The guinea wasn't "a way for shops to scam you out of an extra 12 pence." The guinea is the denomination that was used at auctions and in other markets that involve a middleman. Items sells for 100 guineas; seller receives £100; auction house receives 100 shillings. its just a handy way to pay commissions.
It's because the video didn't distinguish between old pence (240 to the pound) and new pence (from 1971, 100 to the pound). You're welcome, that will be one pound seventeen and eleven please.
As a schoolkid during Decimilisation I used to go to the shops with my Grandmother, who would totally embarrass me every time when items marked in the "new pounds and pence" by asking the shopkeeper "But how much is that in REAL money...?" 😂 I still automatically convert it in my head to good old LSD usually when shocked at the prices of things now
@digidol52 agree, things changed price but you had to pay more for much less, sort of like now with you buying chocolate ( as an example) but it's gone up in price but for a smaller bar. I remember the really good things all for under a shilling. Gran would give us half a crown for doing things like getting her fags lol 😆 once decimalisation came in. I didn't mind. The shop was about 30 secs away, provided I didn't fall over. Always doing it as a kid. Didn't realise I was dyspraxic, that it was a thing. Knees always fell in the gravel.
@@susanclifton I remember the crown (5_shillings) and the half-crown (2_shillings + 6_pence), and the Florin (2_shillings)...and I included the 10 shilling _note_ in my list (or didn't I?!)
I remember old UK money very well. We had to do special 'money sums' at school using bases 12, 20 and 10, so it was very good for our maths skills. You said that people could not memorise all the different coins, but the fact is that they did, because it was money and money is important to people. Even the most stupid people could usually work out their correct change. I was 12 when we changed to the present decimal system and I rather miss our old historical money. There was something rather cool about still using coins in 1970 that Jane Austen and William Shakespeare would have recognised.
Being born in 1948, I remember thinking in my youth that people who were alive in WW2 and remembered it were old whereas I passed a similar milestone when I realised that our old £sd system was phased out before some of my younger work colleagues were even born. Having worked in a Cost Accounts department from the mid-1960s I soon came to remember the pound to four places of decimals, so, for example, I know that 11d in old money is £0.0458 in ‘new’ money. A fairly useless talent admittedly.
I used to work for telecoms firm. A man who worked in our costing dept costed up quantities of various codes of electronic equipment parts for individual projects. These codes had an 11-digit format - 2 alphas, 6 numeric, followed by 3 alphas. There were several thousand codes in use; he knew virtually every one, and its price, and often its availability, because he knew the codes that were in short supply.
@@clairec1267the old 1s and 2s (florin) were the same size and weight as the new(1971) 5p and 10p’s so technically the shillings weren’t legal tender they still ended up in circulation, of course that changed when they shrunk the size of the 5 & 10p’s
@@johnleonard9090 Re 1 & 2shilling coins, until the introduction of the smaller 5 &10 pence coins, you would still get a mix of 5p and 1 shilling coins from the bank, same with 10p and 2 shilling coins, so they were legal tender, Note I worked in retail during the change over and did a reasonable amount of Banking, taking coins to and from a bank. The 6d coin and half crown (2s 6d coin) remained in circulation until the removal of the 1/2p, being 2&1/2p and 12&1/2p respectively.
@@johnleonard9090 They were legal tender - otherwise they wouldn't have been accepted by shops. They remained and they made the 5p and 10p coins the same size to help stagger the introduction of the new coins [less cost to the government throwing away [or melting down] good coins and less of a logistical task needed on D-Day].
@@rs1884Actually the Florin was introduced in 1849, marked “One Florin, One Tenth of a Pound”. It was also nicknamed the “Godless Florin” because it omitted the “D G” Dei Gratia, by the grace of God, from the inscription of the Queens’ name.
@@dw620 I didn’t see a 6d for long after D-day, but I understand they were kept in circulation for nearly 10 years because they were useful in London Underground ticket machines.
People in the uk used to learn their times table up to the 12x table to reflect 12 pennies in a shilling and 12 inches in a foot. People learn to understand and communicate in a whole language so learning an imoerial system through regular use is not that hard. Decimalisation does make counting easier though.
It's amazing how many people still get children to learn up to 12x without really knowing why- it's now a totally random number. Why not just go to 10 x, or go on to 15x?
@@carolineskipper6976 Up to 12x12 was retained for some time after decimalisation because imperial measures like feet and inches were still widely used. But it was changed to up to 10x10 when the first National Curriculum was introduced in 1988 because everyone in education recognised up to 12x12 was unnecessary with our base 10 money and metric measurement systems. However, the government in 2013 changed the curriculum again and required teaching up to 12x12 again (to 'keep up standards' and 'get back to basics'). Now Labour are planning to revise the school curriculum yet again and goodness knows what they'll decide to do about it.
@@carolineskipper6976 It's not that random. It's a "highly composite number", meaning it has more divisors than anything smaller, so its a particularly useful number. Lots of systems have been built around highly composite numbers. The first ones are 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 120, 180, 240 and 360.
@@barneylaurance1865 Yes that's true - but the reason people teach children up to 12x in each Table is a hangover from using feet and inches and shillings- and they mainly just do it because that's what they were taught up to.
The 2p coin actually has enormous cultural significance due to its use in coin pushers. If you go to any large seaside town in the UK, you'll find amusement arcades filled with coin pushers. While there are some 5 and 10p variants, and the 10 pence variant is growing more common due to inflation, the vast majority still use 2 pence coins, and most people call them "2p machines".
It is always annoying when someone from another country basically says something is stupid with no background knowledge. Just because there isn’t an American equivalent of 2p he can’t see any need. His stereotypical American attitude showed through with that comment. ( I specifically added the stereotypical, because I know it is not all prevailing).
I can remember with joy when my friends and I were in Redcar all playing on a 2p machine, and my friend Mike lamented that "I am not getting anywhere here" so his brother Peter said "use telekinesis " and he replied "ok" so he made a concentrating face and tried again again. He immediately dropped a large swath of 2p coins !! The change booth was close enough that the guy running it could hear the conversation and looked absolutely gobsmacked! Great days.😅
@@tonycapri2608I was in a Blackpool arcade, with my young kids. My youngest was a tight bugger, and hated spending his money on arcades, he’s 40yrs old now, and still a tight sod. Anyway, it was time to go, and he walked past a machine, and loads of 10ps were pouring out. We filled a bag up. The arcade woman thought we had been kicking the machine, and said we couldn’t keep the money. I told her to go back to her box, and leave us alone. She did, and we went off to get chips and mushy peas!😀
The abbreviation originates from the Latin currency denominations librae, solidi, and denarii. In the United Kingdom, these were referred to as pounds, shillings, and pence - £SD. Like any currency system, when you grew up with it it was easy to use, only people who had never used it had difficulty. When we went decimal it changed from £SD to just £p (pounds and pennies), and we adopted a range of coins suitable for base 10, this included 1p 2p 5p 10p 20p 50p and eventually £1 and £2 coins. To save even more money these were all smaller in size than their pre-decimal equivalents. As you can see this is close to the American denominations, but our £1 notes were not proving robust enough so were replaced with coins.
We did not use Crowns (5 shillings)- they were collectors items to commemorate special events. And they did not mention the 10 shilling note (ten bob note). Decimalisation Day was my 17th birthday.
I remember one of my friends from the seventies claimed that the UK was such a financial center for the world because in the past we could understand every country's currency but no one could understand ours.
I was born in 1979, so I’ve only ever known the current decimal system. However I do remember as a kid the old 1 and 2 shilling coins still being in circulation. They were simply regarded as 5p and 10p coins and were identical in size and weight to those coins. They could be used up until the early 90s when the 5p and 10p coins were resized
£sd were around for a long time. Even in 1914, you could buy a loaf of bread, or a pint of milk, or post a letter - for one penny (1d). Back then, there were roughly $10 to £1. Even in the vid, in 1971, a tin of sardines costs 8.5p... The value of currency has collapsed massively since then. Guineas make sense when used for sales (e.g. horses) because they include an in-built 5% profit margin for the middleman.
A 10 shilling note in the sixties was like a million pound note. You could go in to a shop and buy just about every thing and still have more change than you could count properly. Then when we were eleven in the seventies we were going to get long trousers.
For a time ,the lowest value note was the 10s, from 1971 it then became 50p coin, and from about 1985 the £1.00 note became £1.00 coin. We only have two copper coins now the 1p and 2p. It is not unlike US 1 cent, will these coins be phased out?
Am Jamaican bro and understand the shilling system perfectly well because we use to use it as well, I know the metric way as well we use them mix and cause no confusion
IIRC the one shilling coin in use from 1816 to 1990 is the world's longest serving coin. While the image of the monarch on the coin changed, of course, the coin remained the same size and weight. It survived decimalization, as the new 5p coin was the same size and weight, and 1s coins could be used interchangeably with them until withdrawn in 1990 (when the 5p coin was made smaller). The 2s coin remained in circulation similarly interchangeable with the 10p coin until that too was made smaller.
