Decimal day-fifty years ago today

clive

On February 15th 1971 Britain's currency changed from 12 pennies to the shilling & 20 shillings to the pound.to 100 pennies to the pound.

Dazzler21

What a horrific numbering process.

Thankful for the decimal currency system we have now.

se9addick

I genuinely don’t understand the way old money worked - guineas? Shillings? Farthings? I can’t believe it took so long for someone to realise how mad it all was and instead just have pounds and pence (with 100 pence to a pound).

What did “d” stand for in old currency - i.e. what was 6d? 6 shillings? 

clive

se9addick said:

I genuinely don’t understand the way old money worked - guineas? Shillings? Farthings? I can’t believe it took so long for someone to realise how mad it all was and instead just have pounds and pence (with 100 pence to a pound).

What did “d” stand for in old currency - i.e. what was 6d? 6 shillings? 

'd' stood for denarius which is Latin for coin.
6d was sixpence [tanner] which became two & half pence.
21 Shillings was a guinea.

IdleHans

and we've been dumbing down ever since

bobmunro

Farthing, two bob, half a crown, tanner, thrupenny bit, ten bob notes - those were the days. Hard to fathom it was 50 years ago.  

seth plum

I remember it well. Also how ripped off a lot of the population were. 
People can handle inches feet and yards even today. Can't  they?
The old system simply used different number bases and led to an arithmetically sophisticated population.

bobmunro

clive said:

se9addick said:

I genuinely don’t understand the way old money worked - guineas? Shillings? Farthings? I can’t believe it took so long for someone to realise how mad it all was and instead just have pounds and pence (with 100 pence to a pound).

What did “d” stand for in old currency - i.e. what was 6d? 6 shillings? 

'd' stood for denarius which is Latin for coin.
6d was sixpence [tanner] which became two & half pence.
21 Shillings was a guinea.

The £ sign (an upper case latin 'L') stands for Libra.

bobmunro

seth plum said:

I remember it well. Also how ripped off a lot of the population were. 
People can handle inches feet and yards even today. Can't  they?
The old system simply used different number bases and led to an arithmetically sophisticated population.

I still think in feet and inches.

DRAddick

Before my time, but the old system is mathematically better as it's much more divisible than the decimal system. People just look at it and say "Oh it's so confusing and stupid". But if you were brought up with it then it wouldn't be confusing would it? It would just be second nature to you and you'd use it without thinking. 

rananegra

I remember this well, I was living on the Cardwell estate in a maisonette. There were public information films after the kids TV. There'd been an election the year before when I was 4, so I thought that it happened the year after an election and was expecting it to happen again in 1975

bobmunro

DRAddick said:

Before my time, but the old system is mathematically better as it's much more divisible than the decimal system. People just look at it and say "Oh it's so confusing and stupid". But if you were brought up with it then it wouldn't be confusing would it? It would just be second nature to you and you'd use it without thinking. 

Not sure I agree with that - the decimal system is far better mathematically, although the old system developed better arithmetic skills.

Divisible in the sense of 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 then yes, and it gave us the betting odds we still use today!!   

clive

When i was at primary school it was the old money, so was taught how to do sums in that currency, decimal money was introduced in my first year at secondary school so i had to adapt like everybody else, but i could go back to old money today.

cafcfan

Yes, it was also a Monday.  I had been employed by the Bank of England for a grand total of 5 months and was tasked, with many others, to work the weekend of 12/13 February manually converting all the Bank's stock ledgers to decimal. The pubs in the City were doing a good trade that weekend.  :-)
(The Banks computers in those days were rudimentary with punch cards. It was not until, maybe the late '70s, early '80s that its financial ledgers were converted to a basic computer-based system made by NCR. Until that time the ledgers were still handwritten using a dip pen which needed to be dipped in indelible ink every few words.  And woe betide you if you made a mistake.) 

SantaClaus

I was born after the currency changeover but I do remember that there were still a lot of Shillings in circulation during the 80's. I think they were interchangable with the decimalised 5p coin.

seth plum

We were brought up with quite a varied system of weights and measures and currency. Even now nobody seems to think twice about the concept of a 'pint'. The currency was a big incentive to be agile with mental arithmetic. It astonishes me even now when paying £1 for something costing 64p that people in shops can't work the change out in their head without a calculator.
Can anybody do a simple sum like £2 3s 11d plus £1 18s 7d and then convert it into decimal currency?


Answer below.









£4 2s 6d
Which today would be four pounds twelve and a half pee.

clive

SantaClaus said:

I was born after the currency changeover but I do remember that there were still a lot of Shillings in circulation during the 80's. I think they were interchangable with the decimalised 5p coin.

Yes, the shilling coin was worth 5p & the two shilling coin [10p] was still in circulation until 1993.

RodneyCharltonTrotta

What was the point

guinnessaddick

bobmunro said:

seth plum said:

I remember it well. Also how ripped off a lot of the population were. 
People can handle inches feet and yards even today. Can't  they?
The old system simply used different number bases and led to an arithmetically sophisticated population.

