If you watch any film set or made in the UK before 1971 and you might catch some very
strange phrases relating to money.
“Ah, you clever boy!
Here’s a shilling for you!”
“There’ll be some change then!”
“Oh, crikey, two and eleven put three farthings”
“If I give you a farthing you can give me three bob, right?”
“Oh yeah”
“Ten shillings, Sir”
“Sorry I haven’t got anything smaller”
“I’m still trying to figure out your money...is
that alright?”
That’s because for centuries, the UK and Ireland used a different system of money to
the rest of the world.
Whereas today you have the Pound Sterling made up of one hundred pence each, before
there was a pound sterling, made up of twenty shillings, and each shilling was worth twelve
pence.
This is because in ancient times a “pound sterling” comes from a pound of sterling,
or silver, and a “shilling”, meaning the shaving off of bits of the metal to make it
easier to carry.
So for hundreds of years, people living in Britain or its territories had to work with
this convoluted system of base-12, then base-20, then base-10 way of handling money.
The coins of this system were;
The farthing The halfpenny
The penny Threepence
Sixpence the Shilling
the Florin The half-crown
The crown The Half sovereign
The pound
The groat The Angel
The Armani the Fine Sovereign
The guinea The Denique
the three farthing The half groat
I made a couple of those up, see if you can guess which one.
It’s even worse if you lived in Medieval Scotland, who had even more coins like the
pistole, the dollar, ryal, lion, ducat, merk, unicorn, bawbee, bodle, and plack.
Those are all real names for coins in Scotland before the Union.
Wales was the only sensible one of the three by just having one coin; the penny.
Thankfully by the Victorian Era, most of these coins had gone out of fashion, and most people
before then were so poor they never actually saw half of these coins.
Imagine being an accountant in the 17th century though.
Have fun with that job.
No, by the 1900s, only a handful of these coins where left;
the halfpenny, which was half a penny and sometimes called the “haipny” for short,
making this word the longest one-syllable world in the word.
It’s pronounced “Haipths”.
The penny, self explanatory.
Threepence, or “thruppence”, three pence Sixpence, which was
six pence.
The shilling, which was 12 pence.
This was also known as the “Bob”.
The Florin, which was two shillings, or 24 pence.
The half-crown, two shillings and six pence.
The crown, which was 5 shillings, or a quarter of a pound.
And the Pound, twenty shillings, or 240 pence.
And although there wasn’t a coin for it, there was a “guinea”, which was just a
more friendly way of saying “One pound and one shilling” - this was so shops could
make it seem like it only costed a pound when they were actually scamming you out of an
extra 12 pence.
Also every single one of these coins had a ton of slang and nicknames, so an American
or European moving to the UK or Ireland would not only have to learn this ridiculous counting
method but also all of the slang that goes with them.
Let’s say you’re in the queue for the shop and you have two items.
One costs Three pounds, sixteen shillings, and eleven
pence and the other costs
Five pounds, fifteen shillings, and ten pence.
Now in the minute or two you’ll be waiting in the line, you’ll need to work out in
your head; what is the total cost of both my items, and what is the minimum number of
coins I can use to pay for it?
Eleven plus ten is 21, and because there are 12 pennies in a shilling, that makes one shilling
and 9 pence, so you carry the one shilling, adding up the shillings to make 32.
There are twenty shillings in a pound, so that’s one pound and twelve shillings, carry
that to the pounds column and you get...four plus five is nine…making, in total, nine
pounds, twelve shillings, and nine pence.
Right, so now you’ve worked that out, you need to find it in your coins to make that
amount.
What’s the minimum number of coins and notes you need to pay for this in exact change?
The answer is A five pound note
Four pound notes or coins A two crowns, which is 10 shillings total,
and a half-crown, which is 2 shillings sixpence and a threepence to make nine pence.
Nine twelve and nine.
If you found that too easy here’s the same puzzle but pretend these are the only coins
you have in your pocket.
Have fun with that.
Perhaps if you grew up with it you’d be a bit faster than this.
But it’s still an awful lot of mental work that everyone had to go through virtually
every single day.
If you have British grandparents go ahead and ask them what it was like.
Obviously, this system is ridiculous.
It’s overly complicated, an unhelpful way of pricing things, and with the advent of
computers, it was going to make the digitisation of money a lot more difficult.
It was time to change.
Plans for the decimalisation of the Pound go back as far as 1824 and various attempts
at it had been done since then – by the 1860s, most of the world’s countries and
colonies had switched to decimal currency; but as with all things we had to do it differently
to those smelly Europeans because we’re British and we’re a special island.
So Britain and most of her colonies continued using a currency system from the medieval
times...
UNTIL NINETEEN SEVENTY ONE.
In the 1960s, a parliamentary commission on how to improve and streamline the UK financial
system returned with the suggestion of switching to a base-10 currency.
Ireland did the same, because after Irish Independence in 1922, they had decided to
peg the Irish pound to the British pound for...reasons we will discuss another time.
Some considered changing the name of the currency entirely, to the Britannia, or the Royal,
or the Noble.
But it didn’t catch on.
The initial plan was for there to be 100 pennies in a pound and keeping the shilling with there
now being five shillings to a pound.
Then they realized how they could just turn the shilling into a 5 pence pence coin and
deleted the shilling from their plans to make it even easier.
The new pound would stay equal to one pound.
A crown would be 25 pence.
The Florin would be 10 pence.
The shilling would be worth five pence.
Three and sixpence would be withdrawn; they’d be replaced by one p and two p coins.
And with that, the date was set; on the 15th of February 1971, the UK and Ireland would
switch to decimal money, like the rest of the world.
Some people resisted; they thought the new system was too complicated and nobody would
understand base-10 currency.
I suppose that’s true if you struggle to count to ten.
Side note: A similar thing is happening more recently as the UK has begun to adopt the
metric system for driving; some road signs are now printed in kilometres instead of miles,
and some boomers have taken it upon themselves to tape over these new signs because they
think the metric system is too difficult to learn.
Some things never change.
In the months leading up to decimal day, both old and new currencies were circulated in
parallel, meaning you could solve that problem from earlier using even more types of coins.
That must have been a fun year for retail workers.
Some of the more silly coins were withdrawn from circulation to make things easier, like
the half-crown and the half-penny.
Shops began to display their prices in the new system, booklets were sent to every household
with information on how to convert to new money, and there was even a radio jingle to
help people remember.
[Cheesy music plays]
This was until Decimalisation Day or D-Day, when the old money was no longer accepted
in shops.
You’d expect there to be chaos or old people causing a fuss, but no.
It went by without a problem.
The only major change is that the halfpenny was withdrawn from circulation in 1984, because
inflation was too high for it to be of any use.
Curiously, the shilling has apparently beaten inflation and would have more buying power
now than the five pence coin does today.
So maybe we need to get rid of some more coins and bring back the shilling?
Anyway, that’s the end of the story.
Aside from Nigeria in 1973, the UK and Ireland were the last countries to make the switch.
Most of the UK’s former Empire had made the switch decades or even centuries ago.
Madagascar and Mauritania are the only countries who don’t use base-10 currency; their currency
works in base five, but inflation is so high that the base-5 coins are never used.
Also some really old UK banks still use computers from the 60s that work out everything in pounds,
shillings, and pence, so it’s nice to know your entire life’s savings are in safe hands.
But if you’re ever watching an old British film, or you’re ever transported back in
time to London in 1872, at least now you’ll know what the shopkeepers are talking about
when they list off all those strange numbers.