Prior to decimalisation the standard currency was referred to as LSD ( pounds shillings and pence) This stems to Roman times, the £ sign was actually a flamboyantly drawn L which stood for Lira, S equals a Shilling (as explained in the video) and d stood for denarii hence LSD..
At 67 I am old enough to remember loving the "threpney" bit - three pence peice - to buy a bottle of milf for school. Loved sixpence's too. and have quite a few silver ones! Never delt with anything more than pennies, half penny, threpney bits, sixpence, shilling and pound note. Simple. Hated the change to decimal - every single price went up significantly. So still think of 5p as a shilling - which used to be a lot of money, and is now virtually worthless. Still has a large collection, and have quite a few silver sixpences! Beauties. Speeds and distances are still in miles. I know my weight and height in Imperial, no idea the metric. Still still have a car that measures fuel efficiant by mpg and that it can turn on a sixpence 😁
The US has a guinea - a shelf price of a dollar. Walking and cycling signs are in km, but road signs are in miles and there have been no serious proposals to change to metric given the astronomic costs
Having been born in the 1950's I never had to use farthings although they still existed in old school text books. I also never came across a crown except as a commemorative coin not used in general transactions. The ten shilling note was important for transactions i.e. 1/2 £. It would have been better to rename the ten bob note as the pound and 100 p would equal ten bob. What happened was a new penny was looked upon as equal to an old penny and retailers quickly took advantage leading to huge inflation. If they has used ten bob as the new pound the divergence in value between an old and new penny would not have been as great. I think the politics of the value of a pound against other currencies played a large part using a less consumer friendly system.
The farthing was dropped around the time I was born, as a kid in the sixties I can confirm we never saw a crown and there was a 10 shilling note, which has been left off this video. My grandmother would always press a half crown into my hand when we visited, except my birthday & Christmas when she would give me a 10 shilling note.
Ah the ol' 'ten bob note' as my parent's used to call it. Shame the phrase 'bent as a nine bob note' (meaning crooked, not derogatory) was rendered totally meaningless!
@Chewiebakke Oh yes. They're just not the same now. Do you remember Palm Toffee for 2d ? Liquorice was tastier too. Sweet Cigarettes, pouch tobacco that was coconut. Liquorice wood. Our school got given Cadburys chocolate every year too, just the 1d bars, but every child got one. Oxo crisps too. So much better confectionery for lots less money. Perhaps they tasted better because you only got them occasionally when there were some pennies to spare lol.
@Chewiebakke you are on my wavelength lol. They say memories get better with age, but I am so pleased to have been born when I was. The world was trying to recover and if you had the radio and books to read you were happy. We had imagination. My parents were cockneys, but didn't have the accent, my mother's sisters and brothers talked differently to her and my dad's family were upper working class. He used to teach me music hall songs, but not many people remember them now.
I was six during decimalization so I do vaguely remember the old money, I had an uncle who would convert everything into pound shillings and pence so that he could work out what was owed and then convert it back to the new money, you could get little books that converted everything for you. As for the guinea it is still used at the Tattersalls racehorse sale at Newmarket, I don't know about now but the odd shilling was the commission. They also used to give the person leading the horse around the ring one pound for every thousand pounds the horse sells for, very nice if you're leading a million pound horse.
We all (I am in my 60s) learnt these easily enough at school, but most people welcomed the shift to decimal coinage (on 15th February, 1971). It dealt a death blow to coin-collecting, since old coins were quickly melted down.
It caused an inflation spike, due to decimal rounding. For example, an item that cost 9d in old money had to be priced at 4p in new money. As 9d was worth 3.75p, 4p equated to 9.6d. That doesn't sound like much on its own, but it made a full week's shopping noticeably more expensive. In the Monty Python 'Hell's Granny' sketch, there is a shop window displaying prices in old money. You could buy quite a lot for a quid in those days.
Looking back, it was a silly system... but it made perfect sense at the time. BTW, the crown coin was rarely used - it was mainly issued as a commemorative, and people didn't tend to have it in their wallets. Oh, and nobody called 3d "threepence", it was always "thruppence".
There are videos on the BBC archive channel interviewing people about the switchover and most were really resistant and said they couldn’t understand it. One claimed that her car would use more fuel because it would be sold in litres instead of gallons.
the press and TV was so full of scare stories about D-Day they had team ready to witness and report stories about OAP crying the only story next day was a kid got a 1/2 penny stuck up his nose
The slang term, ‘nicker’ for a pound leads to the old joke ‘Why can’t a woman with a wooden leg change a pound note?’. Because she’s only got half a knicker…
Before the widespread use of decimal/base 10 number systems. A lot of countries based things around the number 12. We still use some like 24 (x2) hours in a day, 60 (x5) minutes in an hour, 12 inches in a foot. Just off the top of my head. It's hard to explain, but 12 is divisible by 1,2,3,4 and 6, meaning it was very easy to divide and portion things which is what you would generally be doing back then, in terms of mathematics. This is just a product of that system (the pennies/shillings). It would probably be very easy to understand as that is how everyone was hardwired to think with numbers. But it should have been replaced long before it was! My parents used these as kids!
The base 12 system goes all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. 12 is a natural number to count in, using your hands. You count to 12, pressing your thumb to different sections of your fingers: 3 sections per finger, 4 fingers. Then, with the other hand, you count how many times you've counted to 12 on the first hand, up to 5 times. 5 lots of 12 is 60. Hence 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day etc.
The reason that independent Ireland kept the British system was that it was, initially, a poor country and it made sense to copy the much richer UK. Also, Irish coins were minted in London and were exactly the same size as their British equivalents.
When D day came in February 1971 the old system and coins were still allowed for a year or two and this caused even more confusion. I remeber older people saying things like: " Don't give me change in those new coins ... I want the real money!". Customers were were ripped off as shop assistants were told to round everything up when weighing food items. It sparked a new bout of inflation too.
Back in the 70s one of the left over coins from old money was the half-shilling which became the tuppence ha'penny.(2 1/2p). They were still legal tender but they didn't make them so to see one was quite rare.
We needed these coins for people to be paid or to pay for things like bus fare. As a child my parents gave me 3 pence ( thruppence)pocket money a week and after two weeks I could buy a book. I graduated to 6 pence later. My father was paid £1.10 shillings in his first job in the civil service in 1946, a well paid job.
I'm not 100% sure of the amount, but when I started work in 1971, I was still being paid in the old money. We still got paid a pay packet...brown and about 4"×4"...and got the huge sum of about £2 10s 6d per week. Of course mum and dad took a chunk of it for food and board. I still had plenty left to ride the bus, buy clothes and cigarettes and go out with my mates to pubs and clubs, etc. 2 to 3 nights a week. We also went to the cinema, chippy, etc.! Man, money went far back then.
I have all those, got thousands of British coins going all the way back to the Roman Empire. Only ever got the chance to use the 1 and 2 Shillings while they were still being removed from circulation.
Don't forget JJ that the pound sterling, shillings and pence etc goes back around 1300 years to the Anglo Saxon period. The pennies were made of silver and weighed 1 240th of a pound. Much, much later when paper money came along they were "promissory notes". Our bank notes still say "I promise to pay the bearer" 1, 5, 10 pounds etc. Because way back when it meant a pounds weight of silver.
Yes, they were using this until 2 years before I was born, so fortunately, I never had to use it, but for context, the year I was born, I was taken as a baby to the first McDonalds in the UK. So, they were still using this just 2 years before we got McDonald's.
in uk seaside towns we have arcade machines that use 2ps, that push them on a moving platform so you can win more 2ps, so 2ps have been tried to be removed but cant be due to all the 2p machines, also the entire uk still uses miles, we havent switched over yet
Horses are still sold in guineas. Now the pounds go to the owner(s) and the shillings (now equivalent to 5p) goes to tne groom, stable person etc who looked after the horse.
The smallest coin was one eighth of one penny. The basis of the pound sterling was 454 grammes of sterling silver. Currency was made from silver because it was more readily available than gold. Paper notes developed from promissory notes from banks that held the physical silver ingots. 454 grammes of silver could be divided into coins of silver. Shillings and Florins were made from silver. The smaller denominations were made from copper to the value of the metal content.
We grew with the Lsd system and it was used in juniour schools to teach maths. We had scores, 20 items, a gross, 144 items, and not forgetting a dozen, 12 items. It's easier now, but I dont remeber finding it difficult pre-decimalisation as we reheared it in school when leaning aritmetic and then again in Real Life each day when we bought sweets and comics and so on.
