Pounds shillings and pence

[BarrelOfOtters]

im in my 50s, too young to remember decimilisation in 1971 but I know about pounds, Guineas, sixpence etc. 20 shillings = 1 pound. Pence (d) – 12 pence = 1 shilling. 240 pence = 1 pound.

colleague in his 20s had never heard of this. I mean surely mos5 people have seen it in a film or read a book set in the 60s?

or am I really just old.

No he is just ignorant

I’m in my 30s and I know they are things that existed but wouldn’t have a clue how much they are worth. In our defence they stopped using them 20ish years before I was born. 30 years for your 20s colleague.

Eh? How can a shilling be worth both 5p and 12p?

Old pounds were 120 old pence!

It isn't it is 12d (old pence), but 12d was converted to 5p (new pence).

We used the old shilling pieces as 5p for years after conc=version until the coins were resized. Similarly the 2 shilling for 10p and the old sixpence for 2.5 p until it was withdrawn.

Oh god just ignore me, 240 of course 😂

My dad taught me as a child in a sort of maths game way. (Maths games were pretty normal in my family!) I'm 36.

Only time I've ever used it was when my A level physics teacher used to give me random calculations to do as apparently my mental arithmetic was faster than a calculator. So a party trick really.

shilling = 12d (old pence - pre decimalisation)
shilling (the coin) was kept in circulation and worth 5 (new decimalised) pence.

I’m surprised he hasn’t heard of it. I’m not surprised that he doesn’t know the exact relation between pounds, shillings and pence or exactly what a guinea is.

Surely no one outside the racing world has priced things in guineas for a century?

I'm in my 40s and have heard of them, would have no idea how many shillings in a pound though

I'm a bit older than you but have a similar problem with sales staff in shops looking at me baffled when I say,
"I can't get used to this new money, how much is that in groats?'

@TwoLeftSocksWithHoles , you’ve reminded me of a long ago day shortly after a GF died. At maybe 12 I’d been petrified of sleeping in the house where he’d died, in case he ‘appeared’.

My Dm showed me a letter they’d found, which he’d written to his father when still a little boy. ‘I saw something shining in the grass. Mamma said it was a fourpenny piece* and she is minding it for me.’
*a groat, already defunct by then, and this would have been very early 1900s.

My Dm said, How could I be afraid of a ghost (not that such a thing existed) of someone who’d been that little boy?

But I still was! 😩

Your colleague is ignorant in never having heard of it and probably hasn't read many books.

I'm old, and I still yet think in old money. As inflation rages, particularly on food, for me it hasn't gone up 50p since I last bought it, it's gone up ten bob.

I’m a jeweller. We still use pennyweights (dwt) on occasion!

Although I was born in the 1960s I was taught furlongs, chains etc as well as metric

Your colleague is ignorant

My 12 year old asked me how much a shilling was worth, it's definitely something that comes up in school, usually when they learn about ww2. Strange that someone in their 20s wouldn't have heard of them.

They're just words that I'm aware of. I've no idea about their value. I'm in my 40s

I was in primary school when they were changing over and we had weekly radio programme we listened to which taught us the new system , and a work book to record what we had learned. Us kids picked it up far easier and quicker than the adults , and my parents complained for at least the next decade about how ridiculous it all was 😁 I don't think realistically than anyone below the age of about 60 would be expected to know much about the old system, unless it was included in the history curriculum!!

This.

Maths problems at school became much easier with decimalisation - thankfully just in time for my maths O level.

It's not ignorance it's just irrelevant

Not the Lsd switch, but for other things in the imperial to metric switch there were rhymes printed on cereal boxes that I still use.

A litre of water's a pint and three quarters.
Its five miles down the lane but eight kilometres back again
A metre measures 3 foot 3 it's longer than a yard you see
Two and a quarter pounds of jam weighs about a kilogram

Some expensive things were priced in guineas in the 60s - maybe a TV or a fridge (still luxury items). It was probably because it looked cheaper.

And does everyone know that the £sd denominations come from the Latin Libra, Solidi and Denarii?