I still think in feet and inches.

You're still working in furlongs.

Rothko

RodneyCharltonTrotta said:

What was the point

Being a normal country

RodneyCharltonTrotta

Rothko said:

RodneyCharltonTrotta said:

What was the point

Being a normal country

Whoosh :-) 

Stig

RodneyCharltonTrotta said:

What was the point

I think the point of the Imperial system was to have something workable across the whole of society. The difference between the meagre earnings of working people and the massive wealth of the aristocracy was such that a system that could only be broken into 100ths would have been unwealdy at one end of the scale and unworkable at the other. With the inclusion of farthings, Imperial was far more granualar allowing divisions of 1/960 of the base unit and thus could reflect values across society without using Italian or Greek style huge numbers. With semi-constant inflation there became less need for the lower level values and an altogether simpler system could be used. I don't know, but I suspect the timing of the change was somehow linked to the introducion of computer technology that was in its infancy. 

charltonkeston

seth plum said:

I remember it well. Also how ripped off a lot of the population were. 
People can handle inches feet and yards even today. Can't  they?
The old system simply used different number bases and led to an arithmetically sophisticated population.

I left school in 1980 and up to that point I had never used feet or inches at school. The first day at work,(engineering), it was all inches and remained that way for me way with the exception of college for r many years. Even today you will find many of the machine tools with imperial graduations, we actually bought a new lathe about 5 years ago which has dual measurement. 
What catches me out is when someone gives me a sketch in cm. I work inches or mm.
As for the money I remember decimal day well, although I was only 7 years old at the time. My gran used swear blind prices went up because of it.  

IdleHans

bobmunro said:

seth plum said:

I remember it well. Also how ripped off a lot of the population were. 
People can handle inches feet and yards even today. Can't  they?
The old system simply used different number bases and led to an arithmetically sophisticated population.

I still think in feet and inches.

I still think about thrupenny bits

RodneyCharltonTrotta

Stig said:

RodneyCharltonTrotta said:

What was the point

I think the point of the Imperial system was to have something workable across the whole of society. The difference between the meagre earnings of working people and the massive wealth of the aristocracy was such that a system that could only be broken into 100ths would have been unwealdy at one end of the scale and unworkable at the other. With the inclusion of farthings, Imperial was far more granualar allowing divisions of 1/960 of the base unit and thus could reflect values across society without using Italian or Greek style huge numbers. With semi-constant inflation there became less need for the lower level values and an altogether simpler system could be used. I don't know, but I suspect the timing of the change was somehow linked to the introducion of computer technology that was in its infancy. 

I was making  a (now clearly poor) joke.... it was a pun on decimal point.  

I will get my coat! ;-) 

clive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=045Pm78sPkQ

seth plum

Your gran was right.
The old pound could be split into three equal parts by the way.
6s 8d

SporadicAddick

I was born just after decimilisation, but remember having old Shilling (5p) and two shilling (10p) coins in my change until the new smaller 5p and 10p coins came out 1990 and 1992 respectively.

I was always amazed to have such old coins in my pocket as they seemed of another time. You will still find 50 year old 1p and 2p coins (New Penny / Pence) in your change today, but whilst they are aged they don't hark back to a different time quite so much.

I do however always think, when I get a 50 year old coin, the life experience of the many thousands of people that have held and used that coin. Many of those that used those coins when new would have lived through two world wars, seen the development of the car and air travel, and saw man walk on the moon, having been born into a society that hadn't changed that much since the industrial revolution, and I'm still using the exact coin that they will have used...

Whilst I was born into a decimal age, I still couldn't describe someones height in centimetres, or their weight in kilograms, or the distance they walked in kilometres. There are some pre-metric measurements that will always be better than what should in theory be more logical replacements. 

seth plum

Is the decimal system  likely to be more biological than logical?
Hands and feet being the guide?

Dazzler21

IdleHans said:

and we've been dumbing down ever since

It's not about dumbing down, well not entirely.  It's about using a universally understandable metric. Anyone can come to the country and understand the currency system. Can you imagine going abroad and being told that'll be £3, 5d & 2s? Weird. 

It's also why many countries use kilometres, metres, centimetres and millimetres. Can you imagine measuring something requiring fine precision in inches & feet?  If you need to cut something 7 & 1/16th of an inch or 180mm?

Personally I think it's a bit weird that we haven't moved entirely to that too. I measure all distances of running, walking and driving in miles, except the short distance runs.... If I am doing DIY I use millimetres or centimetres. I mean I use them interchangeably and maybe that's best?

SporadicAddick

Dazzler21 said:

IdleHans said:

and we've been dumbing down ever since

It's not about dumbing down. 

It's about using a universally understandable metric. 

It's why many countries use kilometres, metres and centimetres. Personally I think it's a bit weird that we haven't moved to that too. 

Some things are best left untouched. I don’t look forward to the day that I go to the pub for a couple of half litres.