I'm old enough to have been born in the late 1950s, so I was a kid when the £sd system was in operation. It was easy to understand, simply because I grew up with it. When decimalisation came along [the clue is "deci" or 10], being base 10, it was also dead easy to change to. Many of the adults of that day spent ages trying to convert money back to £sd in their heads because that was the only way they could measure the value of what they might be buying with their new money. It soon became clear to anyone who could quickly convert 100p back to 240d that items were more expensive in many cases. The prices had been nudged up. These days I can still nostalgically think and work in £sd quite easily, but £p is obviously easier.
My mother was one of the last generation to learn the old coin system, she worked in the railway ticket office so had to work out people pay packets every week based on the old £sd system, and was rightly annoyed her efforts to learn it so well went to waste when they changed it. I have a commemoration set of some of the last pre-decimal currency they made, from late 1970 before they decimalised in early 1971.
As a child of the 50s, you grew up with whatever money circulated in your household (usually not very much) and just understood it. My pocket money (spent in the sweetshop) was maybe 6 pence, my big brother 1 shilling. I remember once at age 9 or ten being given a 10 bob note and this was wealth I could only barely comprehend - suddenly I was rich. Also, if you have ever eaten smarties, you would take the empty tube and fill it with threepenny bits - 40 fitted in the tube which meant you had saved £1 !
A few years ago my wife and i in a fit of nostalgia spent a happy hour working through sume predecimalisation problems. Funny how it all came back ( i admit it took a time to remember how to divide Lsd. That's pounds shilings and pence not the drug )
The other changes were in what the coins were made of. The sixpence up until the mid 1920s was full sterling silver after this it was changed to being 50% silver until around 1946 when it was changed to the much cheaper cupronickel alloy.
I was 15 years old when this happened and the only impact I noticed was that sweets (candy) seemed to cost more as prices seemed to have been rounded up to the nearest new pence.
You are sure right they cost more. But who cares what a junior kid thinks about costs. A sgebert foutain cost thruppence pre decimalisation and 3p after. So they told people they stayed the same and there was no inflation. But 1/80th of a pound became 1/33.33333 of a pound.
My first pay packet was for 11 pounds 1 shilling 10 pence - in Nov 1965 while on 14 Feb 1966 when we converted it changed 22 dollars 10 cents. I am In Australia.
Some people still have a sixpence to put in their Christmas pudding each year for luck. and we do still have the 1000 and 2000 Guinea-Stakes horse races, but then again, the horse races still measure distances in furlongs, horse racing never really got on with metric.
Britain still uses imperial measurements for distance (miles) and speed (30mph, 50mph etc), weights & measures (stones, pounds and ounces), liquids - petrol (Gas) / diesel we use litres, but for drinks we use pints (pint of beer / pint of milk etc).
I don't remember anyone actually saying things like "2 shillings and 4 pence". It was "two and four" and written as 2/4. A pound was a quid . Some shops marked items as 30 shillings though, rather than "one pound 10 shill8ngs". It often made the items seem less and maybe was used to push items.
It made perfect sense to me, as a nine year-old, then they took all the "proper" money away. To make life more interesting, UK Treasury bonds used to be priced in 64ths, because a 64th of a pound makes perfect sense. Used to get a half-crown a week for pocket money, and you could buy a comic plus your own bodyweight in sweets for that, or so it seemed.
Base 240 is divisible by more prime numbers than base 100 (that's why there were more coins then). I collect Shillings (which is 5 pence now) and my collection includes those from every Monarch starting with George I. I also have all the changes in design for those from Queen Victoria, and most for the subsequent Monarchs. The earliest Shillings in my collection were 92.5% silver content (George I 1723, George II 1758, George III 1787) and were thinner and slightly larger than later coins, becoming standardised with the 1817 George III coin, eventually (with the same shape and size) the 5 pence coin in 1968. Silver content changed in 1920 to 50% silver until 1946 when it changed to Cupro Nickel. The early attempt to decimalise the currency was notable during Queen Victoria's Reign with the introduction of the Florin (2 shillings, or one 10th of a pound, later 10 pence) and the Double Florin (one fifth of a pound), the later proved to be unpopular as it was too close in size to the Crown, some some shopkeepers and taverns were short changed if they didn't have their wits about them). The buying power of a shilling in 1723 today would be just under £10.
Mum and dad put a half crown in each of our Christmas stockings. The fair came to town for a week starting every Boxing day. That half crown enabled us repeat trips to the fair during Christmas school break.
Born in '68 I remember old money kicking around very vaguely, but I never mastered the values. I haven't seen any road signs in km yet, not a fan of that! lol. Before the Euro I remember using Italian money and getting very confused, I seem to recall it was something like 500 Lire to roughly 1 British Pound which gave me a headache trying to work out what I was spending
We used to have a pub in London ( the Kings Head Islington) that still charged for beer in old money until the eighties, although you just gave them new money and pretended to know how much it was.
I worked as a cashier for about 15 years, and I'd say I saw a shilling turn up maybe once every couple of months, they look and feel very similar to the 10p coin so while vending machines might reject them they'll usually go unnoticed when handing them to people. I used to make a habit of swapping them out for real 10p coins cause I like to collect them, they're great looking coins and they have a more satisfying jingle sound than modern coins.
Fun video and reminded me of all I had to learn as a little kid. It wasn't that hard if that was all you knew - it was normal and the new system seemed difficult to a 12 year old when it first changed but we soon got used to it. They didn't mention the 10 shilling note (half a pound) and I never saw a Crown they'd disappeared just after the war. Given where prices are now no one has any need for coins - there's so little you can buy for under a pound. Also going decimal did make the coin system easier to understand but inadvertently caused inflation. 1 new pence was worth 2.5 of the old pence so if something went up by a penny in the new system it's the equivalent of 2.5 times price rise really.
I find it interesting how many sayings we still have in the UK that refer to old money, for example if a vehicle can make an unusually tight turn, you can say "it turns on a sixpence". Or when most people say something is cheap/plentiful by exclaiming "those are ten a penny", my family say "those are ten a tanner". Or "I don't care tuppence for your opinion!". Or "bent as a nine-bob note" (there was no such thing as a nine-bob note, so if you got one it was an obvious fake, or "bent". And yes, I know there are other connotations to this saying). I know there are other sayings but my brain's gone. Also if someone uses modern slang you don't understand, you can ask "what's that in old money?" (ie, "translate it into a way my old brain will understand, please". I generally ask this when people tell me their new-style GCSE grades lol). Btw it's not true that decimalisation went off without "old people kicking up a fuss". I had family members who never got their head around the new money and got very upset and confused. Mostly it was because they were trying to convert the new prices back into old money to work out what they were spending, thereby creating a never-ending translation battle in their heads. There was also widespread suspicion that shopkeepers had used decimalisation to put up their prices (ie, converted the prices into new money then rounded it up). Easiest way of thinking about the old money is that most of the denominations are just like when Americans say "dime" or "nickel", so in the grand scheme of things not worth thinking about. Very very basically: An American would have 5 cents = 1 nickel, 20 nickels = one dollar (overall 100 cents in a dollar) Old English money would have 12 pence = one shilling, 20 shillings = one pound (overall 240 pence in a pound). Everything else is just a nickname for a part of the whole. Yes I know this is very basic, but it's easier to understand that way.
This 6 year old Kiwi was elated when New Zealand switched to decimal currency (dollar) in July 1967 because no matter how hard dad tried to teach me that other crap I just couldn't begin to grasp it. Within another 7 years everything was metric.
I was 8 years old in 1971. I remember using the old coins but with decimal values. I got used to a shilling being 5p and a florin 10p before the new coins were minted. It was much more fun flipping heads or tails with an old penny coin. Thank goodness they discontinued the decimal half penny coin.
One reason for the need for so many small coins in the £sd (aka LSD) system was that, in the heady days of Empire, the £ was so strong as to be a rediculously large unit of wealth. For instance, a basic 2-story terace house in Devenport c. 1912 was (drum roll...) £80 new. The £ was too big for everyday shopping - you needed smaller sub-units, thus a proliferation of tiny amounts.
When I started school we used to spend time in Maths class doing simple ' Money Sums' which I never really got the hang of. Instead of using base 10 which we used for everything else, suddenly we were working with 12's and 20's......and I couldn't get my head around it. When I was 7, suddenly we stopped covering the topic of 'money' in maths lessons, and then when I was about 9 we switched to decimal currency. JJ You are right that a shilling was to the pound as 5c is to the dollar. When we moved across to decimal currency, the old shilling coins were suddenly called 5p. We carried on using both coins for years, until they gradually took the shilling out of circulation, finalising the shift in 1990. The two shilling coin (which was now worth 10p) was still in circulation until 1992.
