive my car looking at my 'miles-per-gallon' and speed in 'miles-per-hour' but my concept of litres is not good so I fill my tank measuring the fuel in £'s and my sat-nav tells me 'it is so many yards to the next turn'. I still don't like 'bars' for tyre pressure so still use 'pounds-per-square-inch'.

Last year I altered my bathroom scales to give my weight in kilograms having used stones and pounds all my life and now have my room thermostat set to celsius but still get a nostalgic feeling when I look at an american weather forecasts and see temperatures in fahrenheit and in the old days if we saw 90 degrees we knew the day was going to be a 'scorcher' as some newspaper headlines put it.

But it's funny how we still measure the size of our telly screens in inches - well I do !
Click to expand...

See the following

Decimalisation In 1971

I was rummaging through a few old things of mine and I came across the following booklet about decimalisation that I am certain many will remember! Myself I was only a month away from being 5 so I don't personally! I remember Mom and Dad telling me when I got older that a lot of people felt...
birminghamhistory.co.uk birminghamhistory.co.uk
 
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I never communicated very well with my parents when it came to metres, centimetres and millimetres!!! They were still in feet and inches.
 
While no avid collector I have got a box of many old coins in my house (many came from my mother when she died)

Here is a photo of some pre-decimal coins (with a modern £1 coin for scale)

From left to right they are

Farthing - quarter penny (from 1926)
Half Penny (from 1893 I think, the coin is damaged)
A penny (from 1893 - pre-decimal I used to love finding the old coins in my change)

Coins 1.jpg
 
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Some more pre-decimal coins, with a modern £1 coin for scale

From left to right

Three pence (from 1955) - "Thrupenny bit"
Sixpence (from 1967)
Shilling - 12 pence (from 1958)
Two shillings - 24 pence (from 1948)

Why on earth did we have 240 pence in the pound!

Coins 2.jpg
 
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How about this for saving things?

The day we went decimal in 1971 I asked my girlfriend at the time (who worked in a bank) to bring me home some sealed unused coins (I paid her of course).

She brought home a stack of half pennies, pennies and two pennies.

I still have them, in their original wrapping, totally untouched by human hand for nearly 50 years !.

Not sure if they are worth anything, probably not much !

Here is a photo of themCoins 3.jpg
 
Apart from the £5 note and groat I have a sample of all the old coins and notes.
I remember the cry of older folk at the time that they felt swindled of 140 pence compared to the new coinage (100 to the £1). Then there was the fact that many things went up in price. For instance 4/11d was now 25p (an increase of one old penny.)
"we wuz robbed" :laughing:
 
My Nan once told me “always to carry a silver coin in your wallet”. “That way” she said “it would never be empty!”

Great Brummie logic!!

Took her advice and to this day I still carry a 1951 shilling piece in mine ( year of my birth) and true enough it’s always had cash to accompany it.

Thanks Nan!!!
 
Well inflation has caused the smaller new coins to be worthless, and even here in Greece supermarkets round amounts up or down to the nearest 5 cents when paying your bill and have done for 15 years at least.

Maurice :cool:
 
Kat7272 said:
Last week a ten shilling note was found in some old possessions. It's the first time I have actually handled a note from before decimalisation.

Ok, that's nothing to write home about (or to the forum!), but it got me thinking about the money that my ancestors would have been using.

Obviously I could 'search engine' the subject, but it's much more interesting asking the forum where they recommend that I look to find the history of money.

So if anyone could make any suggestions I would appreciate it.
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Well just to add my two penorth LOL, pre decimalisation money amounts were written down as £, S, D, IE £2/19/11 or even 59/11d .......... £2.0.0 + 19/- + 11d = £2/19/11. I do hope I have got this right, memory not as good as it was.
 
The question in post#5
Calculate how to it share out £17pounds, 11shillings, and six and half pence between 3 people
I use to calculate this type of question at school with no problems ... but now ...

Here goes ...
Divide £17 - 11s - 6½d by 3

1) Divide the £17 by 3 = 5 and £2 remaining

2) At 20s in a £ = 40s remaining

4) Add 40s to the 11s = 51s

5) Divide 51s by 3 = 17s

6) Divide 6d by 3 = 2d

So each person has £5 - 17s - 2d

½d left over so what to do with it ?

I will check a bit later to see if this is the right answer ... brain ache at the moment ... :rolleyes:
 
As a former maths teacher I couldn't have put it better. Not that I ever had to teach it - decimalisation came in just before I left school and about 5 years before I started teaching.
Of course you couldn't do that type of calculation on a normal calculator. :D
 
Now that Boris has got us out of the Eu (well almost) wouldn`t it be nice if he got rid of decimal money & reverted back to the old pounds shillings & pence. It would be nice but rather chaotic! I remember when they brought out the gold looking £ coin. My late mother in law gave me a pound coin & saying, "here's a gold sovereign for you son". It wasn`t just old people who found the new decimal coins confusing, i think quite a few of us did! & as for metric, i`m still confused.
 
