Decimalisation 50 years ago today!

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

This makes me feel absolutely ancient. I was 9. I remember lots of work in Maths lessons at school to get us used to decimal coinage and we all got used to the new money very quickly. As I recall, many older people struggled, possibly because of poor numeracy, but resistance to change was a big part of it. There were also complaints that when retailers converted prices to the new money many took the opportunity to round up rather than down, or just increase the prices, so many people felt they were being ripped off.

I don't recall doing many money sums in Maths before this point, probably because teachers knew we wouldn't need that skill for very long. They must have been so hard.

A shopper's purchases come to 6/11. How much change should she expect if she pays with a 10/- note?

A clock costs £1-5-0. What would be the cost of buying 17 such clocks?

For the record, this is how it worked.

£1 was made up of 20 shillings. Each shilling was made up of 12 pennies. We also had halfpennies. By the time I was born, the farthing (a quarter of a penny) was no longer in use. The coins we had were:

Halfpenny (usually known as a ha'penny, pronounced haypenny)*
Penny, a large brown coin
Threepenny (usually pronounced thruppeny) bit (brassy colour, thick, 12-sided)
Sixpence, silver, small
Shilling, silver, bit bigger than a sixpence
Two shilling bit (florin), also silver, bigger and thicker than a shilling
Half a crown (two shillings sixpence)*
Ten shilling note
Pound note

*- although now I've checked I see these ceased to be legal tender a few years before decimalisation

On decimalisation:
Old penny and thruppeny bit ceased to be legal tender
New coins introduced: 1/2p, 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p
Sixpence = 2 1/2 new pence, withdrawn in 1980
One shilling = 5 new pence, so the old shilling coins continued in use
Ten shillings = 50 new pence (eventually the note was replaced by the 50p coin)
£1 = 100 new pence

20p coin introduced 1982. The new halfpennies are no longer legal tender.

Anybody else remember the old coins? I think we still have a set knocking about somewhere.

I was a toddler when decimalisation was introduced so remember seeing the old coins but never had to use them thank god. It was so complicated. We should have changed over a long time before we finally got round to it.

I was 17. There was a child who appeared on TV, who'd figured out a quick conversion trick using the hands of a clock - 1 shilling = 5p etc.

Use your coppers in sixpenny lots!

You must have had years of tricky sums at school, Bridget.

Cariadlet, yes, we do seem to have been very slow off the mark with decimalisation. Oddly, US currency has been decimal since they became independent of the UK, but of course they are almost the only country in the world which has resisted using metric weights and measures.

We've never wholeheartedly accepted them, to be fair. It's not just older people who know their weight in stones and pounds rather than kg, or use miles rather than km for distances. Centigrade does seem well on the way to displacing Fahrenheit, though. I never got to grips with F.

I'm a bit too young to remember this but thank you for sharing, this is absolutely fascinating :)

I was 11. I missed the old coins (nostalgia at 11?!) but not long multiplication of pounds, shillings and pence which was a primary school nightmare!

This is really interesting, thank you @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g.

I wasn't quite born but remember the old 5p & 10p coins in circulation that had been 1 shilling & 2 shilling coins pre-decimalisation. My parents & grandparents still talked in old money terms when I was very small.

My dad had a set of old money that we played with. Some of the pennies had Queen Victoria on the back, & they had a very different feel to the new coppers.

Funnily enough my kids found a thre'penny bit in a field a few years back.

I was almost 8 and remember the coins but I don’t really remember using them as currency or using them in class. I do remember having a sixpenny bit to spend in the sweet shop when they became 2 1/2np and being disappointed that a marathon bar was out of my reach at 3np.

I can remember getting 3 black jacks for a 1/2 pence !

It was so complicated.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. People seemed to be so much better at mental maths back then. Having everything (money, weights, etc) on the decimal system, combined with calculators, has made us lazy.
In theory it cleared headspace for better purposes but I'm not sure about that!

I was 10, so remember all this. The 50p coin was introduced in 1969 - worth ten bob of course - ahead of decimalisation itself. I was very taken by its shape.

Even though we still use a mix of units in everyday life, I was so glad that the curriculum and exam boards moved to SI units by the time I was doing gcse and A levels. I'm astonished the US hasn't done so for engineering - scientists by and large have, of course.

People seemed to be so much better at mental maths back then.

Much more to do with necessity because of no calculators than anything to do with the weird mix of bases in old units. Mental maths is about practice.

I was only 3 so don't remember decimalisation, though of course I remember the 'old' coins as they hung around for ages.

What I do remember is metrication and rhymes on the back of cereal packets to help conversions that I still use today.

I was 10 and remember it well. Sums using LSD were hard. Carrying over each unit and converting, a nightmare.
It’s funny how we still mix imperial and metric through the generations.
My sons use feet and inches when referring to height and often miles for distance. They do however weigh themselves in Kg.

I was 18 when this happened and rember it well. It didn't seen hard at the time doing shillings and pence but I suppose you were used to it. I vividly remember buying my lunch in the canteen in New Money and getting the change! I worked in science and have always been comfortable with both metric and imperial systems but not so good at conversions.

DH is older than me and still quotes ‘old money’ occasionally. I was only 6 so can only really remember the sixpence as I used to get them for buying sweets with. Yes, I used to love black jacks too.

I still use stones and pounds for body weight but otherwise, I’m all metric although I use both Km and miles when driving.

I was a 14 yr old with a Saturday/Sunday job in the local corner shop so I got up to speed really quickly

Half a crown (two shillings sixpence)

I wonder where the name shilling and crown came from. If there was half a crown was there also a crown?

There was a crown 5 shillings. Stopped in mid 60s I think

It was so complicated.

It wasn't in day to day use. You just did it without a thought.

I was four - I was only ever taught in decimal, but I remember my granny being very confused by it all. She was probably in her sixties, but an old sixties if that makes sense, and she was utterly thrown by it all.

Crowns have been issued quite recently to commemorate special occasions. They were certainly around in the 1970s, though rare.

I was in my teens when decimalisation came in. I had a Saturday job in WH Smiths and pre decimalisation I had to add everything up in my head (as no automatic tills then), suddenly it was much easier. New pence were referred to as NP (pronounced as new pee).

I can remember my mother saying that prices went up as prices were rounded up (never down!).

It always seemed sad to me that a way of money dating back to Roman times had just gone.....

The other thing that changed was that people started to refer to singular pennies in the plural for some reason. Strictly speaking, you can only have two or more pence. One pence is a nonsense.

I'm 60 so remember this. I'm currently studying Maths GCSE and am having enough trouble practising wordy questions on fractions of time, so daily thank God we do not still have a non-decimal currency!