I was 18 when Decimal Currency came in and had been in full-time employment for over a year. When I was 13 I started delivering meat on a push-bike for a Butcher and taking the money and giving change. That sum in the video? I did it in my head ;-) What the video got wrong was that the Crown was hardly ever used - I never saw one. He also missed out the Ten Shilling Note (or Half a Bar) which became the 50p coin.
As a kid in the 1960s I had to learn all this stuff and the imperial measures too. It was hard to learn, but good for your maths skills. For pennies you had to use the 12x table. The threepenny was actually referred to in London British English as the thrupenny. We also had ten shilling notes called a 10 bob note, hence the old saying as bent as an nine bob note, in other words a fraud, a forgery, which this video doesn't even mention. It was once a common taxi fare, so very old silver charms, one of which I brought secondhand, containing a 10 shilling note. I have a Sooty glove puppet, that my father brought me for a guinea in Hamleys. The decimal half penny was withdrawn not just because of inflation, but also because they were easily lost, so a waste of money for the Mint to produce. I lost 10 of them. That's 5 pence worth lost.
In terms of British imperial/metric system, we have settled on a mixture of both. We buy food by kilos and grams but we weigh ourselves in Stones, Pounds and Ounces. We still measure distance in miles and yards but use Meters and centimetres for small measurements. Height is feet and inches. Cars parts are metric but the wheels are still in inches. We buy petrol by the litre but use miles per (UK) gallon. Beer is by the pint, spirits are centilitres. Houses are in square meters but carpets are by the square yard. I grew up in this transition period and was taught both systems. Even how to send old money because by then they were toys. I still have a box filled with old coins that we used to play with. And yes, It was a mindfuck, but you got used to it. There is an easier way for Americans to understand. It was all by weight and in terms of coins, silver. For a long time, £1 = $5, 1 shilling had the same value as a quarter. 20 Shillings in £1, 20 quarters in $5. 20 shillings or quarters weighed the same as 1 pound (lbs) in silver. The Sterling had a higher value than the dollar. They only really equalised in the last 10 years for so.
There's a good many inaccuracies in that video. I was ten years old when we switched to decimal currency, so I'm familiar with both systems. When I started school in 1965 we were taught decimal currency and the metric system, even though the old £sd were still in use, and most people still used Imperial units (ounces, feet, pints...) I remember receiving coins up to 100 years old in my change, though most Victorian pennies and halfpennies had turned black and been worn almost smooth by all that use.
I was three when the changeover took place. My dad had a shop and my mum has told me many times just how many customers struggled with the change, mainly the older generations. It took them a long time to get used to the 'new money' My mum still occassionally to this day will convert in her head what she is buying to 'old money' because it sounds so much more expensive to her that way. It helps curb that excessive spending I am too young to really remember it happening, but I still have a post office account book from an account which was opened for me when I was born. It starts with pounds, shillings and pence and then the balance is changed to the decimal equivalents in 1971
I am old enough to have learned to add up in £ S & d, it certainly made me able to divide by 20 and 12 fairly quickly! I also remember the 'ten bob note' which as 'half a £1' would later be replaced by the 50pence piece. I have never yet seen a kilometre road sign in the UK and our speedometers are still in 'miles per hour'. I don't think that will ever change. We mostly buy milk, juice and soft drinks in litres, but still have pints of beer at the pub. I can't imagine what 1.83 metres is, but CAN imagine 6 feet ....... guess we are a bit of an interesting mix!
we are creeping to metric an inch at a time but we buy half a kilo bust ask for a pound and dont care if we only get 500grams we buy 2 pints of milk but it comes in a litre bottle but if you you want to start a revolution in the UK it is easy the cry will go around they have taken our shillings they have ripped up our nickers but they will NEVER take our pints away mind you the US is creeping to metric one 9mm a time
I was born after decimalisation and I've got a sense of nostalgia for the £sd arrangement; for starters I would've thought that having access to calculators on a regular basis would make it easier to work with a non-decimal currency.
I vividly remember as a child going into our local corner shop on the way to school having worked out in advance exactly how much I needed to spend in order to get at least one each of the new coins in my change. Only problem is that having watched this I've now realised it can't have been 'D Day', when the old money ceased to be legal tender! Oh well. Just a few more years before I can't remember my own name, but can remember exactly what day that was as if it were yesterday.
The other thing to remember here is cost of items in the 30's, 40's etc. As an example, my favourite lolly was called a 3d, because, in 1963 it cost 3 pennies. No equivalent is available in decimal money so the price goes up. We could buy farthing chews, a quarter of sweets for one or two pennies in our local sweet shop. Decimalisation was also used to increase prices at the time, half a new p was more than an old p, instant inflation. Us little ones were ripped off.........
I am just about too young (57) to have ever used the Old Money....thank goodness. However, I remember 5p coins that said 1 Shilling and 10p coins that said 2 Shillings, as those coins were retained for a while. Very confusing for a child who had never spent shillings.
I'm so glad I missed pre decimal currency. I can barely do maths in my head so making the right change is tricky enough as it is now. 😅 I do remember when I was a kid though that 1 and 2 shilling coins were the same size as 5 and 10 pence coins, so they stayed around probably until they made those coins smaller in about the early 90s. There was also a half penny coin that they didn't mention but I think it was withdrawn in 1984 so I wouldn't have used one myself.
The guinea wasn't "a way for shops to scam you out of an extra 12 pence." The guinea is the denomination that was used at auctions and in other markets that involve a middleman. Items sells for 100 guineas; seller receives £100; auction house receives 100 shillings. its just a handy way to pay commissions.
Totally agree. I cannot remember ever seeing items in a shop being sold for Guineas.
THANK YOU.
Still used today in some livestock auctions. The Guinea equalling £1.05
@@Phil.... That's right, id forgotten that part!
@@johnp8131 You're just not old enough. In the 1950s and 60s you would often see posh shops selling e.g. cashmere sweaters, 9 guineas.
You have no problem with 12 inches in a foot so why can’t you grasp 12 pence in a shilling?
Speak for yourself! Some people DÍD have a problem with 12 inches in a foot.
It's because the video didn't distinguish between old pence (240 to the pound) and new pence (from 1971, 100 to the pound). You're welcome, that will be one pound seventeen and eleven please.
14 pounds to a stone
As a schoolkid during Decimilisation I used to go to the shops with my Grandmother, who would totally embarrass me every time when items marked in the "new pounds and pence" by asking the shopkeeper "But how much is that in REAL money...?" 😂 I still automatically convert it in my head to good old LSD usually when shocked at the prices of things now
@digidol52 agree, things changed price but you had to pay more for much less, sort of like now with you buying chocolate ( as an example) but it's gone up in price but for a smaller bar. I remember the really good things all for under a shilling. Gran would give us half a crown for doing things like getting her fags lol 😆 once decimalisation came in. I didn't mind. The shop was about 30 secs away, provided I didn't fall over. Always doing it as a kid. Didn't realise I was dyspraxic, that it was a thing. Knees always fell in the gravel.
They missed out the 10 shilling note or ten bob note, which was half a pound. The crown was not a normal part of currency before decimalisation.
Half crowns were in use when I was a child.
@@weejackrussell I said crowns, not half crowns
Also, not mentioned was the 1/2 p.
Crowns did see circulation before 20th century 🎩
@@susanclifton
I remember the crown (5_shillings) and the half-crown (2_shillings + 6_pence), and the Florin (2_shillings)...and I included the 10 shilling _note_ in my list (or didn't I?!)
There was one advantage to the old system. You could divide a pound by three -six shillings and eight pence. No rounding problems.
I remember old UK money very well. We had to do special 'money sums' at school using bases 12, 20 and 10, so it was very good for our maths skills. You said that people could not memorise all the different coins, but the fact is that they did, because it was money and money is important to people. Even the most stupid people could usually work out their correct change. I was 12 when we changed to the present decimal system and I rather miss our old historical money. There was something rather cool about still using coins in 1970 that Jane Austen and William Shakespeare would have recognised.
We did sums in yards, feet and inches etc as well just as I am sure American children do.
@@Ben-xe8ps That's right! Ten chains makes a furlong, eight furlongs make a mile, etc... 😀
@@iainsan one chain is a cricket pitch
And an acre is 10 chains by 1 chain (4840 square yards).
Being born in 1948, I remember thinking in my youth that people who were alive in WW2 and remembered it were old whereas I passed a similar milestone when I realised that our old £sd system was phased out before some of my younger work colleagues were even born. Having worked in a Cost Accounts department from the mid-1960s I soon came to remember the pound to four places of decimals, so, for example, I know that 11d in old money is £0.0458 in ‘new’ money. A fairly useless talent admittedly.