Smudger said:
Now that Boris has got us out of the Eu (well almost) wouldn`t it be nice if he got rid of decimal money & reverted back to the old pounds shillings & pence. It would be nice but rather chaotic! I remember when they brought out the gold looking £ coin. My late mother in law gave me a pound coin & saying, "here's a gold sovereign for you son". It wasn`t just old people who found the new decimal coins confusing, i think quite a few of us did! & as for metric, i`m still confused.
Click to expand...
me also smudge. 1580805235226.png1580805436579.pngthey might bring out homer dosh for us
 
pjmburns said:
As a former maths teacher I couldn't have put it better. Not that I ever had to teach it - decimalisation came in just before I left school and about 5 years before I started teaching.
Of course you couldn't do that type of calculation on a normal calculator. :D
Click to expand...
I noticed my grandson adding up to the "base 3", just as an exercise, it dawned on me that this type of thing was what we did when we added up £sd and yards, feet and inches, but with a purpose. I'm sure Janice as a maths teacher can explain better what I am trying to say. I have somewhere a bill from early decimal days that had been manually converted to decimal, the shop keeper worked to three places of decimals, it looks quite quaint.
 
When left the army, in '68, I started work on the buses. I got into a hell of a mess with the money, I had been in Germany for three years and was used to metric currency so trying to get back to the medieval LSD was almost impossible.
 
oldMohawk said:
A ten shilling note (ten bob note) was my favourite when I was young and we were all familiar with the following terms.
ha'penny, tuppence, thruppence, a tanner, a bob, two bob, half a crown, ten bob note and in the 'posh' shops guineas.
We also had to be 'brainier' to deal with it ... try the following ...
Calculate how to it share out £17pounds, 11shillings, and six and half pennies between 3 people - long division in old money.
I could do it (without calculators) when I was young. :)

An old post below


See the following

Decimalisation In 1971

I was rummaging through a few old things of mine and I came across the following booklet about decimalisation that I am certain many will remember! Myself I was only a month away from being 5 so I don't personally! I remember Mom and Dad telling me when I got older that a lot of people felt...
birminghamhistory.co.uk birminghamhistory.co.uk
Click to expand...
£5.17.2d (Forget the halfpenny), does anyone remember when a loaf of bread was fourpence farthing? And spellcheck has just highlighted four pence. My father (the one who was always right) was an accountant and would take the fifties/sixties equivalent of a spread sheet and literally run his pencil down the amounts adding them as he went and when he did the cross check he always balanced. I do not know how he could add the whole amounts, while the rest of us added the pennies, and carried forward, then the shillings, and carried forward etc,etc. I remember that in 1953, if you had two halfcrowns (or five shillings) left over on a Friday, it was enough for five ciggies a trip to a fleapit and half a pint. I only once had a Crown coin and had great difficulty spending it as shops and buses did not like them. Dad once came home with a white five pound note.
Bob
 
Around 1900 a housewife on a meagre housekeeping budget could go to buy some butter in the Bull Ring and one market stall was selling it at
7oz for 2/11d
but another market stall was selling at
½lb for fourpence farthing an ounce.

She would have loved decimalisation to help her make best buy... :)
ps. the first stall is charging 5d per ounce so the second is best a 4¼d per ounce, provided the butter quality is the same.
 
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Bob,You should have tried working behind the bar of the Aston Villa Supp Club on a match day in the 60-70s,It was chaotic trying to add up all the pints.We had Alist by the side of the till. 1-10 pints:yum:yum
 
Long after the decimal currency came in one of my old 'Forester' customers asked me what he could do with some old pound notes he had that he'd 'put away and forgotten about'
I took them to my bank and changed them for him, all £250 worth. :), even now my memory isn't so bad I could forget a wad of cash tucked away.
 
I used to work for a book publishers and in the early 2000's an elderly gentleman who had been living in Spain for quite a long time wrote in to ask if we could send him one of our books - that was all fine but he enclosed an old 10/- note in payment :laughing:
I think we sent him out one of the office copies as it would have been too much trouble to explain!
 
Eric Gibson said:
Long after the decimal currency came in one of my old 'Forester' customers asked me what he could do with some old pound notes he had that he'd 'put away and forgotten about'
I took them to my bank and changed them for him, all £250 worth. :), even now my memory isn't so bad I could forget a wad of cash tucked away.
Click to expand...

It could be worse.

Somebody here left £20,000 in a safe that was sent away for scrap

From BBC web site

www.bbc.co.uk

Ipswich scrap metal merchant finds £20,000 in safe

The cash, which was found in old and current notes, was handed in to police.
www.bbc.co.uk
 
devonjim said:
I noticed my grandson adding up to the "base 3", just as an exercise, it dawned on me that this type of thing was what we did when we added up £sd and yards, feet and inches, but with a purpose. I'm sure Janice as a maths teacher can explain better what I am trying to say. I have somewhere a bill from early decimal days that had been manually converted to decimal, the shop keeper worked to three places of decimals, it looks quite quaint.
Click to expand...
There were quite a few lads from my youth who, if asked to do a maths problem at school struggled to do it either through inability or lack of interest but when asked to work out their winnings on a 5/- each way 3 horse accumalator bet, could give the correct answer in seconds!
 
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