D-Day, 1971

[Nefertiti2]

here's the video

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

"I won't buy petrol in kilometres because you get less of them"

[Nefertiti2]

and here's Max to explain it all to you

[Sporting]

Many Spanish people used pesetas to express especially big amounts long after the introduction of the euro. No idea if similar things occured in other European countries.

My old local in Bethesda:

The hotel has remained in the Davies family since 1913. Alfred’s son Geoffrey is still remembered for his objection to the decimalisation of British currency in 1971. Although he had to accept decimal coins and notes, for many years he continued to tell customers the price to pay in pounds, shillings and pence!"

So for a long time after D-Day I was quite au fait with old money.

https://historypoints.org/index.php?...-arms-bethesda

[Nefertiti2]

this is also pretty amazing- what London was like 50 years ago

[Sporting]

Here's a thread drift factoid for you, occasioned by my mention above of Bethesda:

"A curious fact about Bethesda is that all the pubs on the High Street are on one side! It’s reputedly because Lord Penrhyn shut down his pubs, on the other side, during the Great Strike of 1900-03."

[Jah Womble]

To clarify - the jingle went:

’Decimalisation, decimalise!
Decimalisation, Decimal Five!’

Decimal Five was the name of the five-minute pre-evening-news programme that helped us all adjust to how the newfangled money was going to work.

It was hosted (offscreen) and the jingle sung by The Scaffold - still basking in the afterglow of their all-conquering number-one Lily the Pink and subsequent kids’ TV show Score with The Scaffold.

[Capybara]

I thought that the jingle went, "Decimalisation, decimalise, decimalisation will change your life" but I could be miss-remembering.

My poor old granny never went shopping again. That would have been for around five years that she asked other people to go for her, though TBF she was well into her 80s at that point and not particularly mobile.

You are both right. IIRC it went:

Decimilisation, decimalise, decimilisation, decimalise,
Decimalisation will change your life,
Decimilisation, Decimal Five.

Decimal Five was a series of short public information films featuring the Scaffold, explaining how to use the new currency with advice such as 'use your old coppers in sixpenny lots' and 'give more, get change'.

[Capybara]

Which Jah Womble has just posted ...

[Jah Womble]

(Blimey - as cross-posts go...)

[gjw100]

I was 10 at the time and remember it very well. I was particularly aggrieved though at the loss of the old half-crown (two shillings and sixpence), which at the time was the largest unit of currency I ever received as pocket money or from my grandparents. With a solid half-crown in your shorts pocket you felt rich. A 10p or two 5p pieces and a few pennies didn't quite cut it.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Sunderland had a "metric martyr" fruit n veg man who got ridiculous amounts of publicity for refusing to sell in kilos. The BNP jumped on the bandwagon.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Great thread, this. Nice point by wingco about the positive buzz of modernisation at the time. I was 7 on decimal day, and remember the slight element of inflation when the price of a packet of crisps went from 7d to 3p, a price increase of a little over 7 per cent. Not sure why I remember that, I don't think I'd reached the age for pocket money yet.

Anyway, here are three random unconnected "old money" memories from me.

When I first lived in London in the late 1980s, the King's Head Theatre Pub on Upper Street, Islington had a gimmick that their bar staff would always state the price of drinks in old money. I kind of assumed that, even if it had originally been some kind of conservative protest, it had long since evolved into something done out of twee nostalgia "for the tourists".

The Abbey House Museum in Kirkstall, Leeds, used to have a load of Victorian mechanical amusements which were coin operated with an old penny, and which visitors could have a go on - pre-decimalisation I guess they earned a lot of pennies for the Museum. For the first few years after decimalisation, the Museum would exchange your new money for old pennies to use in the machines, at the actual decimalisation exchange rate. I remember getting a jarring surprise when I turned up there at some later date after many years of not visiting, perhaps in the 1980s, expecting to get 12 pennies for 5p to use in the machines, to find that the exchange rate had evolved by a very large factor. I dare say that these days, if indeed the Museum is still running with the same exhibits, they daren't sell you old pennies at all, for fear that collectors will simply keep them. That's speculation, mind.

Finally, a joke that stuck in my mind as one of my first bits of unofficial "sex education" from older kids - I think I was about 12 and the girls whose conversation I was hanging on the edge of, at our local youth theatre group, were a few years older. The joke involved a woman who was trying to get her love-making rhythm right by counting four coins: two pennies, a sixpence and a shilling. "Penny, penny, tanner, bob" she repeated rhythmically. "Penny, penny, tannner, bob, penny, penny, tanner, bob!" Speeding up, until eventually she was shouting "one and eight! one and eight!".

[wingco]

Heh. Anyway, here's the Scaffold. Not as I remember it . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G76Zp0mxIGo

[Capybara]

When I was little we were encouraged to save right from infants' school and the Yorkshire Penny Bank sent someone to school each week to take our deposits which could be as low as, literally, one penny. I kept the account for years, the last transaction being in 1976. Quite recently, that is within the last ten years, I took my bank book to the successor branch where I had the account and they were able to close the account and give me a cheque for what I had in 1976 plus interest. Anyway, I still have the bank book and it shows that in 1971 I had ?8 18s 8d which, upon decimalisation, was converted to ?8.93, the thieving gets.