I used to work for telecoms firm. A man who worked in our costing dept costed up quantities of various codes of electronic equipment parts for individual projects. These codes had an 11-digit format - 2 alphas, 6 numeric, followed by 3 alphas. There were several thousand codes in use; he knew virtually every one, and its price, and often its availability, because he knew the codes that were in short supply.
We have not adopted metric for driving - road signs are in miles, not kilometres.
I hate metric, don’t use it at all , I use Fahrenheit also it just works for my brain for some reason.
@@stopanimalcruelty298I feel the same about Stone Age imperial. Detest it.
When i was a kid you could use a shilling as a 5p that was until they changed the size of a 5p.
and the two shilling that looked a lot better than the new 10 pence piece
I'm sure one shilling used to be written on the big 5p coins
@@clairec1267the old 1s and 2s (florin) were the same size and weight as the new(1971) 5p and 10p’s so technically the shillings weren’t legal tender they still ended up in circulation, of course that changed when they shrunk the size of the 5 & 10p’s
@@johnleonard9090 Re 1 & 2shilling coins, until the introduction of the smaller 5 &10 pence coins, you would still get a mix of 5p and 1 shilling coins from the bank, same with 10p and 2 shilling coins, so they were legal tender, Note I worked in retail during the change over and did a reasonable amount of Banking, taking coins to and from a bank.
The 6d coin and half crown (2s 6d coin) remained in circulation until the removal of the 1/2p, being 2&1/2p and 12&1/2p respectively.
@@johnleonard9090 They were legal tender - otherwise they wouldn't have been accepted by shops. They remained and they made the 5p and 10p coins the same size to help stagger the introduction of the new coins [less cost to the government throwing away [or melting down] good coins and less of a logistical task needed on D-Day].
The 20 pence coin wasn’t introduced until the 9th June 1982.
Technically, Queen Victoria introduced the Double Florin in the 1880's which had the same 1/5th of a pound as the 20p.
@@rs1884Actually the Florin was introduced in 1849, marked “One Florin, One Tenth of a Pound”. It was also nicknamed the “Godless Florin” because it omitted the “D G” Dei Gratia, by the grace of God, from the inscription of the Queens’ name.
So many errors in the original video...
The 6d wasn't withdrawn for nearly a decade, either... which totally confused visitors to the country.
@@dw620 I didn’t see a 6d for long after D-day, but I understand they were kept in circulation for nearly 10 years because they were useful in London Underground ticket machines.
People in the uk used to learn their times table up to the 12x table to reflect 12 pennies in a shilling and 12 inches in a foot. People learn to understand and communicate in a whole language so learning an imoerial system through regular use is not that hard. Decimalisation does make counting easier though.
It's amazing how many people still get children to learn up to 12x without really knowing why- it's now a totally random number. Why not just go to 10 x, or go on to 15x?
@@carolineskipper6976
Up to 12x12 was retained for some time after decimalisation because imperial measures like feet and inches were still widely used. But it was changed to up to 10x10 when the first National Curriculum was introduced in 1988 because everyone in education recognised up to 12x12 was unnecessary with our base 10 money and metric measurement systems. However, the government in 2013 changed the curriculum again and required teaching up to 12x12 again (to 'keep up standards' and 'get back to basics'). Now Labour are planning to revise the school curriculum yet again and goodness knows what they'll decide to do about it.
@@Langstrath what 12 x 12, really , that's gross.
😊
@@carolineskipper6976 It's not that random. It's a "highly composite number", meaning it has more divisors than anything smaller, so its a particularly useful number. Lots of systems have been built around highly composite numbers. The first ones are 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 120, 180, 240 and 360.
@@barneylaurance1865 Yes that's true - but the reason people teach children up to 12x in each Table is a hangover from using feet and inches and shillings- and they mainly just do it because that's what they were taught up to.
The 2p coin actually has enormous cultural significance due to its use in coin pushers. If you go to any large seaside town in the UK, you'll find amusement arcades filled with coin pushers. While there are some 5 and 10p variants, and the 10 pence variant is growing more common due to inflation, the vast majority still use 2 pence coins, and most people call them "2p machines".
Also similar size to the old Halfpenny (1/2d) which was used in a game called Shove H'pp'ny often played in Pubs.
It is always annoying when someone from another country basically says something is stupid with no background knowledge. Just because there isn’t an American equivalent of 2p he can’t see any need. His stereotypical American attitude showed through with that comment. ( I specifically added the stereotypical, because I know it is not all prevailing).
I can remember with joy when my friends and I were in Redcar all playing on a 2p machine, and my friend Mike lamented that "I am not getting anywhere here" so his brother Peter said "use telekinesis " and he replied "ok" so he made a concentrating face and tried again again. He immediately dropped a large swath of 2p coins !! The change booth was close enough that the guy running it could hear the conversation and looked absolutely gobsmacked! Great days.😅
@@tonycapri2608I was in a Blackpool arcade, with my young kids. My youngest was a tight bugger, and hated spending his money on arcades, he’s 40yrs old now, and still a tight sod. Anyway, it was time to go, and he walked past a machine, and loads of 10ps were pouring out. We filled a bag up. The arcade woman thought we had been kicking the machine, and said we couldn’t keep the money. I told her to go back to her box, and leave us alone. She did, and we went off to get chips and mushy peas!😀
The abbreviation originates from the Latin currency denominations librae, solidi, and denarii. In the United Kingdom, these were referred to as pounds, shillings, and pence - £SD. Like any currency system, when you grew up with it it was easy to use, only people who had never used it had difficulty.
When we went decimal it changed from £SD to just £p (pounds and pennies), and we adopted a range of coins suitable for base 10, this included 1p 2p 5p 10p 20p 50p and eventually £1 and £2 coins. To save even more money these were all smaller in size than their pre-decimal equivalents.
As you can see this is close to the American denominations, but our £1 notes were not proving robust enough so were replaced with coins.
We did not use Crowns (5 shillings)- they were collectors items to commemorate special events. And they did not mention the 10 shilling note (ten bob note). Decimalisation Day was my 17th birthday.
I used to get a crown every birthday and Christmas from my great aunts
I remember one of my friends from the seventies claimed that the UK was such a financial center for the world because in the past we could understand every country's currency but no one could understand ours.
yep adding up 3 columns 1st every 12 carry one over middle column every 20 carry one over
I was born in 1979, so I’ve only ever known the current decimal system. However I do remember as a kid the old 1 and 2 shilling coins still being in circulation. They were simply regarded as 5p and 10p coins and were identical in size and weight to those coins. They could be used up until the early 90s when the 5p and 10p coins were resized
£sd were around for a long time. Even in 1914, you could buy a loaf of bread, or a pint of milk, or post a letter - for one penny (1d). Back then, there were roughly $10 to £1.
Even in the vid, in 1971, a tin of sardines costs 8.5p... The value of currency has collapsed massively since then.
Guineas make sense when used for sales (e.g. horses) because they include an in-built 5% profit margin for the middleman.
The farthing ceased to be legal tender in the UK, after 31 December 1960. Getting a 10 shilling note in a birthday card was really something
A 10 shilling note in the sixties was like a million pound note. You could go in to a shop and buy just about every thing and still have more change than you could count properly. Then when we were eleven in the seventies we were going to get long trousers.
Though if the birthday card came through the mail, the gift would usually be in the form of a Postal Order.
even today you can buy a lucky charm with a ten bob note in it
I used to buy Blackjacks and MoJos with Farthings or I'd buy 4 for a penny.
For a time ,the lowest value note was the 10s, from 1971 it then became 50p coin, and from about 1985 the £1.00 note became £1.00 coin. We only have two copper coins now the 1p and 2p. It is not unlike US 1 cent, will these coins be phased out?
Am Jamaican bro and understand the shilling system perfectly well because we use to use it as well, I know the metric way as well we use them mix and cause no confusion
IIRC the one shilling coin in use from 1816 to 1990 is the world's longest serving coin. While the image of the monarch on the coin changed, of course, the coin remained the same size and weight. It survived decimalization, as the new 5p coin was the same size and weight, and 1s coins could be used interchangeably with them until withdrawn in 1990 (when the 5p coin was made smaller). The 2s coin remained in circulation similarly interchangeable with the 10p coin until that too was made smaller.
After decimalisation the sixpence was still in circulation and was worth 2 1/2 p. Also the 20p piece wasn't introduced until about 1980 IIRC.
Prior to decimalisation the standard currency was referred to as LSD ( pounds shillings and pence)
This stems to Roman times, the £ sign was actually a flamboyantly drawn L which stood for Lira, S equals a Shilling (as explained in the video) and d stood for denarii hence LSD..
@@zaphodbeeblebrox6627 Those Romans, with their roads and baths and aquaducts and LSD!
@@iolog513 I know!
What have the Romans ever done for us?
At 67 I am old enough to remember loving the "threpney" bit - three pence peice - to buy a bottle of milf for school. Loved sixpence's too. and have quite a few silver ones! Never delt with anything more than pennies, half penny, threpney bits, sixpence, shilling and pound note. Simple. Hated the change to decimal - every single price went up significantly. So still think of 5p as a shilling - which used to be a lot of money, and is now virtually worthless. Still has a large collection, and have quite a few silver sixpences! Beauties. Speeds and distances are still in miles. I know my weight and height in Imperial, no idea the metric. Still still have a car that measures fuel efficiant by mpg and that it can turn on a sixpence 😁
A bottle of MILF??? 😂😂😂😂😂😂. Don't say that to any young people hahah
My mum used to put sixpences in the plum pudding at Christmas. Our 'pocket money' for chores was a shilling. 😅
Maybe it's a regional thing but as kids we always said thruppence or thruppney bit.
When we moved I found a box of coins in my Dads old stuff, found a Silver 3d that used to go in the Christmas pud.
I'll have farthing etc and silver threepenny pieces
The US has a guinea - a shelf price of a dollar.
Walking and cycling signs are in km, but road signs are in miles and there have been no serious proposals to change to metric given the astronomic costs
16:31 As children we were taught the 12 times table. This helps to use the old currency they didn't change the currency until I was 12
Fun fact. The Schilling and Florin were revalued as 5 pence and 10 pence. They were in common circulation until the early 1990's.
Not exactly revalued, as the shilling was still 1/20th of £1
Having been born in the 1950's I never had to use farthings although they still existed in old school text books. I also never came across a crown except as a commemorative coin not used in general transactions. The ten shilling note was important for transactions i.e. 1/2 £. It would have been better to rename the ten bob note as the pound and 100 p would equal ten bob. What happened was a new penny was looked upon as equal to an old penny and retailers quickly took advantage leading to huge inflation. If they has used ten bob as the new pound the divergence in value between an old and new penny would not have been as great. I think the politics of the value of a pound against other currencies played a large part using a less consumer friendly system.
I remember seeing a 20p coin for the first time in 1982.
The farthing was dropped around the time I was born, as a kid in the sixties I can confirm we never saw a crown and there was a 10 shilling note, which has been left off this video. My grandmother would always press a half crown into my hand when we visited, except my birthday & Christmas when she would give me a 10 shilling note.
When I was a child if you had a penny you could buy 8 sweets for a penny.
@@angeladormer6659 Black Jacks and Fruit Salads?
Ah the ol' 'ten bob note' as my parent's used to call it.
Shame the phrase 'bent as a nine bob note' (meaning crooked, not derogatory) was rendered totally meaningless!
@Chewiebakke Oh yes. They're just not the same now. Do you remember Palm Toffee for 2d ? Liquorice was tastier too. Sweet Cigarettes, pouch tobacco that was coconut. Liquorice wood. Our school got given Cadburys chocolate every year too, just the 1d bars, but every child got one. Oxo crisps too. So much better confectionery for lots less money. Perhaps they tasted better because you only got them occasionally when there were some pennies to spare lol.
@Chewiebakke you are on my wavelength lol. They say memories get better with age, but I am so pleased to have been born when I was. The world was trying to recover and if you had the radio and books to read you were happy. We had imagination. My parents were cockneys, but didn't have the accent, my mother's sisters and brothers talked differently to her and my dad's family were upper working class. He used to teach me music hall songs, but not many people remember them now.
I can still remember the words from a Decimalisation jingle in '71 by 'The 'Scaffold'. Paul McCartney's brother Mike's band. Stage name Mike McGear.
I was six during decimalization so I do vaguely remember the old money, I had an uncle who would convert everything into pound shillings and pence so that he could work out what was owed and then convert it back to the new money, you could get little books that converted everything for you. As for the guinea it is still used at the Tattersalls racehorse sale at Newmarket, I don't know about now but the odd shilling was the commission. They also used to give the person leading the horse around the ring one pound for every thousand pounds the horse sells for, very nice if you're leading a million pound horse.
I've still got one of those little books.
We all (I am in my 60s) learnt these easily enough at school, but most people welcomed the shift to decimal coinage (on 15th February, 1971). It dealt a death blow to coin-collecting, since old coins were quickly melted down.
It caused an inflation spike, due to decimal rounding. For example, an item that cost 9d in old money had to be priced at 4p in new money. As 9d was worth 3.75p, 4p equated to 9.6d. That doesn't sound like much on its own, but it made a full week's shopping noticeably more expensive. In the Monty Python 'Hell's Granny' sketch, there is a shop window displaying prices in old money. You could buy quite a lot for a quid in those days.
Looking back, it was a silly system... but it made perfect sense at the time. BTW, the crown coin was rarely used - it was mainly issued as a commemorative, and people didn't tend to have it in their wallets. Oh, and nobody called 3d "threepence", it was always "thruppence".
I still remember using thrupenny bit,sixpence, 2 bob bit(florin) , & shillings.
Australia moved to decimal currency in 1966, so 5 years before UK.
There are videos on the BBC archive channel interviewing people about the switchover and most were really resistant and said they couldn’t understand it. One claimed that her car would use more fuel because it would be sold in litres instead of gallons.
the press and TV was so full of scare stories about D-Day they had team ready to witness and report stories about OAP crying
the only story next day was a kid got a 1/2 penny stuck up his nose
"Ive never met anyone called testoon but it's just a matter of time" 😂😂😂 funny but also sad because it's likely too.
I would like to be friends with someone named Testoon. Sounds like a good Geordie name.
There were lots of jingles on both radio and TV (after more than 50 years, I can still recite some of them!)
The slang term, ‘nicker’ for a pound leads to the old joke ‘Why can’t a woman with a wooden leg change a pound note?’. Because she’s only got half a knicker…
Before the widespread use of decimal/base 10 number systems. A lot of countries based things around the number 12. We still use some like 24 (x2) hours in a day, 60 (x5) minutes in an hour, 12 inches in a foot. Just off the top of my head.
It's hard to explain, but 12 is divisible by 1,2,3,4 and 6, meaning it was very easy to divide and portion things which is what you would generally be doing back then, in terms of mathematics. This is just a product of that system (the pennies/shillings). It would probably be very easy to understand as that is how everyone was hardwired to think with numbers. But it should have been replaced long before it was! My parents used these as kids!
The base 12 system goes all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia.
12 is a natural number to count in, using your hands.
You count to 12, pressing your thumb to different sections of your fingers: 3 sections per finger, 4 fingers.
Then, with the other hand, you count how many times you've counted to 12 on the first hand, up to 5 times.
5 lots of 12 is 60.
Hence 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day etc.
Latin currency denominations librae, solidi, and denarii explain why pounds, shillings and pence were £ s d. Interesting.
Yes, and librae is also the source of the 'lb' shortening for pounds weight. Interestinger and Interestinger.
@@Chewiebakke well yeah, because the £ is based on a pound in weight of sterling silver. Later gold, and then quite literally debased.
The reason that independent Ireland kept the British system was that it was, initially, a poor country and it made sense to copy the much richer UK. Also, Irish coins were minted in London and were exactly the same size as their British equivalents.
I’m of an age where I used this old money, and, believe it or not, sometimes still refer to it when talking about current prices !
When D day came in February 1971 the old system and coins were still allowed for a year or two and this caused even more confusion. I remeber older people saying things like: " Don't give me change in those new coins ... I want the real money!". Customers were were ripped off as shop assistants were told to round everything up when weighing food items. It sparked a new bout of inflation too.
Back in the 70s one of the left over coins from old money was the half-shilling which became the tuppence ha'penny.(2 1/2p). They were still legal tender but they didn't make them so to see one was quite rare.
We needed these coins for people to be paid or to pay for things like bus fare. As a child my parents gave me 3 pence ( thruppence)pocket money a week and after two weeks I could buy a book. I graduated to 6 pence later. My father was paid £1.10 shillings in his first job in the civil service in 1946, a well paid job.
I'm not 100% sure of the amount, but when I started work in 1971, I was still being paid in the old money. We still got paid a pay packet...brown and about 4"×4"...and got the huge sum of about £2 10s 6d per week. Of course mum and dad took a chunk of it for food and board. I still had plenty left to ride the bus, buy clothes and cigarettes and go out with my mates to pubs and clubs, etc. 2 to 3 nights a week. We also went to the cinema, chippy, etc.! Man, money went far back then.
dad was a docker early 50s was made up to earn 50 bob a week
I have all those, got thousands of British coins going all the way back to the Roman Empire. Only ever got the chance to use the 1 and 2 Shillings while they were still being removed from circulation.
Don't forget JJ that the pound sterling, shillings and pence etc goes back around 1300 years to the Anglo Saxon period. The pennies were made of silver and weighed 1 240th of a pound. Much, much later when paper money came along they were "promissory notes". Our bank notes still say "I promise to pay the bearer" 1, 5, 10 pounds etc. Because way back when it meant a pounds weight of silver.