[Snake Plissken]

NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:

Two Farthings = One Ha'Penny. Two Ha'pennies = One Penny. Three Pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 Pence). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.

The British resisted decimalised currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.

[Balderdasha]

I was born in 1982 so didn't experience the joy of decimal conversion. Though I did have one of those "new money" sets as part of a collection of various coins that my grandfather bought me. I sorted and priced them all and boxed them up and sold them last summer, and they got me nearly a month's worth of rent.

Both my dad and my uncle used to keep a jar of "old coins" for playing card games with. My dad's jar was all shillings, my uncle's one was mostly coppers, ha'pennies and the like. Once on a rainy day, when I was about 8, the whole family played "21" for the coins in my uncle's jar. I gradually won the whole lot (partly luck, partly being 8 and having nothing else to concentrate on than card counting). At the end of the day, the coins were quietly put back in the jar and my uncle never suggested playing cards with me again.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Heh. Anyway, here's the Scaffold. Not as I remember it . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G76Zp0mxIGo

I can't help but feel that the decimalisation task force that commissioned that tune were probably hoping for something a bit more upbeat. That was a bit maudlin.

(There's probably a Reginald Maudling gag in there somewhere. He was Home Secretary at the time.)

"We'll change, our change, our change,
From pennies to pence, to pence, to pence,
We'll call them new and they'll be li-ighter.
There'll be a hundred, not two-hundred-and-forty,
And they will change, all of our lives."

[Nurse Duckett]

I was 8 at the time, and I still find myself converting sub-pound prices to shillings - 85p for a few bananas, that's 17 shillings! - and so forth.

I recall some sketch - which might well have been The Scaffold again - talking about "[salaciously] the dirty 30s, the naughty 40s, the filthy 50s, the sexy 60s, ... and [groan] the DECIMAL 70s". There were also stories of decimal inflation such as "was ?1 for a dozen - still the same price for, er, 10".

And yes, our father presented my sisters and me with a presentation set each of newly minted decimal coins, which probably lasted all of 3 weeks, ungrateful scrotes that we were.

[Capybara]

[NHH]

I'm sure there were decimalisation refuseniks in the 1960s, but what strikes you is the remarkable bipartisanship - having seen how it went in South Africa, it was concluded that it could be done in the UK too, and a report commissioned by MacMillan's Government, reported under Douglas-Hume's and given statutory effect by Wilson's. It had been a source of political debate for almost 150 years, which hadn't happened for the usual aristocratic-led fudging bollocks that prevents any fucking change in this country, and then suddenly, it happens in a decade. The political confidence that the country should be modernised as opposed to valorising it as the very essence of Merrie England is stunning by comparison to now. Despite the political wind being driven by the same bunch of wankers who think decimalisation a bad thing, I think we're safe because the people who would welcome its return can barely remember it, and can't actually be arsed to fight for it, and know in their hearts it's dumb, and the culture warriors who could be the shock troops equally know in their hearts that it's fucking incomprehensible nonsense too.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Just thinking about pre-decimal coinage (of which my memories are hazy) - weren't the half-crown and the florin confusingly similar? Their respective diameters in the 20th century were apparently 32.3mm and 28.5mm (presumably not officially in those dodgy continental units of length), which I guess is not quite close enough to justify the link I've mentally made to the Fawlty Towers scene about fire alarm-burglar alarm confusion, where Basil exclaims in exasperation "It's a whole semi-tone higher!".

Edit: actually I see from checking their respective Wiki pages that the half-crown was almost 30 per cent heavier, so I guess no risk of confusion.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

I'm sure there were decimalisation refuseniks in the 1960s, but what strikes you is the remarkable bipartisanship - having seen how it went in South Africa, it was concluded that it could be done in the UK too, and a report commissioned by MacMillan's Government, reported under Douglas-Hume's and given statutory effect by Wilson's. It had been a source of political debate for almost 150 years, which hadn't happened for the usual aristocratic-led fudging bollocks that prevents any fucking change in this country, and then suddenly, it happens in a decade. The political confidence that the country should be modernised as opposed to valorising it as the very essence of Merrie England is stunning by comparison to now. Despite the political wind being driven by the same bunch of wankers who think decimalisation a bad thing, I think we're safe because the people who would welcome its return can barely remember it, and can't actually be arsed to fight for it, and know in their hearts it's dumb, and the culture warriors who could be the shock troops equally know in their hearts that it's fucking incomprehensible nonsense too.

I presume as well that even in the 1960s it was becoming apparent that everything was soon going to be run by computers, and telling computers to do everything in 1/240ths, when America was already doing it in decimal, was going to be a right pain in the arse.

[Eggchaser]

I had one of those too. I wonder if anyone was sad enough to keep them...

Erm...

(No idea how or why it's in my possession, I wasn't even alive at the time)

[fospheny]

I can't embed the video - but the Irish transport authority, CIE, had an extremely jaunty number to publicise their contribution to D-Day

https://ifiplayer.ie/cie-d-day/