Yes, they were using this until 2 years before I was born, so fortunately, I never had to use it, but for context, the year I was born, I was taken as a baby to the first McDonalds in the UK. So, they were still using this just 2 years before we got McDonald's.
The British were very good at mental arithmatic.
We also used to know how to spell arithmetic.
@@scottneil1187 I am seriously visually impaired and find it ddifficult to read back what I have written - sorry if it upsets you.
in uk seaside towns we have arcade machines that use 2ps, that push them on a moving platform so you can win more 2ps, so 2ps have been tried to be removed but cant be due to all the 2p machines, also the entire uk still uses miles, we havent switched over yet
Horses are still sold in guineas. Now the pounds go to the owner(s) and the shillings (now equivalent to 5p) goes to tne groom, stable person etc who looked after the horse.
My Dad often referred to a half crown (2 shillings and 6 pence, 1/8th of £1) as a half dollar as at some time there were 4 dollars to the £1
The smallest coin was one eighth of one penny. The basis of the pound sterling was 454 grammes of sterling silver. Currency was made from silver because it was more readily available than gold. Paper notes developed from promissory notes from banks that held the physical silver ingots. 454 grammes of silver could be divided into coins of silver. Shillings and Florins were made from silver. The smaller denominations were made from copper to the value of the metal content.
We grew with the Lsd system and it was used in juniour schools to teach maths. We had scores, 20 items, a gross, 144 items, and not forgetting a dozen, 12 items. It's easier now, but I dont remeber finding it difficult pre-decimalisation as we reheared it in school when leaning aritmetic and then again in Real Life each day when we bought sweets and comics and so on.
I'm old enough to have been born in the late 1950s, so I was a kid when the £sd system was in operation. It was easy to understand, simply because I grew up with it. When decimalisation came along [the clue is "deci" or 10], being base 10, it was also dead easy to change to. Many of the adults of that day spent ages trying to convert money back to £sd in their heads because that was the only way they could measure the value of what they might be buying with their new money. It soon became clear to anyone who could quickly convert 100p back to 240d that items were more expensive in many cases. The prices had been nudged up. These days I can still nostalgically think and work in £sd quite easily, but £p is obviously easier.
My mother was one of the last generation to learn the old coin system, she worked in the railway ticket office so had to work out people pay packets every week based on the old £sd system, and was rightly annoyed her efforts to learn it so well went to waste when they changed it.
I have a commemoration set of some of the last pre-decimal currency they made, from late 1970 before they decimalised in early 1971.
8:52 that pained expression. “Give em a ten pounder” 😂😂😂. My thoughts exactly.
I was still using halfpenny coins to buy sweets well into the 80s.
As a child of the 50s, you grew up with whatever money circulated in your household (usually not very much) and just understood it. My pocket money (spent in the sweetshop) was maybe 6 pence, my big brother 1 shilling. I remember once at age 9 or ten being given a 10 bob note and this was wealth I could only barely comprehend - suddenly I was rich.
Also, if you have ever eaten smarties, you would take the empty tube and fill it with threepenny bits - 40 fitted in the tube which meant you had saved £1 !
Where is the 10 shilling note, two of which equal one pound. Everyone had a ten Bob note in their pockets.,
I remember people shining up old 1/2d coins - which were the same size as the new 2p coins.... and passing them off as a two pence.
I was young before decimalisation, but I remember these coins. Even understanding some of it. Ah, memories of a bag of sweets for the old halfpenny
4 Black Jacks for a penny. I remember.
A few years ago my wife and i in a fit of nostalgia spent a happy hour working through sume predecimalisation problems. Funny how it all came back ( i admit it took a time to remember how to divide Lsd. That's pounds shilings and pence not the drug )
The other changes were in what the coins were made of. The sixpence up until the mid 1920s was full sterling silver after this it was changed to being 50% silver until around 1946 when it was changed to the much cheaper cupronickel alloy.
I was 15 years old when this happened and the only impact I noticed was that sweets (candy) seemed to cost more as prices seemed to have been rounded up to the nearest new pence.
You are sure right they cost more. But who cares what a junior kid thinks about costs. A sgebert foutain cost thruppence pre decimalisation and 3p after. So they told people they stayed the same and there was no inflation. But 1/80th of a pound became 1/33.33333 of a pound.
My first pay packet was for 11 pounds 1 shilling 10 pence - in Nov 1965 while on 14 Feb 1966 when we converted it changed 22 dollars 10 cents. I am In Australia.
Some people still have a sixpence to put in their Christmas pudding each year for luck. and we do still have the 1000 and 2000 Guinea-Stakes horse races, but then again, the horse races still measure distances in furlongs, horse racing never really got on with metric.
I remember a dollar was cockney slang for 5/- (5 shillings), but mainly you heard ‘arf-a-dollar, meaning 2/6 (2 shillings and 6 pence)
Britain still uses imperial measurements for distance (miles) and speed (30mph, 50mph etc), weights & measures (stones, pounds and ounces), liquids - petrol (Gas) / diesel we use litres, but for drinks we use pints (pint of beer / pint of milk etc).
a 50p coin is still called "ten bob" in certain areas of the country
I don't remember anyone actually saying things like "2 shillings and 4 pence". It was "two and four" and written as 2/4. A pound was a quid . Some shops marked items as 30 shillings though, rather than "one pound 10 shill8ngs". It often made the items seem less and maybe was used to push items.
It made perfect sense to me, as a nine year-old, then they took all the "proper" money away. To make life more interesting, UK Treasury bonds used to be priced in 64ths, because a 64th of a pound makes perfect sense. Used to get a half-crown a week for pocket money, and you could buy a comic plus your own bodyweight in sweets for that, or so it seemed.
The old and new had pennies (old, 240th of a pound, new 100 the of a pound), so initially the new ones were called 'New Pennies', or NP.
Base 240 is divisible by more prime numbers than base 100 (that's why there were more coins then). I collect Shillings (which is 5 pence now) and my collection includes those from every Monarch starting with George I. I also have all the changes in design for those from Queen Victoria, and most for the subsequent Monarchs. The earliest Shillings in my collection were 92.5% silver content (George I 1723, George II 1758, George III 1787) and were thinner and slightly larger than later coins, becoming standardised with the 1817 George III coin, eventually (with the same shape and size) the 5 pence coin in 1968. Silver content changed in 1920 to 50% silver until 1946 when it changed to Cupro Nickel. The early attempt to decimalise the currency was notable during Queen Victoria's Reign with the introduction of the Florin (2 shillings, or one 10th of a pound, later 10 pence) and the Double Florin (one fifth of a pound), the later proved to be unpopular as it was too close in size to the Crown, some some shopkeepers and taverns were short changed if they didn't have their wits about them). The buying power of a shilling in 1723 today would be just under £10.
Mum and dad put a half crown in each of our Christmas stockings. The fair came to town for a week starting every Boxing day. That half crown enabled us repeat trips to the fair during Christmas school break.
Born in '68 I remember old money kicking around very vaguely, but I never mastered the values. I haven't seen any road signs in km yet, not a fan of that! lol. Before the Euro I remember using Italian money and getting very confused, I seem to recall it was something like 500 Lire to roughly 1 British Pound which gave me a headache trying to work out what I was spending
@martinscott3524 ... Italy didn't change currency until early 2000s, I went then and they still had Lira.
I remember always having holes in my pockets because of the weight of the coins we used to carry around!
The thrupenny bit was the cutest coin ever.
used to be able to balance a 3d bit on the running engine of a jag or rolls royce
We used to have a pub in London ( the Kings Head Islington) that still charged for beer in old money until the eighties, although you just gave them new money and pretended to know how much it was.
I worked as a cashier for about 15 years, and I'd say I saw a shilling turn up maybe once every couple of months, they look and feel very similar to the 10p coin so while vending machines might reject them they'll usually go unnoticed when handing them to people.
I used to make a habit of swapping them out for real 10p coins cause I like to collect them, they're great looking coins and they have a more satisfying jingle sound than modern coins.
Fun video and reminded me of all I had to learn as a little kid. It wasn't that hard if that was all you knew - it was normal and the new system seemed difficult to a 12 year old when it first changed but we soon got used to it. They didn't mention the 10 shilling note (half a pound) and I never saw a Crown they'd disappeared just after the war. Given where prices are now no one has any need for coins - there's so little you can buy for under a pound.
Also going decimal did make the coin system easier to understand but inadvertently caused inflation. 1 new pence was worth 2.5 of the old pence so if something went up by a penny in the new system it's the equivalent of 2.5 times price rise really.
I find it interesting how many sayings we still have in the UK that refer to old money, for example if a vehicle can make an unusually tight turn, you can say "it turns on a sixpence". Or when most people say something is cheap/plentiful by exclaiming "those are ten a penny", my family say "those are ten a tanner". Or "I don't care tuppence for your opinion!". Or "bent as a nine-bob note" (there was no such thing as a nine-bob note, so if you got one it was an obvious fake, or "bent". And yes, I know there are other connotations to this saying). I know there are other sayings but my brain's gone. Also if someone uses modern slang you don't understand, you can ask "what's that in old money?" (ie, "translate it into a way my old brain will understand, please". I generally ask this when people tell me their new-style GCSE grades lol).
Btw it's not true that decimalisation went off without "old people kicking up a fuss". I had family members who never got their head around the new money and got very upset and confused. Mostly it was because they were trying to convert the new prices back into old money to work out what they were spending, thereby creating a never-ending translation battle in their heads. There was also widespread suspicion that shopkeepers had used decimalisation to put up their prices (ie, converted the prices into new money then rounded it up).
Easiest way of thinking about the old money is that most of the denominations are just like when Americans say "dime" or "nickel", so in the grand scheme of things not worth thinking about. Very very basically:
An American would have 5 cents = 1 nickel, 20 nickels = one dollar (overall 100 cents in a dollar)
Old English money would have 12 pence = one shilling, 20 shillings = one pound (overall 240 pence in a pound).
Everything else is just a nickname for a part of the whole. Yes I know this is very basic, but it's easier to understand that way.
This 6 year old Kiwi was elated when New Zealand switched to decimal currency (dollar) in July 1967 because no matter how hard dad tried to teach me that other crap I just couldn't begin to grasp it. Within another 7 years everything was metric.
I was 8 years old in 1971. I remember using the old coins but with decimal values. I got used to a shilling being 5p and a florin 10p before the new coins were minted. It was much more fun flipping heads or tails with an old penny coin. Thank goodness they discontinued the decimal half penny coin.
One reason for the need for so many small coins in the £sd (aka LSD) system was that, in the heady days of Empire, the £ was so strong as to be a rediculously large unit of wealth. For instance, a basic 2-story terace house in Devenport c. 1912 was (drum roll...) £80 new. The £ was too big for everyday shopping - you needed smaller sub-units, thus a proliferation of tiny amounts.
When I started school we used to spend time in Maths class doing simple ' Money Sums' which I never really got the hang of. Instead of using base 10 which we used for everything else, suddenly we were working with 12's and 20's......and I couldn't get my head around it.
When I was 7, suddenly we stopped covering the topic of 'money' in maths lessons, and then when I was about 9 we switched to decimal currency.
JJ You are right that a shilling was to the pound as 5c is to the dollar. When we moved across to decimal currency, the old shilling coins were suddenly called 5p. We carried on using both coins for years, until they gradually took the shilling out of circulation, finalising the shift in 1990. The two shilling coin (which was now worth 10p) was still in circulation until 1992.
I was 18 when Decimal Currency came in and had been in full-time employment for over a year. When I was 13 I started delivering meat on a push-bike for a Butcher and taking the money and giving change. That sum in the video? I did it in my head ;-) What the video got wrong was that the Crown was hardly ever used - I never saw one. He also missed out the Ten Shilling Note (or Half a Bar) which became the 50p coin.
As a kid in the 1960s I had to learn all this stuff and the imperial measures too. It was hard to learn, but good for your maths skills. For pennies you had to use the 12x table. The threepenny was actually referred to in London British English as the thrupenny.
We also had ten shilling notes called a 10 bob note, hence the old saying as bent as an nine bob note, in other words a fraud, a forgery, which this video doesn't even mention. It was once a common taxi fare, so very old silver charms, one of which I brought secondhand, containing a 10 shilling note.
I have a Sooty glove puppet, that my father brought me for a guinea in Hamleys.
The decimal half penny was withdrawn not just because of inflation, but also because they were easily lost, so a waste of money for the Mint to produce. I lost 10 of them. That's 5 pence worth lost.
Decimalisation was an excuse for huge price increases.
My sweets and comics went up a lot and my pocket money didn’t. Still have bitter memories of being ripped off by the government 😂.
@@garygalt4146 Yup, I’m with you on that. They certainly ripped us off big time.
In terms of British imperial/metric system, we have settled on a mixture of both. We buy food by kilos and grams but we weigh ourselves in Stones, Pounds and Ounces. We still measure distance in miles and yards but use Meters and centimetres for small measurements. Height is feet and inches. Cars parts are metric but the wheels are still in inches. We buy petrol by the litre but use miles per (UK) gallon. Beer is by the pint, spirits are centilitres. Houses are in square meters but carpets are by the square yard. I grew up in this transition period and was taught both systems. Even how to send old money because by then they were toys. I still have a box filled with old coins that we used to play with. And yes, It was a mindfuck, but you got used to it.
There is an easier way for Americans to understand. It was all by weight and in terms of coins, silver. For a long time, £1 = $5, 1 shilling had the same value as a quarter. 20 Shillings in £1, 20 quarters in $5. 20 shillings or quarters weighed the same as 1 pound (lbs) in silver. The Sterling had a higher value than the dollar. They only really equalised in the last 10 years for so.
There's a good many inaccuracies in that video. I was ten years old when we switched to decimal currency, so I'm familiar with both systems.
When I started school in 1965 we were taught decimal currency and the metric system, even though the old £sd were still in use, and most people still used Imperial units (ounces, feet, pints...)
I remember receiving coins up to 100 years old in my change, though most Victorian pennies and halfpennies had turned black and been worn almost smooth by all that use.
I was three when the changeover took place. My dad had a shop and my mum has told me many times just how many customers struggled with the change, mainly the older generations. It took them a long time to get used to the 'new money' My mum still occassionally to this day will convert in her head what she is buying to 'old money' because it sounds so much more expensive to her that way. It helps curb that excessive spending
I am too young to really remember it happening, but I still have a post office account book from an account which was opened for me when I was born. It starts with pounds, shillings and pence and then the balance is changed to the decimal equivalents in 1971
Latterly, due to the British Empire, LSD (that's pounds shillings and pence) were also used in British colonies.
I am old enough to have learned to add up in £ S & d, it certainly made me able to divide by 20 and 12 fairly quickly! I also remember the 'ten bob note' which as 'half a £1' would later be replaced by the 50pence piece. I have never yet seen a kilometre road sign in the UK and our speedometers are still in 'miles per hour'. I don't think that will ever change. We mostly buy milk, juice and soft drinks in litres, but still have pints of beer at the pub. I can't imagine what 1.83 metres is, but CAN imagine 6 feet ....... guess we are a bit of an interesting mix!
Cricket pitch is still a chain long. 22yards
we are creeping to metric an inch at a time but we buy half a kilo bust ask for a pound and dont care if we only get 500grams we buy 2 pints of milk but it comes in a litre bottle
but if you you want to start a revolution in the UK it is easy
the cry will go around they have taken our shillings they have ripped up our nickers but they will NEVER take our pints away
mind you the US is creeping to metric one 9mm a time
Decimilisation led to inflation, as shops rounded up their prices into new money.
And old folk got very confused.
I was born after decimalisation and I've got a sense of nostalgia for the £sd arrangement; for starters I would've thought that having access to calculators on a regular basis would make it easier to work with a non-decimal currency.
I vividly remember as a child going into our local corner shop on the way to school having worked out in advance exactly how much I needed to spend in order to get at least one each of the new coins in my change. Only problem is that having watched this I've now realised it can't have been 'D Day', when the old money ceased to be legal tender! Oh well. Just a few more years before I can't remember my own name, but can remember exactly what day that was as if it were yesterday.
The other thing to remember here is cost of items in the 30's, 40's etc. As an example, my favourite lolly was called a 3d, because, in 1963 it cost 3 pennies. No equivalent is available in decimal money so the price goes up. We could buy farthing chews, a quarter of sweets for one or two pennies in our local sweet shop. Decimalisation was also used to increase prices at the time, half a new p was more than an old p, instant inflation. Us little ones were ripped off.........
I am just about too young (57) to have ever used the Old Money....thank goodness.
However, I remember 5p coins that said 1 Shilling and 10p coins that said 2 Shillings, as those coins were retained for a while.
Very confusing for a child who had never spent shillings.
You get a like straight away for making the effort to find the correct Welsh pronunciation.
Much appreciated! 👍
I'm so glad I missed pre decimal currency. I can barely do maths in my head so making the right change is tricky enough as it is now. 😅
I do remember when I was a kid though that 1 and 2 shilling coins were the same size as 5 and 10 pence coins, so they stayed around probably until they made those coins smaller in about the early 90s. There was also a half penny coin that they didn't mention but I think it was withdrawn in 1984 so I wouldn't have used one myself.